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My heart sinks. “Is she really?”
In the two seconds it takes him to respond, I’m already considering giving up my boycott and running right back to his apartment.
He must not want to torture me that much, though, because he sends back, “Nah, I’m just fucking with you. She’s warming up to me.” Then he sends a picture of Toast curled up next to him on the couch.
“She looks cozy. Has she had dinner yet?”
“Yep,” he texts back. Then a second later, “Is this what shared custody is like?”
I crack a smile. “I don’t know. Shared custody is my worst nightmare, so I never hope to find out.”
“Too lonely by yourself?” he questions.
I hesitate to answer. “It’s not that, I just… I have difficulty trusting someone to take care of my CAT when I’m not there to keep an eye on things, so I can’t imagine my kids.”
“Better never try to divorce me then,” he shoots back with a wink that feels playful and threatening at the same time.
I don’t want to discuss this with him, but I think I have to. I don’t really have another option at the moment. “I have to move out of Stacie’s apartment this weekend. I don’t know where I’m going to move yet, I don’t have anything lined up, but she wants to get a new roommate, so… I have to get my stuff out and put it somewhere.”
“Ok,” he answers. “I’ll swing by tomorrow and pick it up. We can keep everything at my place for now.”
My stomach twists up because that feels too much like moving in with him. I know he added the “for now” to make me feel better about it, but once he gets me there with my cat and all my things…
Will he let me leave once I find a new place to live?
“I won’t be here much tomorrow,” I tell him. “I have a morning shift at the shelter, then I’ll probably head to campus so I can get some studying done because I have plans in the evening. I also don’t have a key to this apartment now that the locks have been changed, she didn’t give me one, so I’ll have to make sure Stacie’s home before you come.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he tells me. “Just leave all your stuff there. I know what needs to be done. I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks,” I say, feeling just a bit of weight fall off my shoulders.
Belatedly, it occurs to me that it’s his fault I have to move out in the first place, so maybe he isn’t owed a thank you.
“How was your day?” he asks me.
“Long,” I answer.
“Well, it’s the weekend. At least you’ll get to relax and have a little fun before it starts all over again.”
Yeah, sure I will.
All I’ll be doing this weekend is running my ass off—working, trying to study without being distracted by the fact that I’m technically homeless, and potentially fighting with Killian to get my cat back so we can live our best lives sleeping in my car… which is still missing, so even that probably isn’t an option this time.
Sounds like a blast.
“I lived in my car for a while my senior year of high school,” I tell him for some reason. “I thought that was going to be the most stressful period of my life.”
And then I went to the wrong party.
And then I met him.
“Why did you live in your car?” he asks.
“It was better than the alternative. I was fueled by dreams of better days so it really didn’t seem that hard. I had this fantasy of what my life was going to be like once I ‘got out’ and I fully bought into the delusion. Call me a nerd all you want, but coming to this school was my fantasy. And I didn’t think it would be like this.”
The last admission slipped out without permission, and as soon as I let the words sneak out, emotion does, too. Tears well up in my eyes, and I angrily brush them away.
My vision blurs from the moisture, but I blink it away and read the message he just sent. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Brynn. Come home.”
