I’m curious about West’s home life and the bizarre way his family seems to be handling his breakup, and I want to know more.
“Not yet.” He roughly scrubs one hand through his hair.
“You don’t think she’ll be understanding, considering McKenna cheated on you?”
He smiles sardonically. “She’ll probably ask what I did to deserve it.”
“Seriously?”
He nods and blows out a soft sigh. “And after she’s done telling me all the ways I screwed up, she’ll start bitching about the wedding deposits she and my dad have already paid and all the plans that need to be canceled.”
“No offense, but your family sounds awful.”
He laughs, but there’s no humor behind it. “They can be, but that’s what I get for being born wrong.”
“Born wrong?” I ask. What does he mean by that?
He sighs again. “Yeah, but I’ve already gone into overshare mode multiple times tonight. You don’t need to hear about my fucked-up family dynamics on top of everything else I’ve dumped on you.”
“Maybe not,” I tell him. “But I asked, remember?”
He toys with the strings of his hoodie and gently tugs them through the hood one direction, then the other. “You know my brothers are a lot older than me, right?”
I nod.
“My parents only wanted two kids, and my brothers are basically every parent’s wet dream when it comes to golden children,” he says in a faraway voice, twisting the string of his hoodie around his finger and pulling it so tight his skin goes bright red from the pressure.
“Did you know vasectomies can spontaneously reverse?” he asks as he unwinds the string from around his finger. “My parents found that out when Mom got pregnant with me at forty-one and over a decade after Dad got the snip.”
“They weren’t happy about having another child?” I ask when he doesn’t continue. Based on everything he’s said, I can already deduce that they weren’t, but I want to hear it from him.
He shakes his head and twists the string of his hoodie around his finger again, this time pulling it so tight his skin goes from red to purple in only a few seconds. “It wasn’t part of the plan. Not with my brothers being in high school and so close to going off to college. But that all changed when Mom had a sonogram and they told her she was having a girl. That’s when everyone started getting excited about having a new baby.”
I shoot him a confused look.
“I was either turned the wrong way or I had my legs crossed in all three of the sonograms she had during the last half of her pregnancy,” he explains. “So they thought I was a girl right up until the moment I was born. Imagine everyone’s surprise when, instead of the baby girl they were excited for, they got stuck with another boy. One who couldn’t even come close to measuring up to my older brothers, and who ruined everyone’s plans just by existing.”
He lets out a little snort-laugh and drops his hands as he stops playing with his hoodie strings. “Apparently my brothers used to get into fights over who would be the better big brother to their new baby sister. And my dad was going around telling everyone about how he always wanted a daughter, and my mom was over the moon at the idea of having a girl and getting to do all the mommy and me stuff she missed out on by having boys. Then I came out, and it’s like they never forgave me for not being the daughter they were promised or the sister they wanted.”
He shakes his head, doing that move where he seems to physically break himself free from his thoughts. “I’m making it sound worse than it is. I know they love me. They’re just disappointed. And I’m sure things would be better if I was more like my brothers and I wasn’t such a scatterbrained mess, but my broken engagement is just more proof that I’ll never get my shit together.”
“That’s fucked up.”
He laughs, and there’s a hint of genuine humor in it this time. “Yup, but that’s how we roll in the Parker house.”
His phone starts vibrating again, and the smile instantly drops from his face as he slumps even lower in his seat.
“I should go,” he says, his tone as defeated as his posture. “She’ll just keep calling until I answer.”
“Is now the best time to talk to her?” I ask as he pushes his chair back and stands.
“No, but there’s never going to be a right time,” he says as he goes to retrieve his phone from my couch. “She’ll just keep calling until I answer, and the longer I avoid her calls, the more worked up she’ll be when I finally do answer.” He quickly glances at the screen of his phone, then shoves it into his hoodie pocket.
“Was that her?” I ask as I stand too.
He nods and shoves his hands deep into his sweatpants pockets, his eyes on a spot on the floor between us. “Sorry I wasn’t better company, and that we couldn’t work on our project because of my drama.”
He looks up when I take a step closer to him, and his eyes never leave mine as I close the distance between us in a half dozen long, slow strides and stop when we’re only a few feet apart.
