Avocado Protection by Kaje Harper

Author:Kaje Harper [Harper, Kaje]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-17T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Fynn woke from another nightmare, muffling his sounds with a fist pressed against his lips. His eyes stung with tears. In the dimness of his room, lit only by the yellow-green avocado nightlight Micah had given him for Christmas, he lay rigid on his bed, his chest heaving. Not again, damn it. It’s been almost two weeks.

He was pretty much okay in the daytime. Sure, knowing someone had tried to kidnap him twice— duct tape— kept his stomach in knots and he’d lost a little weight, but he could handle it. Especially when Nolan was there.

Nolan had started working a split shift, covering both Fynn’s morning commute and his drive home, however late that turned out to be. Joe still drove, having refused Fynn’s offer to give him a vacation till things settled down, but Nolan rode with Fynn in the back seat. His calming presence was the only thing that’d kept Fynn’s freak-out from becoming a full-blown panic attack the first time they got back on a freeway.

In the mornings, Nolan would sit in a corner of the lab working on his phone until Fynn submerged into the day’s work and didn’t care about being handed over to the midday shift. In the evenings, he rode next to Fynn in the car home, never impatient as Fynn expounded on his successes and frustrations. Nolan told stories, too— he seemed to find Fynn a good audience, even with his tendency to interrupt. Fynn didn’t feel like he had to perform being ordinary around Nolan.

Life was good when Nolan grinned at him from across his own kitchen table or shared the couch as they unwound by watching sci-fi movies and reruns. Fynn had even hauled out his current LEGO project and Nolan had a knack and never seemed bored.

At night, though, Nolan had a right to his time off. He’d leave at eleven, handing off to one of his team members, and Fynn would go to bed. Only to wake like this. Apparently, knowing Charlie or Sheridan was out there on the couch watching the security screens didn’t settle Fynn’s sleeping subconscious worth a damn.

When Micah had found out the bodyguards were hanging out in Fynn’s living room, he’d offered to have Fynn move to his house or suggested a hotel with good security. Fynn wasn’t doing either of those. He didn’t want to fall back into his teen pattern of Micah finding him too much, too loud, too wrong, while pretending not to be frustrated with him. He definitely didn’t want to give up his familiar spaces for a hotel that wouldn’t feel and smell like home.

I’d probably have worse nightmares in a strange room.

Not that these were fun. He bit back a whimper as a flash of car headlights cut through his field of view behind the curtains. Not headlights, a helicopter, silly. He could make out a subtle vibration and the sound of the rotors fading away, and anyway he was on the fourth floor. No headlights would shine in on him until they invented flying cars.

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