by Abby Brooks
Pushing off the counter, I strode out of the house and right into Collin Fucking West.
I couldn’t meet his eyes. His proximity made my skin crawl. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Collin frowned, his gaze raking over me. “Glad to see you’ve reverted back to your natural state of assholery. First you randomly cancel our dinner date, now this?”
I shrugged off the statement. Folded my arms over my chest. Stared at my shoes.
“Okay, then.” He bobbed his head and pulled his lips into a frown. “Guess it’s a good thing I’m actually not here for you. I’ve been trying to get a hold of Kennedy for a few days and she’s gone radio silent. Is everything okay?”
My gaze lifted to his and I rubbed a hand over my mouth. It was that or punch him in the face, and I wasn’t ready to go that far. Yet. “I wouldn’t know.”
“I’m sensing a buttload of hostility here, brother.”
I sneered at his use of the word. “Are you? I can’t imagine why.”
Frowning, Collin stepped back, as if he just needed some distance for everything to come into focus. “Why don’t you know if everything is okay with Kennedy? And maybe more importantly, why are you acting like a special kind of asshole again?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because I figured out what was going on between you two? And I ended it?”
Genuine surprise lifted his eyebrows. “You broke up with a woman like that over a birthday party?”
Hold up.
A birthday party?
The black casing surrounding my heart broke away, revealing a tiny glimmer of hope underneath. If Kennedy wasn’t looking to hook up with Collin, then everything was okay…
…and then I remembered the awful things I said to her.
That faint light burned out. My hands fells to my sides. My jaw went slack. My heart shattered.
I blinked at Collin in the blinding light of a Florida afternoon as sweat trailed down my spine. “What are you talking about?”
“Holy shit. You thought…” He raked a hand through his red hair as understanding wrinkled his nose in disgust. “You thought I was making a move on your girlfriend.”
“Actually, I thought she was making a move on you.” Adrenaline coursed through me, lighting my nerves on fire. I paced, knowing damn well I couldn’t outrun the mess I’d made.
“You stupid bastard.” Collin shook his head. “Not everyone is out to get you.”
“Yeah, well, personal experience would beg to differ.”
He dismissed me with a roll of his eyes. “You’ve been selling yourself that story for years and I’m here to call bullshit on it once and for all. I love you like a brother and always have. Harlow loves you and to my knowledge has never been anything but kind to you, even when you were a downright dick to her. You and Lucas are locked in a bromance that would make a lesser man jealous. Kennedy really seemed to dig you, right up until you dropped a grenade on that whole thing. Her grandmother, too.”
“And I’ve been a fan since day one.” Delores’ voice came from directly behind Collin. I whirled while his eyes went wide and he uttered a whispered, “Holy shit.”
“How do you always manage to sneak up on me?” I asked with a nervous laugh.
“The better question might be, why are you never paying attention to what’s happening around you. And, if I’m overhearing things right, it seems like that’s gotten you into quite a pickle this time. If you were paying any attention at all, you would have known that Kennedy would only cheat on you with Collin West.” The glimmer in her eyes said Delores meant to make a joke.
And it would have been a good one, in any other circumstance.
Collin coughed into his hand and waited while she studied him. When recognition lit her face, he extended a hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Joe’s brother.”
“Now I see why you’re jumping to conclusions.” Delores gave me a sad smile. “All joking aside, and no offense to you Mr. West, but I’ve seen the way that woman looks at you. You officially dethroned your brother. Or you had…right up until you made an ass of yourself.”
Panic surged through me and I yanked my phone out of my back pocket and called Kennedy. One ring. Two. And…voicemail.
“Penny. Kennedy. I’m so sorry. I just talked to Collin and Delores and…” I rubbed my hand over my face. “My God, I was such an idiot.”
With that cryptic message, I ended the call. Paced the driveway a few times, then turned to my brother. “I need to go see her.”
“Yeah, you do. You need to make this right.” He gave me an encouraging smile.
“I need to see her right now.”
“I agree.”
I pointed at his car, blocking my truck in the driveway. “I need you to get out of my way.”
With an apology dressed in laughter, Collin climbed into his car and drove out. I hopped into the truck and drummed my fingers on the wheel as he took his sweet ass time.
Delores lifted a hand when I finally hit the road. “Go get ‘er, Tiger.”
“I most certainly will,” I said to myself.
Or, at the very least, I’d try.
The difference between Key West Pediatrics and the Community Health Clinic was extreme. No expense had been spared in the quality of the building or the décor. Frowning patients quietly perched on expensive chairs under pretentious paintings. The woman at the desk practically snarled as I barged in.
“I need to speak to Doctor Monroe, please.” I tried to stare past the receptionist in the hopes of catching Kennedy walking by, her arm lovingly wrapped around the shoulders of a patient as a choir of angels hovered over her. I’d leap over the desk to get to her if it came to that.
“Doctor Monroe is no longer with the practice,” the receptionist whined in a nasally voice.
