He chuckles, but the ease in it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah. I’d shake your hand but…” He nods to me still clinging to him and Cori laughs.
“Yeah, that’s okay. Can you manage to carry her back to the car?”
33
Janey
When I wake up, I can’t identify the room I’m in, but I know the face that’s lying next to me. I want to touch his jaw, his lips, his cheek, but I also want him to sleep. I’m sure he’s tired. Exhausted not just from a lack of shuteye, but from life itself.
I try to shuffle off the bed quietly, but am unsuccessful in not waking Kace.
“Hi,” I whisper, and he nods. His eyes are on me the entire time and I can almost see the wheels spinning and spinning and spinning in his head.
“Why did you come to find me, Janey?”
“I was scared you’d get hurt.” I whisper the words, unsure as to how he feels about my search and rescue mission. A part of me thinks he should be happier about how things turned out, that I found him, that we’re here together.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay home?” he says, confirming the fact that he’s not as thrilled about being here as I think he should be. “Didn’t I tell you that I wanted you safe?” He rubs the bridge of his nose and lets out a frustrated sigh.
“I’m safe now, Kace.” The truth is, I’ve always been safe, cocooned in a palace like a true princess with her father wearing his sword like a badge of honor.
“You’re not. And every second you spend with me, is another second you’re putting yourself in even more danger.”
“That’s been your song for months, Kace.”
Kace snorts, but there’s no humor there. “And somehow you still haven’t learned. Cain found me tonight, Janey. He knows where I am and who you are.”
“And yet you’re still alive.”
“For now,” he says. It feels like a spite and understandably, I cringe at the impact of his words. “He’s going to go after the people I love. It’s how he operates.”
“He wouldn’t hurt your mom or Abby though, right?”
He shakes his head and I sigh, completely relieved.
“He wasn’t threatening them,” Kace responds, looking down at me. “He was threatening you.”
Realization dawns on his face and all of a sudden, I feel like I can’t breathe. Somehow, despite the heaviness of the situation we’re in, it feels like the good kind of suffocation.
Kace nods instead and leans his head back on the pillow.
I sit up and straddle him, wrapping my arms around him and laying my hand on his chest. “You want to keep me safe,” I whisper, “and I want to keep you safe, too. You have to understand that, Kace.”
He takes my hands in his and squeezes. “You’re putting yourself in danger, Janey. You’re stubborn and hard-headed and…”
“You are those very same things.” He washes his hands over his face before pulling me to him. “We’re in this together, Kace. You and me…as unlikely as that might be. We. Are. In. This. Together.”
His hands reach higher until either side of my face is cupped between his palms. Slowly, carefully, he eases into me, pressing his lips against mine. I kiss him back with all the breath in me. It doesn’t take long before heat consumes us and we’re bare before each other, skin to skin, tasting each other into memory.
34
Janey
A knock on the door has me jumping out of Kace’s arms and rushing for my clothes.
“Janey, open up.” The voice belongs to Cori which at least has my nerves settling a little. But it doesn’t make it any easier to get out of this bed. Kace and I have had way too much of each other in the past few hours. We made love, we fucked, we tangled between the sheets like we were trying to make up for years of not being able to take advantage of each other, as well as make up for all the time we might miss. All the time the future has not yet promised us. Every single part of my body is sore in the most amazing, but also the most exhausting way.
“Laaaneey,” Cori’s voice comes again. I pull my jeans up over my thighs and tussle my hair into a more organized mess before throwing the door open.
She scans the room to see Kace still bundled up in the sheets. The smile that spreads across her face is one of mischief and I know that what’s happened here is not something that’s gone over her head. Cori’s the type who’ll want in on the details. But today, she doesn’t seem to be in the badgering mood. A raise of her eyebrow and a small smile is all I get before she says, “we need to head home.”
My mouth forms an ‘O’. My heart does that pitter-patter that makes it feel like the beats reach all the way to my stomach.
I cringe as I recall how badly I behaved with dad. And then I cringe again at how easily he jumped to conclusions. Trying not to allow my mind to go down the road CJ traveled on when he worked up the nerve to tell my dad I was harboring a criminal in my car, I turn to Kace.
“You gonna be okay here?”
“You gonna be okay?” he shoots back.
I know we’ll have a lot of repairing to do, but I think I’ll be okay. Enough time has passed for tensions to settle and with Cori by my side, at least I know that I’m not going to be tackling my family on my own.
“I’ll be okay,” I tell him.
“Then I’ll be okay, too,” he says.
With that, Cori and I make an exit. The ride back to the house is a relatively silent one. Cori, I’m sure, has been on the phone with dad. That at least gives me enough confidence to believe that I’m not walking into a shit show. I know my sister. She’ll protect me with her life. Throw herself in front of whatever shrapnel my mother and father might want to launch at me.
When we pull into the driveway, Cori turns to me.
“Ready?”
I shrug. “I’m not really sure what I’m going to be walking into.”
