by Tracey Ward
He chuckled dryly, reminding me of a night full of fire and lights, wet pavement and the thrill of the fight. It had been a new fuel to the animal, one he’d never had before. One he was addicted to.
“I’m about four years older than you, dude. Don’t call me ‘sir’.”
I smiled. “You got it.”
“Good. Listen, we appreciate what you did for us last month. I’ve met a lot of volunteers since then but you stuck out. You’re solid. Or am I reading you wrong?”
I shook my head despite the fact that he couldn’t see it. “No. I’m good. I’m solid.”
“That’s what we need.” He cleared his throat, lowering his voice. “I’ll be straight with you. We just lost a guy here in the house. Washed out. Couldn’t take it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Yeah, he was a brother and he walked and we’re all… well, we’re all a little shaken by that. Big boots to be filled. You got big feet, Coulter?”
“The biggest.”
“Perfect. Come on down tomorrow and meet the crew. We’ll see if they fit.”
He hung up without waiting for an answer. I didn’t mind. I’d be there.
“Who was that?” Callum asked.
Sam slapped my shoulder as I hung up the phone, a smile on my face.
“This one,” she said certainly, holding up the biggest of the three rings. “It’s more expensive than the rest but for some reason I’m guessing you can afford it.”
My smile widened as I reached for the ring. “You guessed right.”
She pulled it back out of my reach. “Be real with me. You a drug dealer? Coke mule? Is it gambling? Do you owe money to the mob?”
I snatched the ring from her fingertips, surprising her with my speed. Little girl had no idea who she was dealing with.
“None of the above,” I promised as I stepped around her to the counter. I put the ring down on the velvet, slipped my wallet out of my pocket, and laid my card down on the counter next to it. “Debit, not credit, please.”
“You didn’t even ask how much it is,” Sam protested.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Sam looked desperately between myself and Callum. Neither of us reacted.
“Really?” she asked in annoyance. “We’re just going to pretend this is normal. That this is fine. He’s a part-time EMT for f—You know what? I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t need to know.”
I felt her energy bubbling higher and higher the longer we stood there. It took almost fifteen minutes to ring me out, inform me about insurance, go over the IGA report, talk to my bank and assure them that yes, I did want to make a purchase that large and no, I wasn’t some psycho committing identity theft. By the time I got a wink from the clerk and a small black bag in my hand with the sum of my heart’s hopes and aspirations inside it, Sam was about to explode.
We loaded into my truck in silence. No one said a word as I pulled us onto the expressway. Rain started to fall, sending my wipers softly swishing over my windshield and filling the silent cabin with a gentle rhythm that ticked like the pendulum of a clock, counting down to the end of her willpower.
Sam turned to me with serious eyes. “I figured it out.”
“Did you?”
“I did.”
“Lay it on me.”
“It’s so obvious. Orphan. Genius. Fighter. Wealthy.” She leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “You’re Batman, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jenna
“What’s his name?” I asked for the fiftieth time.
Laney laughed, shaking her head. “Nope. Not telling.”
“Does he have a name?”
“No.”
“What do you call him?”
“Constantly,” Mom chuckled. Her answer didn’t quite fit my question but it was very telling. Both of Laney’s relationship status and my mom’s mimosa content.
Brunch. Not my usual scene but when Mom and Laney texted me last night and asked for the first time since my Junior year of high school if I would go with them, I decided to try something new. What I thought was a gossip fest with a bowl of fruit I’d be required to fret the calories of later turned out to be a binge eating, alcohol swilling good time. I was stunned to see both Laney and Mom devour plates of pancakes and waffles, both asking for bites of my French toast slathered in butter.
And we washed it all down with bubbly and orange juice, as a lady should.
“Constantly, huh?” I asked Laney accusingly. “You must use his name sometimes.”
“I don’t,” she protested primly, looking down her nose at the strawberry she was dragging through my whipped cream.
“Max,” Mom told me with a small grin. “His name is Max.”
“Dammit, Mom!”
“Language. And stop tormenting your sister. She wants to hear about your life. She should know you’re happy.”
“I was going to draw this out until Christmas,” Laney protested.
I lifted my glass and my eyebrow. “Until I was removed from the Naughty List?”
Laney smiled mischievously. “Maybe.”
“Was I getting his name or would I get to meet him?”
“No one is meeting him,” Laney said seriously, her demeanor changing in an instant.
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer. She looked away, her eyes going distant and vacant, her secrets pulling in deep under the surface.
The move reminded me so much of Kellen I felt dizzy.
I put down my mimosa, no longer thirsty. “You okay, Lane?”
Laney smirked, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “I’m great. So great.”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“She’s being a wet blanket,” Mom mumbled.
“No, I’m not being sarcastic,” Laney told me, her tone clipped. “I’m being… I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m being.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Yes, Jenna!” she burst out. “I am mad at you!”
Mom and I met eyes nervously over the table. People turned to look to see what was happening, but neither of us dared ask Laney to stop shouting. Tell Laney not to do something and she was bound to do it, just to spite you.
