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I can’t imagine losing my family, and I know it wouldn’t be fair for me to ask Victoria to leave hers. So where does that leave me? What kind of future can we possibly have going forward? How else can I build a foundation? It’s always going to have started with dishonesty, not once, but twice.
Holy turds, I’m not just a huge turd. I’m a mountain of turds.
I need my family more than ever, and I’ve bungled that too.
“I was actually going to have dinner with my family tonight. I have a whole car trunk full of pizza right now, but we needed to talk. I can stay if you want me to stay. I just have to let them know.”
Her face softens, and nope, she’s not pissed at me for having a family thing and having to go, even if it is really bad timing. “You canceled on your family for me?”
“More like postponed.”
“I…wow. Yes, you should go. Tell them I’m sorry their pizza is going to be super cold.”
“Nothing the oven can’t fix.”
“It’s probably really dusty from the gravel roads,” she adds.
“What’s a little extra seasoning?”
“And like lumped and bumped all over because it’s not a smooth ride to get here.”
“I’m sure it all tastes the same.”
“Right. Everyone says it ends up in the same place anyway.”
I let out a shuddering sigh. “Are you okay? Are you…I really don’t want to just leave like this.”
She steps away from the porch railing and calmly walks down the steps before she comes to stand right in front of me. I stand statue still, but then she wraps her arms around me and melts against me, and I’m melting too—melting into a huge pile of very un-statue-like jelly goo matter. Yummy.
I hold Victoria tight, closing my eyes to drink in the lovely peachy-vanilla scent that surrounds her like a halo of blossoms. I hold her tight as an apology and as a promise.
I’ll do anything to keep you safe, and I really, really hope you don’t hate me for trying.
I brush my lips over her forehead because I need to touch her, be near her, and feel the heat of her body becoming one with mine, but I can’t taste her sweet lips. She gave me another chance, logically, choosing forgiveness and understanding over anger, and I can’t use the very same lips that just lied to her to claim her beautiful mouth.
CHAPTER 17
Atlas
“Well, if the pizzas were any indication, I’d have to say it’s bad.” Granny has my number. She’s always had my number. She’s Granny, and she could tell the second I walked in that things weren’t good.
I handed over the boxes of pizzas for my family’s inspection, and there was a round of disappointed sighs before Granny whisked them away to reheat and revitalize in the oven. They’re big pizzas, and the oven only has two racks, so sensing we’d be here for a while, Granny gathered us all in the living room.
She set out bowls of nuts and a bag of apples to curb the hangry while the pizzas were taking their sweet time.
“It’s not that bad.” Those words are barely out before I nearly choke on them. “Okay, it’s bad.” This is the only place I’ve never had to lie.
Cass and Lennox are on the loveseat together, their hands interconnected and their legs brushing, giving each other lovesick looks every other second. Granny, on the other hand, is pacing around the living room, and from the other side of the couch, Orion is shooting me unhappy glares and glances, which are a more deadly form of his regular annoyed glances.
“How bad?” Granny demands, pacing a path across the area rug with the black heels she essentially lives in. “On a scale of beautiful roses to gag me with rotting garbage left out in the sun for three weeks, how bad is it?”
“Um, I guess somewhere around an eight?”
Granny tenses. “Define an eight.”
“Um, well, I guess it would smell like the time we installed that window AC, and it became all full of mosquitoes, and they started rotting in there because there was no screen on the outside, and it was all damp from the motor running, and it smelled like rotting death warmed up over and over again.”
“Hmm, that’s bad.” Granny resumes her pacing.
“Here’s a novel idea,” Orion piped up, leveling me with a look that I hadn’t seen from him before because whenever we were mad at something, we were mad together and never at each other. “Maybe you shouldn’t have lied about everything in the first place when you had every opportunity to not be a scammy scammer. Maybe you wouldn’t have bungled things if you weren’t a bungling bungler. Then we wouldn’t be reheating our pizzas, and we wouldn’t be using the stench scale at all.”
