Chapter Four
Will wasn't entirely sure what to make of his life when he woke up in the morning, but both April and Lacey were both still there. At some point during the night, the two girls must have gotten up and bandaged April's neck. He wasn't entirely sure why he'd done that on both of the girls' first time, but he figured there was definitely a chance he might keep on doing it, so he was glad they'd tended to it and didn't let it get infected. He peeked beneath the bandage, and while it was definitely a wound, it almost seemed like the bite was healing up much quicker than he'd expected it to.
He suspected they were going to need to talk about this new arrangement they found themselves in soon, but he discovered on the first day, nobody really wanted to broach the subject. They were all sort of skirting around one another, none of them starting any real conversation, just sort of going through their daily life.
That night, though, when they sat down to have dinner, April decided she was ready to broach the subject. Will had picked up some fried chicken from a local joint, and when he set it down on the table, April pounced to start off the conversation in the direction she'd clearly been thinking about all day long.
"So, uh, you're, uh, cool with both of us just hanging around here?" April said, clearly unsure where to start talking, so she'd just picked somewhere.
"What do you mean by 'hanging out?'" Will asked them.
"Well, what do you *
want*
us to mean by hanging out?" Lacey said with a smile. "I was kinda thinking April was just asking to check and make sure that we were both your girlfriend. I know I am, and I know we *
talked*
about her also taking on that title as well, but, y'know, we sort of caught up in the heat of the moment and didn't put anything down in paper. She's just making sure you haven't changed your mind. Which you haven't. Because of course you haven't. Why would you? Just look at her. She's a completely dead sexy bitch."
Will tilted his head briefly, as if they were having different conversations. "I think I was more of making sure *
you*
two hadn't changed your mind," he said. "This isn't exactly what most people think of when they say they're in a relationship."
"Sure," Lacey replied, "but most people are fucking stupid. And I don't give a shit what they think. I like dick. I like chicks. I want both. Regularly. And you've got an appetite that I don't think either of us could keep up with on our own."
"You make me sound like I'm some kind of sex machine," Will said with a soft laugh, opening the box of fried chicken, taking out a few pieces. "I'm really not that bad. Am I?"
"I think you don't realize how *
intense*
you can get, Will," Lacey answered with a smile. She reached into the box to pull out a couple of pieces of chicken for herself. "Don't get me wrong; I love that about you. I promise you, I truly do. But when you get into it, fuck, man, you *
really*
get into it. And I bet April's a little bit sore this morning 'cause of the railing you gave her."
April blushed and giggled a little bit. "Sitting's a little bit uncomfortable but it's also kind of nice. But yeah, I definitely can't handle that being an everyday kind of thing."
"We don't have-" Will started before Lacey put her fingertip up.
"Nobody has to do *
anything*
, baby, but we want to do it regularly, and we're here voluntarily, so let your girls be *
your*
girls, okay?"
And that was sort of the end of the discussion. Will tried to bring it up a couple of times over the next few weeks, but the conversation was almost always immediately brushed aside in favor of other topics. Will also asked a couple of times if April regretted giving up her ties to the local church she'd been a part of, but each time, she'd sort of brushed it off as "a fad," and didn't linger on the subject much longer.
And, of course, he had to go and rent the U-Haul again, as April decided she wanted to move into their place as well. Will hadn't been entirely convinced it was a smart move, but April had pleaded with him, saying that unless she just up and left her old place without warning, the people at her former church might come and harass them once they found out where she'd gone, and she'd rather just avoid all the confrontation for as long as she could.
The first Monday after they'd hooked up, someone from the church had tried to talk to her, but she'd done her best to avoid talking to them, saying she just didn't feel at home in the church anymore. The guy pestering April had eyed Will like he wanted to pick a fight, and Will was ready for it to spill out into a shouting match. It hadn't. The man had started to say something about how Will had no right to corrupt a member of their congregation, but the sentence died in the man's throat unspoken. Will had turned to glare at him, almost feeling like he wanted to snarl, and the man had started to wilt, almost shivering in fear, just from a dirty look.
Nobody from the church came to bother them again for a while after that.
