I shake my head, but my face and my nose are running and gushing gross liquids all over the place. What if he hadn’t been there? I feel like a complete and utter failure.
Flynn’s hand stays on my shoulder. “It’s okay,” he mumbles, like I’m the little kid.
Kyle sits up and crawls into my lap and wraps his arms around me. It shocks the snot out of me.
“What were you doing, buddy?” I ask him and hiccup and sniffle.
“I was really tired, Jess.” He yawns and puts his head on my shoulder. The warmth of his hug quiets all the noise that’s warring inside of me, and I’m filled with a gooey kind of calm.
“Kyle,” Flynn says, and Kyle lifts his head.
“You scared Jess. You shouldn’t have hidden on her. You’re not supposed to wander off. You scared us.”
Kyle blinks at me. “You were scared?”
I nod. “Yeah. Really scared.”
Stella walks toward us. I didn’t even hear her come in. She kneels down beside us. “We were all scared. You have to be careful, Kyle. No hiding.” She stands, walks to her desk, and leans against it, her arms crossed.
“Not even when we play hide-and-seek? I wanted to play hide-and-seek with Jess when she went to the bathroom. But I got tired of waiting, and I lay down and fell asleep.”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupt. “I didn’t mean to leave him alone for long.”
“No,” Flynn snaps.
I cringe, waiting for him to berate me, tell me what I already know. I’m irresponsible and stupid. I’ve got a bad track record.
“It’s not your fault.” He stands up. “Not cool, little dude. You don’t start a game of hide-and-seek without telling anyone. Especially not when you are being babysat.”
“I’m not a baby,” he says. Kyle wiggles his head back and forth.
“Then don’t act like one,” Flynn tells him.
He looks up at his big brother and blinks. “Am I in trouble?”
He’s so friggin’ adorable, but fear and attention get to Kyle, because he starts to cry too.
Flynn leans down and takes him from my lap and stands him on the floor. “Apologize to Jess,” he says.
I shake my head, but Flynn glares at me, so I stop.
“I’m sorry, Miss Jess,” Kyle says, his little lip jutting out and quivering.
I think before I say anything. “Um. It was a mistake. And we learn from those.” I wipe under my eyes and sniffle, and Flynn holds out his free hand and helps pull me to my feet. He flicks his hair back, and I have a brief desire to spin around and flee, because even now with all this drama, I still can’t help appreciating that he’s stupid hot. And I don’t know how I’m going to see him every day when he thinks I’m such an idiot. His lashes are longer than most girls who spend their money on Latisse.
He smiles at me though, and my insides freak the hell out.
“Sorry for being a dick,” he says and glances at Stella. “I mean jerk. Kyle is my responsibility. I shouldn’t have put that on you.”
“No. I mean, you’d think I’d be able to keep track of a five-year-old for a little longer.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Flynn says. “Anyhow, you found him.”
“I used to have naps in the closet when I was a kid,” I tell him. I walk to the front of Stella’s desk, plunk down in a chair, and let out a big sigh.
Flynn follows me to the other chair, and all at once, he’s staring into my eyes. It feels like he’s seeing things I don’t even know are there. There’s this huge swoop. It starts in my belly, and my whole body goes on its own roller-coaster ride. It leaves me with goose bumps. I stare down at my shoes, wondering if he can tell what I’m feeling.
Stella clears her throat.
“Is Jess your new girlfriend?” Kyle asks. I look up, and he’s standing beside Stella, watching us, his head barely visible over the top of the desk. He blinks at me. “He has a lot of girlfriends.”
“Dude,” Flynn says. “We’ve talked about that.”
I can’t help laughing out loud, and Kyle giggles. Even Stella laughs. “You want me to clean this handsome boy up?” she asks Flynn.
“Yeah. One second though. Come here, big guy.” Kyle scoots around the desk, and Flynn bends down so he’s at the same level as him. “No more running off?” Flynn says.
