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“Morgan, could we take this outside?” I tried to keep my voice level.
Morgan wasn’t having it. His face was red, his eyes blazing. I had never seen him this out-of-control angry before. “No, we’re doing this right fucking here. Unless you don’t want everyone to know what you’re doing with my little sister?”
Before I could say anything, he bulldozed right over me. “I’ve heard people talking about you two. They saw you kissing at the tavern last night, and your car was parked a few houses away from our place, all fucking night! And a few days ago you were seen at that one diner downtown…”
“Glad to know you’re listening to rumor and basically spying on Billie and me,” I replied. I could’ve gone into how seeing us at the diner wasn’t anything conclusive but I figured that Morgan wasn’t in any kind of mood to listen to that.
“Well I’ve got reason to!” Morgan bellowed. “Now that I know you’re sneaking around!”
“I don’t care who knows,” I replied. “And she’s not just your little sister. She’s an adult and she’s her own person and she can make her own decisions. Her decision is to be with me.”
“You seduced her, you corrupted her—you should never have touched her at the kegger and ever since then—”
My blood started to boil. “Stop talking about Billie like she’s a fucking object that I stole, okay? I didn’t swipe your fucking Gameboy or something Morgan, Christ, Billie is a person! What is it going to take to get that through your thick skull? You don’t have a right to be angry about this! You really don’t!”
“I don’t have a right to be angry?” Morgan move towards me, ready to swing at me, and I was ready to fucking jump him and show him what it really was to get his ass kicked, but then Jones emerged from his office and bellowed,
“Morgan Adams, what the fuck do you think you’re doing!?”
Morgan and I both froze, instinctively cowering before Jones. He strode across the garage towards us, fire in his eyes. The old man might’ve been getting up in years but he could still tan both our hides if he wanted to.
“I expected better from you,” Jones snapped, glaring at Morgan like Morgan was the dirt under his heel. Morgan’s mouth fell open, looking shocked and hurt. Morgan cared about Jones’ opinion of him same as I did, and to hear the man talk to him with such anger and disappointment must’ve really hurt.
“I don’t know if it’s your money,” Jones went on, still sounding furious and at the end of his rope, “or what, but this kind of entitlement isn’t going to stand. You get out of my garage, and don’t come back until you can talk about and treat my mechanics and your sister with some fucking respect.”
All of us, including the other mechanics, gaped at Jones. Holy shit.
Morgan stared at Jones for a moment, like it was genuinely taking him some time to process what he had just been told, and then he glared at me a final time before turning and storming out.
Jones sighed, his shoulders slumping, and he looked old again. He turned to me.
“Jesus Christ, old man,” I blurted out. “I thought you were gonna spank him like a toddler.”
“He would’ve deserved it,” Jones grumbled. “That boy’s got a stick so far up his ass it’s coming out his mouth.”
I burst out into shocked laughter. “Holy shit.”
Jones fixed me with a look and I stopped laughing. That look could stop a charging rhino. “You need to figure things out with him, boy.”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that. He needs to talk to Billie and sort it out with her, not me. He’s treating her like he controls her and until he fixes that point of view, I don’t know how I’m going to make anything better.”
“Then you need to tell Billie to sort it out with her brother,” Jones replied. “One way or another, this has to be sorted. I’m not dealing with this nonsense in my garage. You hear?”
I nodded. Right. Yeah. Especially because, well, yeah Billie might like me, she might even love me, but I doubted she’d agree to marry a man who her brother hated, if only to spare herself a bunch of heartache along the way. I’d have to find some way to help her fix this.
One way or another.
24
Billie
Fuck.
I retched into the toilet again, my stomach heaving. Fuck, my throat burned. My nose burned. Tears leaked out the corners of my eyes as I threw up yet again.
This was the fifth time this week. It was Thanksgiving, and I’d been throwing up at least once every day since Sunday.
Shit.
I pressed my head against the cool porcelain of the toilet as the nausea slowly passed. Jesus Christ. I was managing to hide this, uh, new little habit of mine from my family but I couldn’t ignore the signs anymore. My period was late by two weeks—and yeah, I’d never been super regular, but between that and the vomiting…
