My mouth opened as I struggled on whether to tell them that kind of intimate detail or not. But he had just had me pinned to the wall a moment ago. "Sort of?" I allowed.
"Told you," Fee said to Lea who rolled her eyes.
"Just because she has a phone sex business, she thinks she knows everyone's kinks."
"Hey, I was right about the guy who owns the laundromat wasn't I?"
"He has a furry fetish," Lea supplied. "Something I really didn't want to know. Thanks for the nightmares, Fee."
"Listen, that's not half as bad as recognizing my daughter's guidance counselor on one of the lines once and learning he's a granny fucker and needs my women to offer him cookies and milk after groaning about him hurting their little geriatric hips and loving the feel of their teeth-free mouths around his cock. You want nightmares, that will give you nightmares."
I snorted at that, finding that Ryan's warning about them was perfectly accurate and also that the nerves I had felt building when he opened the door while still there, weren't getting worse.
"So," Lea said, turning to me. "You're Dusty."
I nodded my head at her, shrugging. "I'm Dusty."
"Mark and Eli did say you were hot shit. They weren't lying. Shane wants to know how you aren't three-hundred pounds when you don't leave your apartment."
"Shane is a gym rat," Fee supplied.
"I, ah, do workout DVDs?" I offered.
"That's what I told him. He's a gym purist. I've tried the DVDs, but unless I'm at the gym, there's no one to judge me when my ass gets the wrong kind of jiggly so that doesn't work for me. Anyway, we brought you some stuff. We heard you had to leave in a bit of a rush and figured Ryan didn't exactly think about things like pajamas, makeup, or tampons."
Well, that was true. And, come to think of it, I was due for my period soon and that wouldn't have been a uber fun conversation to have- hey, um, I have the red devil in my pants. Can you go buy me some tampons? Not sexy.
"That's great actually, thanks," I said, meaning it.
"I mean, I doubt you'll be wearing pajamas anytime soon," Fee added. "With all the sex. You are doing it, right? I mean, being agoraphobic doesn't mean you don't like sex."
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure we weren't supposed to bring up the agoraphobia thing," Lea chided, giving me an apologetic smile.
"Please," Fee said, rolling her eyes. "It's not a big deal."
"I think the issue was that now it looks like Ryan was talking behind her back," Lea specified.
"Alright fine," Fee said, turning to me with a smile. "When Hunt and I first met, he was my neighbor and some highlights of our courtship included- him thinking I was a total slut because he heard me dirty talking and moaning all the time and didn't realize it was my job, him seeing me stumble home drunk all the time, him stopping an attempted rape, and him finding me passed out in a pile of my own blood because I used to cut because I had a shitty upbringing that used to make it hard to exist sometimes. There, now you know all about me and Hunter."
"You forgot the vibrator thing," Lea added, making my brow quirk up. The vibrator thing?
"Right!" Fee said, sounding excited. "So I wasn't into the sex thing at first believe it or not. Long story. Next time you get a couple drinks in me, we will get into that. But anyway, I was trying to pretend I wasn't thinking about Hunter when I was... giving the hooded monk a back massage," she said, making a laugh escape me. "But that was shot to shit one night when he came over and found my vibrator in my bathroom sink."
"Shane and I don't really have any..."
"Um, shut the fuck up," Fee cut her off. "The gym bathroom thing? The oral while on his shoulders thing? Come on. You have some juicy shit to tell too."
Okay.
I liked them.
Was it possible not to?
Granted, there was a bit of a feeling of being an outsider because I didn't know all the little stories yet, but still, they were open and funny and accepting. What more could you ask for?
I figured that, given some time and story telling, they would be all too happy to have me in the fold.
"Oh, and we brought junk food too," Lea said.
"Thank God," Fee added, going into the bags and grabbing a bag of Reeces. "I mean, I love my kids. But I swear they can hear the sound of a candy wrapper from three miles away during a thunderstorm. I never get to eat my own junk food. And, well, they have several years until they start getting a period so they don't understand the struggle and need for chocolate yet, but when they do, I hope they remember all the candy they stole from me over the years and feel really bad about it."
"You taught kindergarten, right?" Lea asked, looking at me.
"Yeah," I agreed, nodding, accepting a Reeces when Fee handed one to me.
"Right here in town?"
"Yeah," I agreed, feeling a pang of loss yet again.
"A class full of twenty little Beccas or Izzys? How? Why?" Fee asked with a smile.
"I always liked kids. I was an only child. I liked the chaos."
"Fee, I think you just found a babysitter," Lea declared, moving off to the kitchen and going about making coffee like she had been in the place many times before.
"Seriously, if you ever want to be driven up a wall for a few hours, I am always looking for a decent sitter. To come here today, I had to pay three neighborhood girls to watch them for a few hours. Thirty bucks an hour because no single girl will take them on. They have that bad of a reputation."
"I'd be happy to hang out with them," I volunteered. "You know, once I am settled again."
"Yeah, crazy situation," Fee said, dropping down on the couch and propping her feet up on the table. "I mean, Lea might have you beat technically. But it's still nuts."
"Maybe she doesn't want to talk about that," Lea said, coming back as the smell of fresh coffee filled the air.
"Fine, then we can talk about how Shane took care of..."
Lea cleared her throat and they both shared a look that I didn't know them well enough to interpret.
But then Fee abruptly changed the topic of conversation. "This place is awesome, isn't it? No one stays here much but Hunt and I take it over on our anniversary for a long weekend every year. Charlie and Helen stay at our place for the kids. They have room service! Ugh, the luxury."
"Please, Hunter does most of the cooking anyway," Lea said, shaking her head.
"Well, only because I'm not good at it. We also have holidays here sometimes. Fourth of July we all show up because they do fireworks over the Navesink. It's perfect from here," she said, gesturing toward the windows.
Then, well, we all drank coffee and ate junk food and talked about light topics before things went serious and I learned about their pasts.
And I learned about Fee's screwed up childhood with a religious fanatic, abusive father in the woods and isolated from anyone but her father, mother, and brother. I learned about how she had run away to New York City and had to learn how the real world worked, with scars from her father both literal and figurative that made her struggle to keep sane without alcohol and cutting herself. Then, finding Hunt and finding someone who accepted her just as she was, she had slowly recovered.
Lea's story was no less traumatic, coming from a life in a bike gang where her father and brother did nothing to stop the club president from raping and abusing her for years. She escaped and he retaliated by abusing and killing a girl she once knew and hurting her brother and trying to guilt her into returning. On the run from him, she went to work for Fee and met Shane and, eventually, he got wind of the ex situation and 'handled' it.
There was a sort of finality to their words that said it would never be a problem again, but didn't elaborate further. I figured that was because, while I was with Ryan, I wasn't exactly in the fold yet. They barely knew me and didn't know how much they could trust me.
I had to understand that.
It was almost dark out when Fee, obviously the one with less of a filter, finally blurted out, "So, agoraphobia..."
"Fiona," Lea hissed.
"What? We're old friends now," she said, shaking her head. "It's not like it's a secret for chrissakes. So was it just anxiety that escalated?" she asked, surprisingly accurate.
"Yeah."
"How long was it before Ryan forced you outside that you left? Months..."
"Years."
"Oh, wow," she said, brows raising. "So, you being here... this is huge. Good for you."
It felt good to hear that, to have someone outside of maybe the few people close to me, understand what that meant for someone like me, to know it took a lot out of me to make the moves that, to others, seemed small.
"Thanks," I said, feeling my face getting warm.
"If you ever have an urge to get out without pressure, you can come hang at my place," Fee offered. "In case you want to branch out with new safe zones and whatnot."