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I don’t do what people expect. Was I fucking kidding myself? What a pile of horseshit.
As soon as I walked into my parents’ house for Sunday night dinner—the first time I’d attended in a month—I knew things weren’t going to get any better.
Laura looked behind me and to the side and around again before finally meeting my eyes. “Where’s Lola?”
I shrugged like the question didn’t sting deep. “I don’t know. With her family?”
Laura’s eyes narrowed as Cam crept in from the living room behind her. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said simultaneously with Laura. My eyes widened. I’d thought she would rat me out.
Cam looked at both of us a little longer and with a healthy dose of suspicion born from his years in law enforcement, but he eventually moved back into the living room to sit down and talk to my dad.
“Wow. Is that baby leeching self-control hormones into you?” I asked after a quick look to confirm he was out of earshot. It wasn’t like her to keep my secrets, especially from her husband.
“Shut up. I knew you wouldn’t tell me anything if Cam was in your business too. So this was strictly strategic to save the mission. Now, spill.”
I rolled my eyes. “Why does there have to be something to spill? Lola’s never been to family dinner with me before.”
“Of course not. She hated you, but then you broke down her defenses, and by the time I met her, you guys were headed straight for codependency.”
I shook my head and laughed, trying to ignore the fucking ache setting up shop in my chest. “So what’s the deal? Where is she, and why are you acting like it’s no big deal?”
“Because it isn’t a big deal,” I lied. “She wanted me to go with her family to Santa Cruz, where she is now, but I wasn’t into it.” The words tasted so fucking sour on my tongue, my cheeks hollowed out. Still, like the fuck-up I was, I kept up the charade.
Laura’s eyes narrowed and appeared three seconds away from shooting actual lasers in my direction. “Not into it? What is that?”
“Just what it sounds like.”
Something I recognized as biologically similar to my own persistence bled into her eyes, stance, and attitude. “Reed.”
Maybe it was the fucking enormous belly, or maybe it was the desperation clouding my judgment, but the dam I’d built inside of me faltered a little—started to crack. The only problem was, I didn’t have the answer. A week of lonely pondering and I still hadn’t figured it out. “Fuck, Laura, I don’t know. I just don’t do what’s expected. You know that.”
Her stomach jumped with a kick from the kid as she leaned it into the countertop. My eyes glued themselves to the motion, even though she didn’t seem to notice. “That seems like a really big fucking cop-out to me. Not doing what’s expected. I thought you were the kind of guy who did what you wanted for very specific reasons—like it making you happy.”
Forcing my eyes from her stomach back to hers, I told her what I honestly thought was the truth. “I am that guy.”
“Well, you could have fooled me. You don’t look happy now.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s horseshit.”
God, she sounds exactly like me. I’d always thought of myself as the black sheep of the family, but maybe we weren’t so different, after all.
“Well, then I guess that’s normal, huh?” Reed Luca: pathological liar. The description had never before tasted this bitter.
She narrowed her eyes even further and ticked off facts on her fingers as though she was reading from my extensive background file. “You, Reed Luca, never get an attitude. You don’t get exasperated or upset, and you don’t play into your stereotype. You do what you want because you enjoy it.”
“And what keeps me happy is to keep moving.” It rang completely false even to my own ears, and my heart beat and tripped over itself like it was an engine trying to restart.
“What else is going on?” Laura asked. Her soft voice and her pleading eyes felt completely foreign, but they also…felt nice.
I rolled my eyes, but I found myself answering despite myself. “I got fired from the Journal.”
“Why?”
“Come on, you know I’m always changing jobs,” I argued.
“Because you quit. You just used a very specific, different word.”
“What word?”
“Fired.”
I took a deep breath and sighed. “Yeah.”
“You didn’t want to be done. Oh, my God,” she said as her face lit up. “Oh, my God, for the first time in your life, you were actually willing to stay at a job.”
I shook my head at her obvious excitement in the face of my misery. Still, I admitted it. Don’t they always say that’s the first step? “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Why’d they fire you?” Detective Laura was hot on the case, and her questions came at rapid speed now.
“Because I was agreeing with her.”
“Her who?”
“Lola.” I corrected myself. “Sex Says.” Lola’s column was only a small sliver of what she was as a person. Laura waited patiently as the details flowed out of me one by one. “I was agreeing with her column because…well, I honestly thought she was right. And I wasn’t willing to compromise that for the gain of some stupid paper.”
She smiled. “So you’re blaming Lola.”
What? “No, I’m not. This isn’t her fault at all.”
“Sure,” Laura pseudoagreed, and I started to get frustrated.
“It’s not. This is not her fault. Not the fact that she was right, and not the fact that I’m not willing to pretend she isn’t.”
“Then why are you blaming her?”
“Laura, would you listen? I told you. I’m not.”
“Reed, baby brother…I hate to break this to you, but you are. You are blaming her so hard. It’s like this twisted thing. She’s the thing you want, but she’s the reason you can’t have it. The girl, the perfect brain-buzz of building your lives and battling it out in columns.”
No. “That’s not it.”
Fuck. Was it?
Was I blaming Lola for completely immersing herself in me and our relationship, for saying what she felt?
Was I my own fucking worst nightmare?
“If it’s not that, it’s something else. Because the guy I had coffee with a couple of weeks ago would have jumped at the chance to go to fucking Santa Cruz with Lola Sexton. He would have jumped at the chance to go to the moon.”
A sarcastic retort about how cool a trip to the moon would be regardless was on the tip of my tongue, but for perhaps the first time in my life, sarcasm didn’t seem like the right place to focus.
“We just fought.” I knew immediately that even that was a lie. Lola had fought. I’d done nothing but sit there.
“Reed—”
“You remember Brandon?” I asked, and her head jerked with what she figured was an abrupt subject change, apropos of nothing. “My friend from college?”
“Sure, I remember him. But why the hell are you talking about him? I thought you guys weren’t in touch anymore.”
“We weren’t,” I agreed. “But I ran into him. The day of the firing. The day of the…fight.”
The skin between her eyebrows pinched as she tried to decode my secret meaning.
“He’s getting a divorce, and—”
“Ooh.”
“Ooh, what?”
“You see this guy who’s everything you’re not, everything you’ve done your best not to be, and all of his shit is falling apart. It reinforces your ideals, and boom. Lola’s as scary as a fucking crocodile in your bed,” she proclaimed as though solving some scientific equation.
“No, I don’t think it’s like that. My mood was just shitty. I wasn’t in the right headspace to have a serious conversation about—”
“Reed!” she snapped, cutting me off. I pushed back off the counter and scowled.
“What?”
“You better wake up, baby brother. Because you’re sitting on the edge of having everything you’ve ever wanted or having nothing at all, and if you don’t get your head on straight, it’s going to be the latter.”
My heart squeezed. Nothing at all meant no Lola, and even imagining a future without my unicorn felt painful.
Day after day, I watched people wade through their lives like it was a race to the finish—not reaching out and grasping the things they wanted most, not soaking up all of the things and experiences they could, and not giving change an ounce of a chance because of their fear of the danger.
It’d never felt much like me, but right now, it sounded more like me than ever.
I was a coward and a cad, and I’d been too stupid to goddamn say something when Lola had been pouring her heart out right in front of me.
A bunch of rodents all scurrying to monotony and back again, I’d thought.
As it turned out, maybe I was the rat leading the pack, after all.
Nearly a week had passed since Reed let me know how he felt about expectations. Fucking expectations. I understood that I’d thrown the whole family trip on him last minute, but didn’t he get that I wanted him to go because I wanted to spend time with him, not because my family expected him to be there?