Kyle’s eyes fill with tears, and his lower lip goes in and out. “I promise,” he says. It’s about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
“Okay, handsome.” Stella gets up and walks to Kyle, holding out her hand. “You come with me and we’ll clean you up, and then Flynn can take you to lunch.” She glances at me. “Good job finding him.”
I lower my eyes as they leave the room, because really, if I hadn’t lost him in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to find him.
Flynn stands. “Well, I guess you need to get back to work,” he says. His voice is slightly deeper, and Nance would say it’s sexy. Who am I kidding? I’m the one who thinks it’s sexy. The big brother thing, it works for him.
“Yeah.” I sneak a look up. He’s watching me. Neither one of us moves.
“It must be kind of cool to have someone little who looks up to you like that,” I say. “My sister and I, we’re nothing like that.” I don’t know why I admit that.
“No? I don’t know. Sometimes I worry I’m a bad influence.” He coughs and looks away. “I look after him when my mom works.” He glances back and smiles. “Your mom probably doesn’t work. Or does she do charity work instead of a real job? I hear lots of the moms in Tuxedo are into that.” He doesn’t say it with meanness, but it makes my stomach lurch.
I stare at him. “You honestly believe that?” I ask.
He hesitates. “Well, I saw your house, remember. I mean, it’s pretty huge. I guess I assumed she doesn’t have to work.” He eyes the door Stella walked out of.
I cross my arms. “Maybe she’s the one with all the money.”
He purses his lips but glances at me. “She is?”
“Well. No. I mean, she did work. She had a good job.” I inhale deeply through my nose, trying to calm myself. “Some women like to work, you know. This isn’t the sixties.”
“No. I know. I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry. I just mean, she has a choice, right? She doesn’t have to. Anyhow, you know what they say, all the stay-at-home moms live in Tuxedo. Sorry. It was stupid. Forget it.”
I glare at him. He doesn’t know how far from the truth he is about my mom. “You think my mom has an easy life because of where we live?” I ask. Hot anger licks at my brain because that is so far from the truth.
“Hey, wait. I mean…well, kind of. I thought…” Flynn sputters and stares longingly at the exit.
“She worked,” I say through clenched teeth. “No. She had a career. And she loved it. But she doesn’t anymore…” I take a breath, stopping myself before everything spills out. I won’t do that just to prove my point. I uncross my arms. “She can’t work. She doesn’t have a choice.”
“Hey. I’m sorry,” he says after a moment of silence. “I didn’t know.”
I wrap my arms around my waist. My face is hot. “Whatever.” I untangle myself a second later. “I have to work.” I stand up. I want out, away from him. He’s a lot less hot now. I don’t care how cute he is, he doesn’t get to judge my family. It’s none of his business.
He lightly grabs my arm to stop me as I try to slip by, but I pull away. He immediately lets go, but it tingles where his fingers pressed into my flesh. Treacherous arm. I frown at it.
“I really am sorry,” he repeats. He clears his throat again as if he’s viewed inside my head and sorted through my thoughts. “You’re not at all what you seem, are you, Jess?”
“Depends.” I bite my lip. “What do I seem?”
He tilts his head, watching me, and then he smiles. “Entitled, r
eckless, and maybe a little spoiled.” He laughs at the look on my face. He holds his fingers up to show me an inch. “A little?”
He grins then, full-on, and I try to be mad. But it’s hard.
“But you’re also good with my brother and maybe a little softer than you seem. Wilf likes you. That counts for something.” He bends his head, but the blush is visible on his cheeks. “I don’t know what happened to you or why you’re here. Maybe someday you’ll tell me.” He smiles again, and it’s lopsided, but his whole demeanor shifts. He’s good-looking, but when he smiles…my heartbeat pounds.
“Maybe not,” I say, even though I’m about ready to tell him anything he wants to know.
“Is she sick?” he asks. “Your mom?”
I lower my gaze. Blink. Blink. Blink. No one asks. No one talks about my mom. “Kind of,” I say softly.
He watches me, his head tilted, his eyes soft. “That’s rough,” he says.