That caught my attention. I zeroed in on the sour woman in front of me. “What do you mean?”
“She quit three days ago.” She glanced around then leaned close, her eyes lighting up with a sick sort of glee. “It was all very dramatic,” she whispered, leaning even closer, smiling even wider, “between you and me, she was sexually harassing one of the other doctors. Can you believe that? She tricked him into meeting for drinks, then made him feel very unsafe.” The woman shook her head in judgement. “When they tried to reprimand her, she up and quit.”
“You…” I clamped my mouth shut to keep a few choice words from slipping out. “You have the story very wrong. Doctor Dickbreath tricked Kennedy into meeting him for drinks. Not the other way around.”
In the hall behind the receptionist, the man himself strolled past, looking just as douchey in his white coat as he did at The Drunken Goat. A woman in a pink pantsuit walked beside him, her blonde bob grazing her chin. Ramsey’s eyes widened when he saw me.
“You must be a bigger idiot than I thought,” I said to the man. “Did you really think you could take advantage of Kennedy and nothing would come of it? Did you forget I was there to watch your entire sleazebag routine?”
The woman in the pantsuit stared, as did the patients sitting in the waiting room. A little boy giggled and his mother covered his ears.
“Kennedy Monroe thought this man was inviting her out for a business meeting,” I said for anyone listening, “but he spent the entire night flirting, even when she stomped on the brakes. I know, because I was there. I watched the whole thing because I knew something smelled off about that situation. And yes, that makes me an asshole, but it makes me her asshole.”
The whole situation had me so upset that I was rambling curse words in a pediatric waiting room.
The receptionist’s jaw dropped, but I didn’t hang around to hear what the horrible woman talking shit about my Penny had to say. After pausing to apologize for my language to some wide-eyed kids and their scowling parents, I was out the door, phone pressed to my ear as I spewed another desperate plea to Kennedy’s voicemail.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Kennedy
My phone star
ted going crazy around noon and it didn’t stop. I didn’t want to talk to Joe. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But I felt his absence like I’d lost a part of myself. I couldn’t catch a breath. The sun seemed less bright. The sky less blue. The world less…well…just less.
I set my phone to silent, but that didn’t stop me from checking it every few minutes like a neurotic idiot. Finally, I decided to leave the thing at home while I went to the store to restock the snack table at the clinic. I needed to get my mind on something that wasn’t Joe Channing. Though, as I finished my fifth lap around the store to pick up items I missed on the last pass, it became obvious he was the only thing I could think about.
Even Dorothy seemed like her volume had been turned down. Her thousand-watt smile didn’t light up the room when I entered with the rattle and grunt of too many bags of groceries on my arms.
“What’s up, Doc?” she asked with so much concern I almost turned right around and walked out of the clinic.
“Not much, my friend. Not much at all.”
And somehow, that seemed to communicate everything.
Dorothy offered me a sad smile and a warm hug, then helped arrange the snacks on the table. When that was done, I had to make peace with the fact that I had no idea what to do with myself until my next shift at the clinic. Without a job to focus on, I had nothing. No friends. No hobbies. It was just me, alone with myself, and a phone full of messages waiting for me at home.
Maybe my priorities had been skewed over the last few years. There had to be more to life than work, right? Maybe I needed to take up knitting. Or reading. Or baking.
“Shane Samuels was here earlier,” Dorothy said. “With his mom.”
I didn’t have it in me to find out Shane’s mom had been lying. And I definitely didn’t have it in me to discover I’d given one more bad person the benefit of the doubt when they didn’t deserve it. Between Ramsey and Joe, my faith in humanity was stretched to the breaking point.
“Everything okay with them?” I crossed my fingers, hoping Dorothy had good news for me.
“Both of them seemed good. He looked clean. Happy. He ate the last apple, then asked me to give this to you.” Dorothy held out a folded piece of paper.
Opening it up, I found a detailed crayon picture. Me in my white coat. Him with a bleeding finger and a hummingbird smile. He’d drawn a heart around us and scribbled “thank you” in the corner. A note in feminine script scrawled at the bottom.
Thank you again for taking care of my son. He keeps saying he wants to be a doctor just like you when he grows up. Maybe he’ll make that better life for himself after all.
Feeling a little revived, I drove around for an hour or so, but without my favorite Collin West playlist to lighten my mood, I finally gave up and took myself back to the apartment I’d been so proud of once upon a time.
The second I walked through the door, I made a beeline for my phone.
Seven missed calls. Seven voicemails. Too many texts to count.
I didn’t trust myself to hear Joe’s voice, so settled for reading the transcription of his first voicemail as I sat cross-legged on the floor in my empty living room.
Kennedy. I’m so sorry. I talked to colon. I’m sassafras. I can’t be Steve I jumped to cupid inclusions. Please forgive me. Please hear meow.
Laughing to myself, I scanned the rest of the transcriptions and found them just as garbled. So, with a box of tissues in reach, I opened the app and played the first message.
