Free Near To You by Asha King

 
     
    Chapter One
     
     
    If the weeds weren’t taken care of by today, Niara Morgan was certain the lot of them would rise up in the night, arm themselves, and attack her home.
    They wouldn’t need to do much, either. The house was the fixer-upper even fixer-uppers avoided. New insulation around the windows needed—new windows needed. There was a persistent leak in the upstairs bathroom. She didn’t want to think about the potential flooding in her basement with the house situated this close to the lake. If the weeds laid siege, they’d win by sunset, and too few people lived in the general area to hear her scream.
    But the place was hers—all hers, paid for with the divorce settlement. And at least the weeds would be tackled today.
    If her gardener ever showed up, that is.
    The woman she spoke to at Red Rose Home Help Services said someone would arrive between 8:00 a.m. and 8:30. Her watch said 8:22. She’d sat on the sagging step of her front porch, sipped her coffee, and waited. The drink had long since gone cold, and watery spring sunlight crept over her house, drying dew on the grass.
    She had been watching dew dry . Seriously. How boring was that?
    It would just be her luck, too. Her appointment yesterday with a contractor to look at the inside of the house had postponed and she still didn’t know when he was showing up. Here only a week and already nothing was going smoothly.
    Her cordless phone sat beside her, next to the empty pink coffee mug, and chirped a new call. She was expecting someone from the gardening place to cancel or make up excuses for being behind; instead, a familiar name and number flashed.
    Niara sighed. “Hello?”
    “I guess he’s not yet tilling your garden if you’re answering the phone.”
    She rubbed at her temples. “Hey, Deena.”
    “C’mon, that one was funny.”
    “Once again, I’m not going to sleep with the gardener.”
    A pause, and then genuine confusion. “Why not?”
    “Because, dear, this isn’t a porn flick.”
    “You’re right,” her best friend conceded. “He might be fugly.”
    “And also, I’m not going to have sex with a stranger.”
    “It’s a small town,” Deena said. “And you grew up there. You really think that many new occupants entered the rather stagnant gene pool in the past eight years? I bet you totally know the guy.”
    It was far too early in the morning to be having this conversation. “The only gardener I knew growing up was Mr. Tansey. He was in his fifties.”
    “Maybe he had a son?”
    “Gay and childless.”
    “It’s rather hard to live vicariously through you when you don’t actually live .”
    When “living” had come to mean seducing gardeners like a lonely old married woman, Niara couldn’t say. She rubbed tiredly at her eyes. “Let’s not talk about me. How’s things?”
    “I saw Ron the other day and almost ran him down with my car.”
    Niara smiled wryly, even as her heart thumped a little harder. “He’s not worth the jail time.”
    “True. Plus I think he’s going bald. Definitely has a beer belly. And the way he was moving, I suspect hemorrhoids.”
    None of it was true—Niara had last seen her ex-husband two months ago, randomly bumping into him at the grocery store, which was what set her on a mission to just leave town and start anew. And he’d looked good, even then—good in a way that twisted her gut and pierced her heart. Unlike the movies where so often an ugly person was the bad guy, his smooth exterior and expensive suit hid a lying, cheating, emotionally abusive asshole. Just that brief glimpse, the awkward moment when she’d caught his gaze, sent her out of the store and unable to eat for days, wanting nothing more than to hide out from the world as every insecurity he’d carved in her flared to life again.
    “You okay, Nia?” Deena said softly.
    She shivered, shut her eyes, and drummed her fingers on her temple. “Yeah. Just picturing him with syphilis.”
    “I do that sometimes