Mind Games

“Why’s it hot?”

“You can’t have a movie without popcorn, and you can’t melt butter on popcorn unless you get it hot.”

“Prime save.”

Rem shrugged. “It’s a skill.”

Good times, Ty thought.

* * *

That night when his boy slept, when Thea slept beside him, Ty lay awake.

His life, he realized, had taken a major turn. His great-grandmother hadn’t just left him a house and five acres in eastern Kentucky. She’d given him the opportunity to make that turn, build another kind of life.

He hadn’t expected it to be like this, to find himself rooting here, and making plans to spread those roots. To see his little boy thriving in this new place.

He hadn’t expected people who’d been strangers only months before to become such an integral part of that life. To become not just friends, but a family he never really understood he wanted.

He sure as hell hadn’t expected the woman sleeping warm and soft beside him. A woman he’d started falling for almost from the first minute of the first day.

He’d put even the idea of a real relationship aside, locked it away. Too many betrayals, small and large, to risk another now that he had Bray.

Then Thea changed everything.

She’d opened her own life to him and his son in such an easy, loving way. No demands, no slyness, no hidden agendas.

She’d given him something he’d missed, something maybe his early, rushing success had tainted.

She’d given him someone who cared about who, not what, he was. And who understood and accepted who he was now. Someone he could trust in a way he’d been unable, or unwilling, to trust in a very, very long time.

He had to find the right time, the right place to play her the song he’d written for and about her. The right time to tell her what she’d come to mean to him.

For the first time he wanted someone not just to be in his life but to make a life with him.

She was the one, he thought as he drifted to sleep. The only one.

* * *

It became a kind of routine. Ty grilling on a Friday or Saturday night, often both, with Thea joining them.

She never dreamed of storms when she shared Ty’s bed.

If Ty came to her door during the week, during the school day, she found she could block out Riggs.

Maybe happiness served as her lock.

Though the headaches lingered, she worked, and found her focus there helped keep him at bay.

They broke routine on Halloween when she stepped out of the house in snug black, with knee-high boots, and with a sword at her side. Bunk, with a pair of red wings on his massive back, trotted down beside her.

When she opened the car door, Ty gave her a long look.

“First, wow. Second, you have a sword.”

“It’s rubber, until the ninja needs its keen blade. This is Bunk, the flying dog, the protector of the innocent.”

As he jumped in the back, Thea looked in, feigned shock. “Spider-Man! Ty, Spider-Man came to Redbud Hollow!”