Free The Delivery by Mara White Page B

say.
    “I didn’t think you could do it alone. So I just didn’t listen to you. I got on a bus that night. Been riding for three days.”
    “I have my family to help me. If we have to vacate, we’ll hire movers,” I say, eyeing him incredulously. But what I’m really thinking is—what the hell? Someone put you up to this?
    “Okay, sure, but now you’ve got me too.”
    And I want him. I want him. I really, really want him. But I don’t want him to know it. Not to mention I’ll get fired for this. I’ll lose my fucking job—the only one in my family.
    “You came all the way to Michigan? How were you going to find me?”
    “How many Lana Finch’s can there be?”
    Gulp. Because that’s not really my name. It’s my legal name at least, but not what I’m known by to my family and friends. He never would have found me.
    Lexi stares on completely enraptured by our exchange.
    “Do you have a place to stay? Did you let your probation officer know?”
    “No and yes,” he says, pulling out a folded piece of paper. “He signed off on a week. I told him it was for community service. So that makes you a community, and I came to Michigan to service you.” His smile is ridiculous, both gorgeous and flirty. He adjusts his pack again and groans. That thing looks really heavy.
    “I’ll just stay in a shelter or something. I’m used to finding a place to sleep on the lam. It’s only fair that I help you, Lana. You’ve already helped me so much.”
    I feel woozy at his words, and my heart swells like a Pillsbury oven time lapse sequence with something that feels like pride.
    “Mozey, I get paid to help you. That’s what I do at my job.”
    He looks down at the floor and shifts his feet. He nods his head and pulls the beanie off, and his hair cascades over his face. I look up in time to see Lexi’s reaction. He’s impressed with the hair; I knew he would be. Lex and I used to listen to some hair bands way back in the day. We pretended to shake it even though we never had quite the right hair or attitude to shake.
    “You can stay with us. For as long as we have the house, which might not be much longer. We’re fighting the bank at this point, and they just want us out,” Lex says out of the blue all on his own. My brother who never has a voice, who I’ve spent my whole life trying to wrangle words from. Who feeds me his empty shrugs and vacant stares in response, has a whole goddamned sentence for Mozey. Not to mention, an impressive one.
    Fuck! Thank you, asshole brother. But at the same time, THANK YOU. I would have never had the nerve to invite him myself.

    I’m wearing my grandmother’s jacket, which is decidedly dowdy, and I’m gross from flying and a late night of packing. But somehow with Mozey, I don’t feel self-conscious about my looks, about my weirdo brother, his junker car or my crazy parents and arriving at their run-down house. I’m sure he’s seen worse, and he’s probably seen better, but for the first time in my fucked up life, I feel like I can let my guard down around a man. Maybe it’s something about his ease with Lex or maybe it’s the fact he practically crossed the whole country in defiance to stand by my side. Or maybe it’s because he’s so hot that if I tried to keep my guard up, the stress from his hotness might make me pop a damn hormone.

Chapter 10
    T he three of us make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in our family kitchen and drink glasses of milk. We’re whispering and licking our fingers and watching the sunrise over our backyard with a rusted May pole and a sagging, old clothesline. It feels like in the few hours we’ve been together Lexi and Mozey have become fast friends. And that’s even stranger than unusual because my brother has never had any friends.
    I drum my fingers and pick my cuticles, nervous about my parents waking up and what the hell we’ll say to them. These two are laughing and talking video games like they’ve known each other for