With a shout, Clay slammed his fists against the steering wheel twice, cursing Flo, Jo, and the fucking pestilents. He shoved the money into his pocket and jammed the gas pedal down. The truck barked at the rough treatment and jumped forward.
Freaking idiot.
As he merged the old truck onto the road, Clay tightened his hand on the steering wheel until a couple of knuckles popped. This was a one-time thing. He’d find this guy for Flo. Help him escape the pestilent demon alien…things. God help him with this crazy bullshit. And then he’d say sayonara to the lot of them. Get back on the road and away from this house.
And away from handyman Dane Briggs.
Okay, that part kind of sucked.
Well, really sucked.
Dane was hot in a scruffy, adorable, sad-eyed kind of way that his dick agreed with.
Sighing, Clay relaxed his hold on the wheel and settled against the bench seat. Dane had been the one bright point in all this disaster. The guy hadn’t flinched at helping him when he’d been injured, and maybe he’d been hesitant to invite Clay into his apartment for breakfast, but Clay didn’t blame him. He was some guy who showed up at dawn one day covered in blood.
Dane was surprisingly easy to talk to—not something Clay had found with a lot of people in his lifetime. He smiled fast, but sometimes it looked like he was fighting it. And those fucking blushes. God, they got Clay’s heart going in the worst way. The bathroom had been amazing, but he might have heaped on the praise to pull more blushes out of Dane.
But there was also something more to him. Something Clay couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something that had Clay wanting to draw Dane in and hold him.
Except Clay wasn’t the snuggling, cuddling type. He was the quick fuck and leave type. Usually didn’t even get a name. At least not a full name.
Dane deserved better than that. Not that he could guess what Dane wanted, it was just that Dane was obviously a passionate man with a tender heart. He needed more than a quickie against the wall, half-hidden by a dumpster in an alley. Dane deserved soft sheets and spooning and someone getting him coffee as he woke up. Then maybe a good-morning blowjob.
Clay groaned at himself, letting his head hit the headrest. This line of thought was so much better than the alien things and goddesses that had cluttered his mind earlier.
First, there will be no fucking Dane. Obviously, his life was a shit show. A full three-ring circus of shit complete with rancid monsters and crazy old ladies with shotguns and wads of cash. He was not letting Dane become a clown in this circus.
Even without the circus, Clay didn’t do the dating, romancing thing. He was constantly on the move, looking for the next town and next adventure. His skin crawled at the thought of staying in one place.
Except…it wasn’t crawling now.
The headaches hadn’t returned.
But he wasn’t thinking about any of that right now. He was still dealing with the three-ring shit show.
And since he was already listing things…
Second, smelly aliens and powers!
Was he going crazy, or was it the old ladies?
“Honestly,” Clay said aloud to himself, starting to accept that maybe he’d lost his mind somewhere in the past couple of nights. “With no one to hear me, do I actually believe the stuff Jo was telling me the day before? The pestilents and goddesses and…and…that I now have powers?”
As if summoned by the mention, the feeling of something living in his chest shifted, sort of like a cat rubbing affectionately against his lungs. Clay gasped and coughed, half expecting a hairball to come up his throat.
When Clay’s heart slowed and he could draw in a deep breath, he frowned. “Assuming Flo didn’t put some alien larva in my chest.” Clay paused and rolled his eyes at himself. “There might be some truth to what she said, even if it all does sound insane.”
The trick with the animals was kind of impressive, though not entirely convincing. Jo could have had a trained bird and squirrel, but she didn’t give off a con-artist vibe.
And when Flo put her hands on him last night, he’d definitely felt something. An energy flowing inside of him, making itself at home. In a way, it had been like a puzzle piece pushing into place.
There was something to all this insanity. He wasn’t buying the demon alien explanation yet. But these things weren’t like normal humans. God, they didn’t smell like normal humans.
After nearly an hour of driving, the first signs for the fairgrounds appeared where the flea market was held each Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday during the season. There was a short line of cars waiting to pay the two-dollar fee to park. Grumbling, Clay shifted in his seat to pull his wallet out of his back pocket so he could fish out the ten. He was not going to piss someone off by handing over one of Flo’s bills.