I blink some more, resisting the urge to cry all over again. Two words. Nice ones, but I don’t cry in front of people. Well, I usually don’t. I smile to keep myself from blurting out the whole story. He seems like a good listener. But I can’t. We. Don’t. Talk. About. It.
“My mom works like a dog. My stepdad made sure of that. Such. A. Jerk. ” He shifts from foot to foot and attempts another smile, but it doesn’t last.
I recognize the anger in his eyes. He sees me recognize it, understand it, and then he looks away. “Anyways, who does that?” He takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I don’t know.” The walls of Stella’s office feel like they’re getting smaller. The air is harder to breathe.
“We moved to Tadita. To start over.” Flynn flicks his hair back with his hand. “Too much information. Sorry. I don’t usually go on about it.”
“No,” I say quickly, and without thinking, I reach out and touch his hand. The hand that moved back his hair. I want to touch his hair. I drop my hand to my side before I do anything stupid with it.
I could tell him the truth. Right here. Somehow, I know I can trust him. How it makes me feel. Terrible. Lonely. But it’s so ingrained in me not to say anything, to pretend everything is fine, that I swallow the words. And say nothing.
Flynn clears his throat. “Well, I guess we’re here for different reasons.”
“I guess.”
“For sure we’re both sorry asses,” he says and raises both eyebrows, joking around.
“You have no idea,” I admit, “what a sorry ass I am.”
His expression changes. Gets serious again. “I worried for you the other night. When Braxton drove you home. Wandering around by yourself like that. Getting in the car. We could have been anybody. Guys who weren’t so nice.”
“Sometimes I do stupid things,” I admit. I bend my head, remembering some of my other stupid human tricks. “It’s like I’m testing myself or something,” I say softly.
I think about the stupid dress I ordered. How much it cost and what the people around here could do with all that money. I think about drinking with Nance and stealing a T-shirt from Abercrombie a while ago, just for the rush, just to see if I’d get caught. I’d almost wanted to. But I didn’t. All the bad decisions. And that’s only covering the last couple of weeks.
He presses his lips together and takes a step closer to me. “Be careful, Jess. Okay?”
I can barely breathe. I have an urge to confess that sometimes I don’t even know who I am anymore. That sometimes I’m so caught up in pretending to be someone else that I don’t feel anything at all. And that’s why I test myself. To see if I’m still alive.
“I wish I had a little brother,” I say instead of blurting out the rest.
“I’ll share him,” he says. “As long as you don’t lose him again.”
I cover my smile with my hand. “Deal,” I say.
We’re staring at each other again. As if we’re really seeing each other. My stomach is a mess. Hormone alert. I focus my gaze on his bracelet.
“You’re allergic to something?” I ask, pointing at it, the red symbol.
He covers it with his other hand. “Nope.” He looks at me.
The air around him is sparkling and sizzling with an invisible energy. I wonder if he knows.
“It was my dad’s,” he says softly. “He gave it to me before he died.” He hesitates. “I don’t usually tell people that.”
“I’m glad you told me,” I whisper back. My whole body tingles and I wonder what the hell I’m doing. Am I flirting? In Stella’s office? But no, it’s not even flirting. Not really. I’m being honest. We’re connecting. And I realize with a flush that I want to kiss him more than I’ve ever wanted to kiss any other boy. My cheeks light up. I have a knack for the inappropriate.
“Jess?” Sunny pops her head into the office and crosses her arms when she sees the two of us standing together. “We need you in the kitchen.”
I take a step away from Flynn.
“Stella wants you to go get Kyle,” she tells Flynn. “It’s lunchtime in minutes. Jess, come on. You need to get your scrawny butt out there.”
Sunny waits, a hard gleam in her eyes, until I’m walking, and then she spins and leads me to the kitchen, grabs a black-and-green striped apron hanging from a hook, and shoves it in my stomach. I put it on and tie it around my waist. “The stripes are the server’s aprons.” She pushes me to the other side of the kitchen. “You have tables one to six. The family section. Get the salads to their tables first. We already sat your first group at the tables. Don’t be late again.”
