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“He showed up when it counted,” Amy said, a soft smile on her face.
“Oh, please,” Rose grumbled. “It was the least he could do after all the shit before.”
“You do know how your parents met, right?” Farrah asked her dryly. She made a revving noise that sounded pretty damn good, and my lips twitched. Bitch was funny.
“Dad saved her,” Rose argued. “It wasn’t the same thing.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Amy murmured, reaching over to wrap her knobby fingers around Poet’s forearm. He put his opposite hand over hers.
“Couldn’t have gone over well with the locals,” I pointed out, less interested in the romance of the thing and more curious about how Slider talked his way out of that shit.
“It didn’t,” Poet replied, giving his head a small shake. “Course, Charlie was always a couple steps ahead.”
“Shit, this should be good,” Grease muttered. I cocked an eyebrow at him. The man was my right hand, he’d had my back in more instances than I could count and Brenna liked to call him my bestie in a teasing voice because she knew it annoyed me. He was also built like a goddamn bull. But sure as shit, he was on the edge of his seat like one of the women listening to this damn love story.
“It’s interesting,” he said, interpreting my look correctly. “I haven’t heard any of this shit before.”
“You need time off to go see a chick movie with your woman? A nice matinee?” I replied, ignoring the little pinch in my side from Brenna.
“I resent that,” Grease replied, grinning. “You know I only see chick flicks at night so I have sweet dreams.”
“Man, you know how this ends,” I said, more sharply than I intended. We all knew how Slider and Vera’s story ended. I still saw that shit when I closed my eyes at night.
Brenna’s hand slipped under my shirt and pressed warm and comforting against the skin of my stomach.
“All stories have an ending,” Amy said wisely, giving me a tender smile. “But that doesn’t make the beginning any less important.”
I nodded my head in concession and pressed my hand over Bren’s on my stomach. The old woman had a point.
Chapter 6
Vera
Gram had taken me to the doctor a girl at school had told me about, the one that made problems disappear like they’d never existed. That’s what I was choosing to call it. The problem. If I thought about it any other way, the pain in my chest became so unbearable that I thought I might die.
I’d done it. I’d had it taken care of. So I didn’t understand why I still felt so sick. Everything was sore, from the top of my head to the ends of my toes. My mom thought I’d caught some kind of summer flu, but I wasn’t sure how that could’ve happened. I hadn’t seen anyone for weeks, choosing to stay with my Gran until my dad had come and dragged me home.
I didn’t really feel like doing anything lately, even if my body hadn’t felt like I’d been run over by a truck. After I’d run home from the neighbor’s and unloaded my problems onto Gran’s shoulders, I’d expected to feel some kind of relief, but I didn’t. I’d thought that after I had the problem taken care of, I’d go back to my normal life, but I hadn’t.
I seemed to be stuck in some sort of limbo where I didn’t really want to stare at the four walls of my bedroom all day but I also couldn’t stand the thought of hanging out with my friends. I felt so much older than them now, like I’d grown up overnight but they’d somehow stayed the exact same age. I wanted to scream at them to be careful, that they had no idea what kind of fire they were playing with, that their stupid problems and complaints were bullshit. I also wished so badly that I could go hang out with them like everything was fine and the beginning of summer had never happened, but I was so filled with shame that I was afraid they’d take one look at me and see every stupid decision I’d made and what I’d had to do to fix them.
When Charlie showed up at our door that afternoon, every pain and shameful memory seemed to multiply until just standing at the door had become agony. I’d never thought I’d see him again. I’d prepared myself for that. The relationship we’d had—if you could even call it that—was over when I’d found him having sex with someone else. But the pain of that discovery was so minimal compared to everything else that had happened, the disillusionment I’d felt so insignificant, that I hadn’t even let myself think of him until he was standing on my front porch.
