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He was standing next to the driver’s side door, holding his hand out expectantly.
I grumbled something under my breath but tossed him the keys anyway.
“I don’t think I’ve ever sat over here,” I admitted as I got into the cozy passenger seat.
He looked over at me as he pressed the push button to start it.
“I wouldn’t imagine you would,” he said as he watched as JP came out of the bus, locked it, then started pressing buttons on her phone. “What is she doing?”
“Setting the alarm,” I answered. “We have a routine. We go into the bus, we set the alarm. We leave the bus, we set the alarm. That way, we know that no one is in there waiting for us.”
She dallied so long that he felt safe in asking his next question. “How much does she know about the situation that y’all are in?”
I felt my stomach squeeze in response to his query. “She knows that bad men are after us. Just not ‘how bad.’ She knows that there’s danger, because she instinctively knows how to protect herself and me. But she doesn’t know how dangerous. She doesn’t know that my life is on the line.”
I turned to look at him, telling him without telling him to keep it that way.
His mouth turned up at one corner, and I saw the corners of his pearly white teeth.
Jesus, Kobe was one gorgeous man.
He was tall for an Asian male. At six foot three, he stood eight inches above average.
“Is your father tall?” I asked, knowing the subject of his father was a sore one but asking it anyway.
I was an ass like that.
I physically saw the grimace cross his face as he said, “My mother was. Her father was. My father was average height, around five foot seven. My sister is tall too. Around six foot.”
“Wow,” I said. “So have you heard anything about your sister or your dad?”
I wouldn’t pretend that I didn’t read every single email or know why he was sent to jail. I’d also read every single correspondence between him and his father that they’d had over the years, as well as all the court documents, lawyer’s information, the state’s lawyer’s information, and anything else that I could find.
I knew the situation with his sister was a fucked-up one. I also knew that his dad had taken his sister’s side and pretty much written him out of his life after the sentencing. I also wanted to point out that I was the one that had rerouted his father’s last five emails to the spam folder.
“He called me last week and said all of his emails were being returned undeliverable,” he shot an amused look at me as JP finally got into our car.
She was well insulated from our conversation, however, with her noise-canceling Bose headphones that were likely playing her schoolwork from her teacher.
She was a homeschooled kid, with videos that taught her every day. We’d learned that she learned better when it wasn’t my frustrated self teaching her. Go figure.
“He contacts me once a month to tell me that the wedding for my sister has been pushed back a month because he can’t afford to pay for it, as per family tradition. And then tells me that I’m the reason that there’s a fund shortage in the first place,” Kobe scoffed.
I knew that to be untrue. When everything had hit the fan, Kobe had paid for the first lawyer out of his own pocket and, from there, had taken a public defender.
His father hadn’t helped with a single thing.
“Do you want me to block his calls?” I asked. “I can do that. I can block anything coming from that area code, actually.”
I could see him seriously contemplating it when he said, “I’ll think about it. Right now, I think it’s funny that she can’t afford to pay for it. One day, she’ll get down off her high horse and ask her stupid big brother to help her.”
I lifted my lip in a silent snarl.
“When she does that, then you can block them all,” he continued.
The store was well over fifteen minutes away, according to our friend, Google. When we got there, it was as if JP had never seen a bookstore attached to a grocery store before and headed straight for it with wide eyes.
We spent the next hour in the bookstore, watching her run from row to row, choosing her next read.