“About Kellen?” I asked hesitantly.
Her eyes narrowed. “No. It’s not about Kellen. It’s about Max.”
“What’d I do? I’ve never met him. I hadn’t even heard about him until a month ago.”
“And I’ve been dating him for sev—six. Six months. I couldn’t talk to you about it for six months because of you and freaking Kellen.”
“How do we have anything to do with you and Max?” I demanded, getting angry.
“Because if I’m dating someone everyone will think it’s okay what you did, and it’s not. I’m not okay with it.” She took a deep breath, lowering her voice. “I mean, I guess I’m okay with it now because I have to be, but I wasn’t for a long time. Even though I was seeing Max I was still pissed.”
“I get that.”
“No, you don’t. No one does.”
“So explain it to me.” I sat forward, crossing my arms on the table. “I’m here, I’m listening. Tell me.”
Laney pursed her pink lips together, moving them side to side thoughtfully. “Fine,” she eventually burst on a breath of air.
Mom sat back in her chair, groaning with worry.
“I hate that you’re dating Kellen,” Laney began, and it was such a simple statement that it blew my mind when I realized it was the first time I was hearing it. She’d never said it to my face, never said it aloud as far as I knew. It had always been an assumed truth that we lived with, that we carefully danced around, trying never to touch it. Never to taunt it and make it rise up to its full height in front of us because her wrath was that kind of terrifying. Like a dragon in the mist, all fire-filled nostrils and glistening, golden scales.
“Okay,” I acknowledged calmly.
She looked at me for a long time before continuing. “I hate that you had a thing for him behind my back. You wanted him even when I was engaged to him and that’s shitty.”
“I couldn’t hel—“ I cut myself off, silencing my own defense. She didn’t want to hear it and it didn’t matter if I gave it. The past was done and gone and we had to deal with the after effects of it now. “I should have told you.”
“Yeah. You should have,” she agreed eagerly, turning to face me. Opening up by tiny cracks. Little fissures – just like Kellen. “That’s why I feel so lied to and betrayed. You were lying to me for years.”
“I was lying to everyone,” I admitted. “Myself, Kellen, you, Mom, Dad. Even when I was with Alexander I was lying by making him think I could try with him. I knew from the start it wasn’t going to work.”
“Because you wanted Kellen.”
“Because I loved Kellen, and I didn’t know how to tell my heart to stop. But I should have been honest with you. I wanted to be. You’re my sister, you’re the only person I could have talked to about it back then.”
“So why didn’t you? In high school when I was dating him and you liked him why didn’t you say something?”
“Because I was thirteen and it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“It would have mattered to me.”
I laughed, unable to contain it. “Seriously? If I had told you that I had a crush on Kellen you would have stopped seeing him? The captain of the football team, the bad boy with a motorcycle and boxing gloves and a body like a Greek god. You would have walked away? Honestly?”
Laney chewed on her lower lip with the corner of her teeth, thinking. I could tell she wanted to lie to me but we both knew the truth. And even if she thought I didn’t, Mom did. She was watching us with interest, her eyes going back and forth between us like a spectator at a tennis match – mimosa in hand.
“Okay, no,” Laney relented. “I would have said you were a kid and I didn’t care.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being honest. Now I get to be honest.” I sat back hard in my chair, leveling my eyes on her. “You never loved him. You even told me you didn’t.”
“So what?”
“So I did. I do. And what I want from you is not permission because I don’t need it, but acceptance. I want you to accept the fact that yes, I’m with your ex and yes, that’s fucked—“
“Dammit, Jenna,” Mom groaned before slapping her hand over her own mouth in surprise.
“But it’s the truth,” I continued. “It’s how it is and no matter how bad you think it makes you look or how wounded and indignant you feel like you have a right to be, I want you to stop and really consider how upset you honestly are over it. None of the spiraling out and compounding your anger with little details that don’t mean anything or matter. Quit throwing coals on the fire and ask yourself if you’re really cold.”
“I don’t know what that means. Is that a saying?”
“It means stop being mad for the sake of being mad and ask yourself if you really care that much?”
She sneered. “What does it matter how I feel? Even if I forgive you it doesn’t make it right for him to cheat on me with my sister.”
“It was one kiss and he broke off the engagement within hours,” I shot back, the words and the math and the timeline crystal clear in my mind. I had mulled it all over for so long, wrapped and unwrapped it in layers and layers of guilt. I couldn’t stop worrying over it. I just wanted it to be resolved. To find an end to this. To know once and for all, was I the villain?
“He still cheated. Even if it was one kiss he was in love with you for how long? Years while he was with me? So one kiss or not you were still the other woman. You still stole him.”
“Laney slept with Max while she was still with Kellen,” Mom told me frankly, lifting her glass and toasting me with a wan smile. “Merry Christmas. That’s your gift from me.”
“Mom!” Laney shouted angrily.