I hurry toward the dining room and rush around to get orders out, and when I hurry back to the kitchen, Kyle and Flynn are walking toward me. I step one way and Flynn steps the same way, and we do the awkward dance of stepping to the same side and then back. He laughs and then holds out his hand. “Go ahead.”
I smile at both of them, lower my eyes, and slip past as they take a seat in my section.
“Jess,” Sunny calls to me as I’m grabbing bowls of soup. “Don’t mess with the people here,” she blurts out. “You are not near good enough for that boy.”
And then she’s gone. A shiver goes up my spine.
chapter eight
After my shift, Stella asks Wilf to walk me to the bus stop.
“It’s still daytime,” I tell her. “I’ll be fine.”
She insists. “Don’t want your dad complaining to me later,” she says. “Wilf doesn’t mind.”
Wilf waits for me at the door while I get my stuff from my locker. “You really don’t have to walk me,” I tell him. “God.”
“You don’t have to call me God, love,” he says. “But something tells me you might need a little assistance figuring out which bus to take.”
I roll my eyes as we walk together through the kitchen, not wanting to admit he’s right. He’s kind of fragile-looking, but he opens the front door and waits for me to walk through. There’s a group of men sitting on the stairs out front. I try not to cringe at the smell and then recognize one of them and strain for his name. Martin. Same name as my dad. I have lots of tricks to remember people’s names.
“Bye, Martin,” I call nervously when he grins at me with half a mouthful of teeth.
“Thanks for the extra sandwich,” he calls and bows deeply. “I feel like I went to heaven today. ’Cause you’re a real angel.”
The old guys with him groan and make jokes. I smile to show I’m perfectly calm. I don’t want to acknowledge my conviction that I don’t belong here. That I feel uncomfortable because I live in a different world. A better one.
“That was nice,” Wilf says when we’re out of earshot. It takes a while. He moves pretty slowly.
“What?” I ask, watching a younger man leaving the building. He’s carrying a construction hat under his arm and has on steel-toed boots.
“Remembering his name.”
I lift a shoulder. “I’m good with names. Hey. Does that guy work?” I ask.
“Lots of people who come to New Beginnings work,” he tells me.
“So why are they here then?” I wondered the same thing about Flynn’s mom.
“You’ve haven’t seen much of this world, have you, kiddo?” he asks.
“I’ve seen enough,” I snap.
He doesn’t say anything, but his expression changes. I feel kind of bad, but he doesn’t know me. He’s making as many assumptions about me as he thinks I’m making about others.
“How come you volunteer?” I ask.
“Not because my dad makes me, that’s for sure,” he grumbles. And then he looks over at me. “If not us, then who?”
I think about that as we walk the rest of the way in silence, and when we reach the bus stop, he sits on the bench as soon as he reaches it.
“You shouldn’t be walking me all the way here,” I tell him. “You’re tired.”
He frowns at me. “You think I’m too old?”
“Well, let’s say in your day, I think rainbows were in black and white.”
He chuckles. “I admit I’m at the age where I pick my cereal for the fiber content, but you’re still at the age where you pick your cereal for the toys.”
“Funny,” I tell him. “As in not funny at all.”
“You have sass,” he says. “And I think you use sarcasm to keep people from looking too deep. You remind me of someone I used to know. In spite of yourself, I’ve decided to like you.”
I turn my head and pretend to be watching for a bus so he doesn’t see that his comment pleases me. “How do you know I’m not just mean?” I ask.
“Because your remember people’s names.”
A bus is pulling toward us, and he tells me it’s the right one. He gives me instructions on transferring to Tuxedo as the door opens. “You have change?” he asks.
“I’m a spoiled rich girl, remember?”
“We all have burdens to overcome,” he says.
The door closes behind me, but I see him watching me from the bench, and he’s smiling.
The Truth about Us Page 6