Her eyes came up to me and her voice was soft when she spoke. “I see you intend to take care of our boy. Makes me feel better. Way things were at your party, couldn’t tell and didn’t like that.”

Maybe she had honest juice before I arrived. Or maybe she was just the kind of person who put it out there.

“We had a… thing,” I told her quietly.

“Yeah, you’ll have more what he went through. Don’t give up on him. There’s about two men I’d say this about, Tate is one, Ty is the other and I’m married to Bubba, love him to death, he’s pulled his shit together and I’m glad but I wouldn’t say this even about him but Ty’s worth not givin’ up. You get him to the other side, you won’t regret it.”

“I won’t give up on him,” I whispered, deciding I liked Krystal.

She nodded and held my eyes.

Then she said softly, “Be smart. You stick your neck out, the bunch you’re goin’ up against, they’ll whack your head clean off.” I sucked in breath but she didn’t quit talking. “You know that, what they did to your man. A man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. Tate and Deke wadin’ into that shit, don’t got a good feelin’. Ty bein’ pissed and wantin’ to do somethin’ about it, I get. I definitely get that. Don’t got a good feelin’ about that either. But men gotta do what they gotta do and we women got two things we can do, stand by their side or be smart enough to do what you just did and find men who know what they’re doin’ to take their man’s back. Now, you set that ball rollin’,” she jerked her head back to the bar, “you see to your man and keep your head down. Ty feels about you like you feel about him, he didn’t survive that nightmare to come out the other side and watch his woman enduring her own. Keep yourself safe, if not for you, then for him. Get me?”

I nodded. I got her.

She nodded back, muttered, “Make him happy,” then turned and walked back to the bar. She stopped at the door and called, “By the way, you got grease stains on the back of your shirt.”

Then she shot me a knowing grin, turned, threw open the door and entered the bar.

I stared at the door long after she disappeared behind it.

Then I got in my Charger and drove home.

* * * * *

Ty

You’re far and away the most beautiful man I’ve met…

The words played in his head once again as he hit the garage door opener. They’d been playing in his head since Lexie said them. Over and over. So often, they were all that was on his mind. So often, Keaton and Misty were long gone before he thought of them again. He’d forgotten they were even there.

You’re far and away the most beautiful man I’ve met…

Fuck him but he liked that she thought that.

He rolled the Snake in, shut her down, grabbed his workout bag from the passenger seat and hauled his ass out. He dumped the bag in the utility room as he moved through it. She’d sort his shit and he wouldn’t have to ask. He knew it. He gave her diamonds and expensive shoes. She gave him everything else and she gave it in a way that he knew he didn’t have to give her diamonds and expensive shoes to get it.

He walked up the stairs, rounded the railing and stopped dead.

“In the middle of something, baby,” she muttered, “kiss you in a minute.”

She was sitting at a stool at the island, legs crossed, one heel to the bar on the stool, both legs shoved to the side, torso hunched over, head bent, even though he had her back he knew she was concentrating on what she was doing and he understood this not just because of her distracted words but also her posture.

She was wearing a pair of white slacks, wide leg, riding low, a wide slash of skin exposed below her top and above the waistband of her pants. A wide slash that was an invitation that, knowing Lexie, she had no idea she was giving. A wide slash that invited her man to shove his hand down her pants and cup her sweet ass, an invitation he decided he was going to find time that night to accept.

Her top was a light gray, satin camisole, loose-fitting and gathered at her waist, tied at the side in a big, droopy, satin bow. Her hair was in a sleek fall down her back. A pair of black, high, spike-heeled sandals had been tossed on the floor by the side of the island; a small, black purse was resting on the counter on top of it.

Also on the counter were a bunch of gray and black pitchers that, even as a man, he had to admit were the shit. They looked good on the black granite countertop. His eyes moved from them and around taking things in. Shit in the window sill over the sink that wasn’t there when he left that morning, her snow globe, a photo. His eyes scanned. A wide bowl that matched the pitchers filled with fruit by the fridge. His eyes kept moving and he saw their wedding photo in a silver frame on the mantel.

Seeing that photo, he felt that sharp thing pierce through the left side of his chest again and, at the exquisite pain, that area tensed and stayed that way.

His mother didn’t frame photos. She didn’t set out souvenirs to remind them of good times had during family vacations or outings. Their family didn’t take vacations. They didn’t have outings. And they didn’t have happy memories to display.

But it was more than that. His mother spent her energy bitching and pissed at the world. She did not spend it making a home, definitely not for a husband she hated but stayed with for the sole purpose, Ty figured, of torturing him. But also not even for her children who she frequently forgot she had.

Therefore, Ty Walker never had a home. Even the house he bought and started to fill with shit he liked he didn’t try to make a home firstly because he was a man and secondly because, never having one, it didn’t cross his mind.

Pitchers, a bowl, a snow globe and some frames and Lexie did it. She needed nothing else. No flowers for the deck. No other touches. He’d be good with what she’d already done. But he also knew, what they started kept going, she’d fill his house with shit that made it a home.

He moved toward her, got close to her back, pulled her soft hair off her shoulder and bent low to kiss the point of her shoulder then moved his mouth to her ear.

“My mama’s been busy,” he muttered there then his eyes moved to the counter where he was going to toss his keys and he froze solid.

“Yeah,” she mumbled distractedly but he barely heard her.

That was because on the counter was a scattering of dissected roses and he knew by their color they were from her wedding bouquet. She had a square piece of glass in one hand, in the other she had a weird gun that she was using to edge the glass with some melted metal the color of silver. He noticed that it wasn’t one piece of glass but two and between them she’d pressed petals from the roses in the shape of a heart. They were overlapping thickly, both colors used, the pattern random, pieces of petal arranged in other places in the glass that looked arbitrary but somehow pointed to and highlighted the heart. He wasn’t a hearts and flowers guy but he’d seen shit like that sold in stores and the way she made what she’d made was far from amateur.