“Lower your voice, Laney. I’d like to come back here someday. Their eggs are divine.”
“You swore you wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“And you swore you’d make amends with your sister. She gave you an opening and you shot it down.”
“I did not! I’m talking it out with her.”
“You were digging in the knife,” Mom countered sternly. “Let it go. You barely even liked him. You said he was annoying. You called him a know-it-all every other day.”
“He kind of is,” I threw out there. “For what it’s worth, I agree with that. Problem is he actually does know everything.”
Mom smiled affectionately. “He’s truly brilliant.”
“He’s an ass,” Laney snarled.
I grinned. “Also that, yeah.”
She looked at me briefly before sighing and shrugging her shoulders. “Okay, fine. Yes, or no. I’m not that mad anymore. I haven’t really cared about it for months. Not since Max and I… not since he told me he loved me.”
“Whoa,” I breathed. “Did you say it back?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you mean it?”
She kicked me under the table.
“Ow!” I cried, rubbing my shin.
People were glaring at us all around the restaurant. We would not be brunching here again.
“Watch yourself, bitch,” Laney warned with a laugh.
We both looked at Mom, waiting to be scolded for our foul language.
She raised her nearly empty glass to her lips and shrugged carelessly. “Fuck it.”
Laney and I looked each other in shock, our mouths hanging open. But then they slowly closed as we smiled, bubbling full with laughter that turned so loud and raucous that even our waiter openly frowned at us, and we owed that man money.
Mom grinned as she motioned to him for our check. She watched Laney and I laugh together, and I felt like our family was a family again. That we weren’t fighting, we weren’t tense, we weren’t liars and cheaters and fakers and thieves. We were people with flaws and scars that took a long time to heal, but everything did eventually. Time took its toll on everything, the good and the bad. It could whittle away your world to nearly nothing until it disappeared out from under you and left you standing barren and bereft in the cold empty. Until you were so broken down you had no choice but to start again. Or it could break down a wall. It could close a gap. It could clear your eyes to a shine that showed you forever. That showed you everything you’d already known.
We were villains the lot of us, but it didn’t matter how the rest of the world saw us. Not even how we saw ourselves. What mattered when the sun went down and the day’s deeds were done was that in the eyes of the ones we loved, we were golden.
Chapter Fifteen
Kellen
Christmas came and went and still I didn’t ask Jenna to marry me.
New Years on the beach sitting on a blanket, huddled close together against the cold in the dark watching fireworks explode in the night sky, reflecting over the rolling ocean waves, and still I didn’t ask her.
I was starting to scare myself.
I kept thinking I wanted it to be perfect. I thought maybe I needed to wait until we were in Ireland. That maybe there I’d find the right moment, because I needed to find that perfection. I had to get this of all things right. I’d screwed up so much with her already. I couldn’t stand to ruin this too.
But was that really what was stopping me? Was I scared of doing it at the wrong time or worse – was I scared to do it at all?
I didn’t know. I had anxiety about it either way and I couldn’t pin down exactly what I was anxious about.
I felt like I needed a new outlook. Fresh scenery if I ever wanted to change. A new outside to spark a change on the inside.
“I think I want to buy a house,” I called out to Callum, glancing around my bedroom.
He laughed from down the hall. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
/>
“Why?”
I chewed on the question, my mouth bursting bitter. “This place reminds me of Laney.”
“That’s a good reason.”
“Right?”
“You gonna use Daddy’s money?”
I didn’t answer him. He was lucky I didn’t go out there and punch him.
“Well, do what you want, man,” he called, unfazed by my silence. “But if you want my two cents-”
“I don’t.”
“You wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t. My two cents is that you got engaged to Laney and started talking about buying a house. Now here you are getting engaged to Jenna and you’re talking about buying a house. Might wanna deviate from the script a little.”
He had a point. When I broke things off with Laney one of my biggest worries wasn’t that my relationship with her had gone south, because to be honest it’d never gotten above the Equator to start with. What I had been worried about, what I lost sleep and lining on the inside of my stomach over, was the fact that I was walking a path I didn’t want to take in every aspect of my life. Wrong job, wrong girl, wrong dreams. I admired Dan so much for all of his accomplishments and kindness that I had started trying to pattern my life after his. I convinced myself I wanted the high paying job and the big house and the hot, society wife, but what I had been missing was everything.
Dan was good at his job because he loved it. He had a passion for it.
Dan married Karen because he loved her. He didn’t want anyone else in the world but her.
And what did I love? What was I passionate about?
Boxing and Jenna Monroe. That was all I knew in my gut and they were all I needed in my life.
So why hadn’t I fucking asked her yet?
“Are you done packing?” Callum shouted in annoyance. “You’re gonna be late picking Jenna up.”
I looked down intently at my open suitcase. It was packed neatly, everything I needed for a week in Ireland fitting into one bag. That’s the shine on the shit of being a foster kid; you learn to pack light.
“I’m almost done.”
“Pack a sweater. I don’t want you getting cold,” Callum sang.