“Kennedy.” Joe’s voice cracked. He sounded so wretched I started to cry. “I’m so sorry. I talked to Collin. I’m such an ass. I can’t believe I jumped to such a stupid conclusion. Please forgive me. Please hear me out.”
The message ended and I let out a long breath. Hearing his voice made me feel like coming home, but it also reminded me that on the worst day of my life, Joe told me I used people to get what I wanted. And then he called me a bitch.
“That’s what I get for planning a birthday party.”
The joke still wasn’t funny.
Instead of wry laughter, that ridiculous statement unlocked more tears. I broke into the box of tissues as I listened to the rest of his voicemails. Each one got longer than the last. More desperate. More emotional. By the time I finished listening to them all, my hands shook and my head hurt. As if my eyes weren’t swollen enough, I opened up my texts and dove in.
CaptainAsshole: I understand why you don’t want to talk to me, but I feel like such an asshole. I need to apologize.
CaptainAsshole: Please, just pick up the phone, Kennedy.
CaptainAsshole: I considered driving over to your apartment, but realized I don’t even know where you live.
CaptainAsshole: I’m so sorry. Please. Don’t walk away from this over a misunderstanding.
A misunderstanding? If he thought lashing out with the clear intention of hurting me counted as a misunderstanding, then we had more to overcome than I thought.
I carefully typed out a reply, then read and reread what I wrote. I rearranged sentences and added words, carefully pruning the message until I was sure it said what I wanted, then hit send.
Me: Sure, you misunderstood my intentions with Collin, but you also jumped to conclusions, refused to trust me, and said some pretty awful things. How do I know that won’t be a pattern for us, especially considering this isn’t the first time something like this happened? When I told you about the meeting with Ramsey, you said you thought it was a date. I offered to cancel. You told me to go, but still showed up anyway, proving you didn’t trust me and were willing to go too far to reassure yourself. I don’t know how to move forward after this.
Almost immediately, the bubble of bouncing lines appeared as Joe typed his response.
CaptainAsshole: Thank you for talking to me.
CaptainAsshole: And for the record, you’re not the one I don’t trust. It’s me. I’ve never been enough for people.
Me: I have to assume you’re talking about your childhood and I’d like to say I understand, but seeing as you’ve never opened up to me about what you lived through, I can’t.
CaptainAsshole: I told you more than I’ve told anyone about my life.
Me: That may be true, but it’s also not a lot to go on. You’ve never explained what happened to you. Just that you’re stronger for it.
CaptainAsshole: That’s the best thing I can say about any of it.
Me: And it’s a shitty excuse.
CaptainAsshole: It’s not an excuse. It’s the truth.
Me: But how am I supposed to make sense of that? How am I supposed to know when I’m getting close to a wound if I don’t know what they are? And since we’ve opened up the door to super honesty, I’m not sure you ARE stronger for it. It seems like you’ve pushed it all into the back of your mind and it’s this bomb of bitterness waiting to explode. You know, kind of like what just happened between us.
CaptainAsshole: What do you want me to do, Penny? Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.
Me: What I want is for you to trust me enough to plan a birthday party without assuming I’m cheating on you. I don’t think I should have to ask for that.
CaptainAsshole: So many people have used me to get to Collin. Yes, I’m gun shy. You would be too.
Me: See, I didn’t know that about you. I’m starting to think there’s too much I don’t know about you.
I stared at the screen for a hot minute, waiting for his response. Or at least for some signs a response was coming. When his text did come in, it hollowed my stomach.
CaptainAsshole: I don’t know what to say.
He could have opened up about his childhood. He could have told me how he’d been used to get to Collin. He could have shared the tiniest nugget about his past and I would have clung to it out of hope that our relationship had the chance of actually going somewhere.
Instead, he chose to do nothing. No sign of growth. No sign of him trying to be anything other than what he was: broken, bitter, and stuck.
With tears in my eyes and a stuttering in my heart, I sent the only response I had.
Me: I guess I don’t know what to say, either.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Kennedy
And that was the end of that.
A week went by and I didn’t hear from Joe again. His silence should have brought me peace, because at least it was clear where we stood. At least I could move on. Rebuild. Figure out what life looked like without a job to fill my time or the guy who made each day better than the last—right up until he left me hurting more than I ever had.
Joe had a chance to open up to me. He didn’t.
Everything I needed to know hid in that choice.
But that didn’t stop me from swiping up my phone and obsessively reading and rereading our messages. It happened without me knowing…without me choosing. One second I was going about my day, the next, my finger hovered over the conversation thread, seconds away from reaching out to see how he was. It was my favorite self-destructive addiction, better than any social media site out there. Today, I actually had the first few words of a response typed in when my phone rang with a call from Nan.
“Hey, lady,” I said, stuck somewhere between relief and disappointment. “How goes it?”
“I got so used to having you around all the time, I’m really missing you. Any chance you’d be interested in coming for a visit? Delores and I are baking today.”