“When was the last time that we all sat down as a family without shouting?” It’s been a long time. A very long time. So long that I’m not really sure it has ever happened. As siblings, we get along. But whenever my mother is thrown into the mix, hell always hits the roof. Even though she wasn’t a big part of the initial conversation, I fear that she’ll make herself the center of this one.
Cori and I walk into the house and come face to face with my father. There is kindness in his eyes. But I stepped on his toes last night, so somewhere in him, I know there’s anger, too.
“I’m sorry about how things went yesterday,” I say.
Dad motions for us to take a seat at the table. Neither Cori nor I protest. In fact, Cori seems a little too eager to get seated. She pulls out a chair and straightens her back then folds her arms in front of her.
“There’s a lot to be said and I think last night was evidence enough of that,” Cori says. Her voice is clipped, the tone of it so serious that I have to look twice to believe the words are really coming from her. “I thought coming here would have been the biggest surprise, but as usual, there’s always some storm brewing in this house and as usual, you guys have no clue what’s going on.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dad asks.
Cori sighs and laughs a laugh void of humor. “Where do I even begin?”
“Well you can start with explaining what you’ve done with my daughter,” Allison chimes in. “How many new holes have you punched into your face?”
“Five, not counting my ears,” Cori responds calmly, proudly.
Dad shakes his head. “They let you go through med school looking like that?”
I feel her tense beside me. I tense too. I thought we were coming into this conversation with my neck on the chopping block.
I squeeze Cori’s arm to offer support, but she can’t seem to bring herself to answer dad. I look at her. She looks at me.
“Cori hasn’t been going to med school, dad. She dropped out before the end of her first semester.”
“What?” Mom and Dad, for the first time in an eternity, are a unified unit.
&nb
sp; “Thanks,” Cori whispers to me and I wrap my hand around hers and nod.
“What have you been doing all this time? Where the hell have you been? Why didn’t you come home?”
“I’ve been on tour. I’m a part of a rock band and I didn’t come home because I finally felt like I was free. I felt like I was alive for the first damn time in my life. I was on my own and free to be the real me without ridicule from this one,” she points at our mother, “And I never wanted to deal with disappointing you, dad.” That last part, she whispers because dad, as easy as he was to jump to conclusions yesterday, has always only wanted the best for us.
“So why did you come home, Cori?” Dad asks.
“I need to go to the doctor.”
This causes just about every jaw in the room to drop and even when Cori laughs, the tension doesn’t dissipate.
“I’m not dying,” she finally adds. “I’m pregnant.”
Allison visibly lights up at this news. “Really?” she beams, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much life in her face.
“This is crazy. How could I not know about this?” Dad asks as though he’s the only one in the room who didn’t have a clue.
“Dad you work really hard. A lot misses you,” I whisper and he sighs.
“What else did I miss?”
“Janey had an eating disorder a few years back,” Cori chimes in, knocking the breath from my lungs.
“What the hell, Cori. Why would you tell them that?” It feels like the walls are caving in and even though I know Cori thinks she’s somehow being helpful here, I don’t feel like I’m being helped at all.
She reaches across the table and takes my hand into hers, squeezing it gently. “Because I need mom to understand why she’ll never be allowed around my child. Not unless there are drastic changes made; not unless she goes to therapy. And dad, you’re not excused here. You let her treat Janey like she had something to do with Dani’s death. Like she somehow needs to be blamed for the fact that Janey survived and Dani did not.”
Tears, so many of them, fill my eyes, making it impossible to see. I try to fight against the memory of Dani and I, out on the lake, struggling to get back into the boat.
“How can you talk about your sister’s death like it was nothing?” Mom’s voice breaks, with anger, with pain, with disbelief.
I clench my jaw and shut my eyes. It’s been a while since this conversation came up in full force, a while since anyone approached it head on. Sure, there have always been daggers thrown by my mother, but those were a lot easier to avoid than this.
“You still have three children, mom,” Cori says. “Three children who all loved Dani. Three children who haven’t been able to mourn her properly because you turned this into a guilt trip.”
“They should have never been out on that boat. Janey should have made sure…” mom snaps.
She’s not wrong. She really isn’t. And even though I was a child, I knew better.
“And you knew, Dani,” Cori snaps. “Dani was the trouble-maker. The fire-cracker. The free spirit who wasn’t against pushing boundaries even if she was just a little girl. It’s what we loved about her. It’s why there was never a dull moment around her. She kept everyone on their toes.”
“But Janey should have-” mom starts again.
This time, it’s dad who cuts her off. “Protected her? Told her no? Dani was her twin sister. The stronger twin. And I didn’t need to ask Janey to know that she wasn’t the one who came up with the idea of pushing the boat out.”
“But she helped her!” my mother shouts.
“Because if I didn’t, she would have gone alone.” It’s my voice that says the words, but I’m not quite sure how. My throat feels like it’s closing in on itself and my eyes are fountains at this point.
Cori reaches across the table and squeezes my hand in hers. “You need to love the kids you still have left,” she says to my mother. “And dad, you should have both gotten a divorce a long time ago. Instead, you put us through hell as you fought over territory and became bitter in the process. It’s why you don’t know any of us. Because you’re too busy hating each other.”