As Christmas approached, both Lacey and April wanted Will to come home with them for the holidays, but Will insisted that he didn't want to leave the area, and that he
certainly
wasn't ready for the sort of grilling any parents were going to give him if he went back with them. April and Lacey were both from Kansas City, which was almost ten hours by car but only an hour and a half flight, assuming they did the drive from Boulder to Denver Airport, which Will had agreed to do as long as the girls shared flights there and back.
He was very pleased to see that whatever animosity had grown between the two girls while they were apart, their shared experiences had quashed that beef immediately, so much so that they'd fallen back into normal rhythms and patterns that he imagined they'd developed over their time as high school friends, before they'd come to college and April had had her dalliance with Jesus. For anyone who didn't know better, it seemed like they were two old friends who'd never had anything come between them.
Once April had moved into the house with him and Lacey, the three of them were always sharing the same bed. Oh, each of the girls had their own bedroom with their own bed in it, but as Lacey had told him, that was mainly for show, in case their parents ever swung by the campus. As proud as Lacey was that she was having Will balls deep at every chance she could, she didn't *
quite*
feel comfortable with being open about that to her parents, not yet anyway.
He drove the girls out to Denver airport on Dec. 19
th
with the understanding that he'd come back and pick them up again on the 26
th
. The weather was cold and sharp, but at least there wasn't any precipitation when he drove them out. They'd had themselves a wild night the evening before, something Lacey and April told him would need to tide him over for a week, something he found rather laughable. The girls seemed convinced he was some ravenous creature, when he felt like they were usually the ones instigating sex with him.
When he got back to the house after dropping them off, he noticed something odd about his place. In a line across the driveway, and in a line laid out in front of his front door, there were two heavy rows of purple flowers laid on the snow-covered ground. He didn't want to drive over them because he wondered if they were thorny and might puncture his tires, so he parked his car along the side of the street, hopping out to go deal with it.
Will kept thick gloves in his car, so he pulled them on and then moved over to the long row of purple plants along the driveway. He didn't recognize them but he wondered if they might be poisonous, so he grabbed handfuls of them and carted them over to his green waste trash bin, flipping open the top before chucking the flowers into it. Whoever had come by had certainly had a *
lot*
of the damn things, as it took Will four trips to get all of them from the driveway, and another two to get all of the ones resting in front of his front door. Before he closed up the bin, though, he took his iPhone out of his pocket and snapped a picture of the flowers, then ran the image through Google image search. Turned out they were called aconitum, and they were definitely poisonous, although it was only minorly so on skin contact.
With all the flowers cleaned up, he got back into his car and pulled it into his garage before heading into the house, enjoying the fact that he had the whole place to himself, at least for a little while, although he knew he wouldn't have long to enjoy it.
As he did on every break, he knew he was going to be locked into wall-to-wall work at the diner, doing everything he could to keep his coffers full enough for whatever next disaster lay just around the corner. It was something Will had learned all too well, that there was always another crisis he would need to solve just around the corner.
The first night at the diner with the girls gone, however, something strange happened at the diner, something Will still wasn't quite sure what to make of. Someone had tried to rob the place. At least, that was what Will *
thought*
had happened. The entirety of it hadn't made a whole lot of sense.
It had been just past 1 a.m. and the diner wasn't all that busy, something Will was thankful for. He'd been a little bit dreading the possibility that the place could be crawling with women, like it had been the previous vacation, but instead, it was just a handful of students who also hadn't gone home and a bunch of the diner's regulars, the sort of grizzled locals who were happy to come into the place any time, completely unphased by college students. There'd been Steve and Gary in their usual booth in the corner, arguing about who'd been the hottest woman on True Blood; Mike and his new girlfriend Linda had been in the booth closest to the door, Lizzie and Rita were the only coeds there to peep on him so they were both sitting at the bar, and Billy was manning counter duty, although more often than not he was watching Baywatch reruns on the television screen that hung on one wall.
Then two guys had busted in through the front doors with shotguns.
"Everybody be cool, this is a robbery!" the taller guy shouted.
"Yeah, don't you dare fucking move," the shorter guy hissed. "Or we'll put a fucking slug through you! Wallets, cell phones - get'em out and put'em on the table!"
Will heard the commotion from the back, but they hadn't moved to see him yet, and he wasn't entirely sure what to do. Some part of him wanted to call 911, but he also knew that the advice from the police was that if you were being robbed, it was best just to go along with it and not to make too much of a scene about it.
He couldn't see the two guys too well, but from what he *
