Free A Demon Bound (Imp Book 1) by Debra Dunbar Page B

But I was supposed to let him make the moves per Michelle, the love doctor.
    “What are you doing tomorrow morning?” he asked.
    “Eating oatmeal. Reading the paper. Taking a shower. Naked. With a loofa sponge.”
    Was that flirty? Or too flirty? Shit, I didn’t know how to do this thing. Wyatt did laugh though, so maybe it was the right thing to say.
    “Come over to my place around nine. I want to teach you how to shoot.”
    “With a gun?” I was a bit confused. I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever need to shoot a gun.
    “Yes, with a gun,” he said.
    “Because I clearly need some way to defend myself?” Did he think I was in need of human technology for protection of my person? After everything that happened between us?
    Wyatt reached in the window and ruffled my hair. It was the first time that he’d touched me in an affectionate manner since our ’incident’.
    “No, I just thought it would be fun. “
    “I didn’t even think you shot real guns. Just the computer game ones.” Maybe that was insulting, I though too late.
    “How do you think I killed those groundhogs last fall? The ones you asked me to get rid of?” He laughed. “Did you think I stabbed them with a screwdriver, or caused them to spontaneously combust?”
    I hadn’t considered how he killed them. They were there, putting big, horse–tripping holes in my pasture, and then they were gone. How they got gone never crossed my mind.
    “Okay, I’ll be there” I told him. Didn’t Michelle say I should take an interest in his hobbies? At least this was more palatable than sitting on a couch, waving some little plastic thing around in front of the TV.
    The next morning, I locked Boomer in the barn to be out of the way of any bullets that might loop around the house and whizz onto my property. Satisfied that he was safe, I proceeded to walk down to Wyatt’s.
    Up close, the dilapidated Cape Cod looked like a damned shack. The paint was peeling, and the window sills and eaves showed signs of significant rot. One broken window had a plywood board nailed over it from the inside. Was Wyatt so poor that he couldn’t make even basic repairs to his house? He never complained about needing money, or doing without, but his house was in shambles. From the outside, it looked like he hadn’t done a thing in the two years since he’d bought it. Perhaps his home repairs had started on the inside? It would take a lot to fix this place up, so maybe he was just doing a little at a time? Either way, the place made me feel anxious inside, like I should find a way to sneak Wyatt more money, or arrange for a contractor to show up free of charge. How could I manage this without offending his pride, I wondered? Then I wondered why I gave a shit about Wyatt’s falling down house or his pride. That wasn’t like me at all.
    It was just as bad in the back yard. There was a dangerously rickety deck off his kitchen, grey with age and full of splintered, bowed planks. He had an equally rickety card table set up on the ground in front of the deck with a target out in my back field. There were cigarette burns, and bottle rings on the card table. An assortment of guns was laid out like at a flea market sale.
    I’d seen guns in movies before but had limited experience with them up close. I remembered a huge long gun about two hundred years ago when I had popped over here for some fun. It was a stupid weapon. It took forever for the guy to get it ready, and then it was just as likely to explode in his face as fire. It never seemed to hit its mark either. I’d pretty much written them off after that. They looked awesome on TV, but I know the liberty producers take with reality.
    Wyatt introduced me to the guns. No really, introduced me. Like we were at a cocktail party. I got to meet Mr. Shotgun. I learned about smooth–bore barrels, the difference between gauges and calibers. This particular one was a 12–gauge, which was supposed to be the most common and thus easier to