“I can see that,” Dad whispers.
“That guy from last night… he’s Janey’s first boyfriend,” Cori continues. “She’s eighteen fucking years old and only now had her first kiss. And you know why, mom? Because you told her nobody would love her. Nobody will want her. Dad, I know you want to protect Janey, but honestly, the person who you should have protected her from is sitting right beside you.”
For the first time in a long time, I see tears pool in my mother’s eyes. It doesn’t take long before we’re all drowning in our own sorrows. Our own secrets. Our own fuck-ups. When we’ve thoroughly cried to our heart’s content my father turns to me. “Did CJ lie to me?” he asks.
I nod.
“And Kace has nowhere to go?”
“Nowhere at all.”
My dad pushes his chair back and rakes his fingers through his hair. A shaky smile positioned on his face, he walks across the room and pulls me into his arms. “Now he does,” he says and I feel like the world has been lifted off my shoulders.
As soon as that part of the matter is done, the next elephant in the room is addressed. Looking at mom and dad obsess over Cori is proof enough that a ruined past doesn’t always lead to a ruined future.
35
Janey
Rather than waiting at the hotel like I expected him to, Kace sends me a message letting me know that he’s at the library. Cori and I are thoroughly exhausted with the making up that’s gone on in our house and both need some time to really digest this new future we’re about to head into.
My sister’s having a baby. I’m about to become an aunt. It’s very possible that my parents will be getting a divorce. And my mother might finally, finally, be going to therapy. It’s a lot to take in and so I decide against trying to take it all in right now. Cori seems to be of the same accord when she steps through the front door with me.
“Where are you headed?”
“Kace is at the library. I was thinking of picking him up and…” My phone dings and I pull it out. Another message from Kace. The animal clinic wants him to come in. My first instinct is to believe that this might have something to do with CJ. Somehow, I doubt it. Plus, just like babies, animals have a way of making life feel so much easier to deal with and so I’m not going to deny him the opportunity to snuggle with some doggies.
When we get to the library, Kace is standing outside waiting for me. Before I even have the chance to bury myself in his arms, Cori has stolen his attention away. She’s looped her arms through his and pulled him into the back seat with her.
“So… how did you two wind up dating?” Cori asks as soon as we drive off.
“She wore me down,” Kace says and I reach back and punch him lightly against the knee.
“You’re right, that’s not it. She beat up a guy at school and I thought it was pretty hot.”
“Jesus Kace,” I laugh, shaking my head.
The conversation goes on like that all the way to the clinic. Needless to say, my sister approves of Kace and Kace seems to approve of her.
As we pull up to the clinic, I momentarily consider telling him about CJ, but I don’t want him to give up his new job, so I decide against it.
“I’ll come back when you’re done,” I smile and watch him go in. I don’t see CJ’s car so I hope he’s not here today. I still want to throat punch him, but now that I’m calm and everything is out in the open, I doubt I will.
“You love him, don’t you?” My sister asks as soon as Kace is out of earshot.
I nod.
“I can tell. I admit, I was a little worried, but then I saw you guys together and… I’m not so worried anymore. He’s very protective of you, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. He’s afraid that his brothers are going to come after me,” I tell her and her eyes bulge.
“Babe, that’s a big detail to o
mit.”
“I know. I just… I needed to get dad to agree to him staying. We can work out the rest as we go along.”
“That’s quite the risk, Janey.”
I wrinkle my brow at her. “When did you become so risk-averse?”
“When I found out I’m pregnant. It’s like every trace of risk taking fled the scene. I feel like an overprotective mama bear and this thing is just a pea. A pea that has some very weird combinations of food she wouldn’t mind indulging in right now.”
“Grocery shopping,” I ask and she nods enthusiastically.
Her list of snacks makes no sense to me, but I don’t judge her as I help to fill the basket with pickles and yogurt, cheese and spam – which she’ll apparently turn into the world’s most revolting salad. And because we’ve got even more time to kill before picking Kace up from the clinic, Cori and I fill the cart to the brim with enough snacks to last us through the next few centuries.
When we exit the grocery store, I notice that there’s a small crowd gathering in the direction we’re headed. I politely squeeze my way through, but freeze when I realize that my car is the reason for the drama.
“Umm...excuse me? What’s going on here?” I ask one of the officers at the rear of my car.
“Are you the owner of this vehicle?” he asks sternly.
“Yes, I am,” I say.
Cori squeezes my hand and I know she wants me to bite back my words. To call a lawyer before answering any questions. But I have nothing to hide. Absolutely nothing to hide.
“Are you the owner of the contents in the vehicle ma’am?” the officer asks.
“Yes.”
“And your name is Janey Bradshaw?” This startles me, but again, I don’t deny it.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Miss Bradshaw, you’re under arrest for the possession of harmful and noxious substances with intention to distribute.”
Somewhere in the midst of all this mess I hear Cori’s voice, but the words the officer just said are still ringing so loudly in my ears that I can’t make out what she’s saying.
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