driveway of his well-lit house. He hated coming home to a dark, empty house. He couldn’t do anything about the empty part right now, but the dark part he had fixed a while ago. He had installed floodlights that lit the front of the two-story Tudor-style stone house.
“Wow, you have a nice house,” Tristan said as he sat up. He seemed to unwind a little.
“What were you expecting?”
Tristan shrugged as Harry pulled the car to a stop. “I guess something like what Bull and Zach live in. This is, like, a mansion or something.” Tristan got out of the car and walked around to the front of the house. “You live here all alone?”
Harry closed the car door behind him and followed Tristan as he walked across the yard. “When I bought the house, it didn’t look anything like this. The yard was a wreck, and the house needed a lot of work. The yard stuff I did myself, and the rest I had done over time. The house was solid enough. It just hadn’t been taken care of.”
“But it’s so big for just one person,” Tristan whispered.
“I bought it when I was dating a man named Reed. He and I had been seeing each other for almost two years, and I thought….” Harry cleared his throat. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. I bought it because I didn’t figure that I would be living here alone. We’d talked about living together and having children, even….”
“So you bought a house to start a family in but lost the family?” Tristan asked.
Harry nodded. “I love the house and didn’t have the heart or the money to just sell it again, so I decided to stay and fix it up for me.” It had been a hard decision, but Harry had concluded that he was worth it. “I had the kitchen and bathrooms redone, painted everything, and took down wallpaper until my arms ached. I dug, weeded, and chainsawed my way through the yard and then planted everything a few years ago. The bushes and shrubs are just coming into their own now.” He was proud of his home and what he’d done. “I guess it was my way of… I don’t know… not giving up hope.” At first he’d hoped Reed would come back to him. Now he was hopeful that he’d eventually find someone to share his home with. But that was no longer a requirement. It was his home now, his place of safety and warmth. “Let’s get you inside.”
Harry walked toward the front door, wondering why he’d told Tristan all that. Not that it mattered. He just didn’t talk about his life very much. It wasn’t that exciting, and all his relationships after Reed—if they could be called relationships at all—hadn’t involved very much talking, and definitely not about landscaping.
“Come on inside,” Harry said, after making sure there was no one else on the street. Tristan cautiously moved from the front walk into the house, and Harry closed and locked the door. He then set the alarm. “If you open any of the outer doors or windows on the first floor, the alarm will sound, and once we go upstairs, I’ll activate the sensors on the main floor, so even if someone comes in, they’ll trip the sensors, and we’ll hear them. Unless they’re crawling on the floor.” Harry smiled. “I had to have them set so the cat wouldn’t trip them.”
“Why do you have all this?”
Harry sighed. “There are some pieces that were handed down to me from my grandfather that I really love and want to protect.” He didn’t go into details. Bull had also insisted that he have an alarm system because, well, Bull was Bull, and he’d seen so many things. It had been Bull who had actually designed and installed the system for him a few years earlier. “Are you hungry or thirsty? I have some things in the refrigerator.”
“No, thanks. I’ve had plenty to drink, probably too much, and….” Tristan yawned, so Harry motioned toward the stairs. He turned off one of the downstairs lights but left the other on, and then he followed Tristan upstairs, doing his best not to stare at his rear