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“Are you at the station? It’s about my son.” I could be there in five minutes.
“You have a son? How long has it been since we talked? A month? I mean, you’re fast, but you’re not that fast.”
I sigh and pinch the bridge on my nose. I need smarter friends that can focus. “Yes. It’s a new development and I’ll explain later. I’ll text you the information, so can you just grab whatever you can?”
He skeptically agrees and tells me he’ll look into it. It’s not the gesture she needs, but I know it needs to be solved. I’m going to find out who hit Allie.
Chapter27
Allie
“I don’t know, Charity, I haven’t heard from him.”
It’s been a few days since Lucas made hislove-you-and-will-wait-for-youdeclaration. Then he drove off into the sunset to “break up” with Kat.
That was Saturday and it’s been nearly a week. He calls at night to talk to Jadon and asks how I’m doing. I haven’t otherwise seen him, but am aware his parents left a few days ago. Giving him the benefit of the doubt and maybe not wanting to fight with her in front of his parents, I assumed he was waiting for the right time when they were alone. Well, during last night’s phone call, I heard Kat’s voice in the background.
Guess they’re still goingmediocre. Or maybe strong. There’s that judgment in me again. Definitely not jealousy.
“I don’t get it. From what you told me, he sounded serious and responsible and not at all what we thought he would be like. Now he’s just a ghost in your Allie undies?”
She just has to make everything weird. Ignoring that, Lucas was working at an earlier time this week and I haven’t even run into him. I’m guessing he’s avoiding me. “I don’t know, Charity. It’s not really like him.”
“Well, I won’t say what I want to, because I don’t want to come off with some sort of bias, but you should screw both of them and pick whoever has the better dick—and don’t tell me about my brother because that’s gross. Or find someone better. That reminds me, did you get your birthday present?”
I set my phone down on my bed and hold the box on my lap. “I have it.”
Is it normal to talk to my best friend about my relationship with her brother? Yes. Does she support Ted and me together? Absolutely. Sort of. It just took a while once things actually happened.
Is she mad at Ted for reacting the way he did the other night and for not responding to me at all since? Totally. She’s coming to town in a couple of days and promises to kick him in the shin on my behalf.
Ted’s prior encounters with other women weren’t ignored when he first asked me out. I knew he had a past. It doesn’t bother me. It’s normal to have multiple experiences with people in your life. I’m not one to hold that against him, considering I am the one with a child in the relationship.
Charity loves her brother, as do I. I just wish he wasn’t so distant because of this. I know he’s uncomfortable with Lucas as competition. The thing is, Lucas kind of made it into one just before he disappeared, not me. At that moment, when he said those things before he left, I thought things could be different. I was going to consider seeing how things would be with Lucas because he was showing me a completely different side than I expected from him.
But both Lucas and Ted have turned into ghosts, it seems.
Charity has spent the last day and a half telling me to just go rogue and be on my own. Get away from both of them. She might be right.
I thought that maybe if Ted were the right guy, he wouldn’t have been ignoring me this week. He would have stepped up and still tried to be part of this family the way he always has been.
If things were meant to be with Lucas, he wouldn’t have disappeared after basically telling me he was turning his life around for me.
It’s become a practiced art for me this week to not overreact to this stuff. I am trying to turn over a new leaf. Be an adult about adult relationships and all that.
But I kind of want to kick both guys myself. I’ve liked Ted since I was a kid and we’re together now. Things have been great. But the second Jadon’s father came into the picture, he’s been mad at me. How is that adult behavior? I don’t understand where this is coming from. Sure, I didn’t tell him about Lucas all this time, but I didn’t know what else to do.
At this point, I don’t even want to tell him what happened between Lucas and me. Maybe that’s selfish.
Lucas is... that’s a different animal altogether. I was ready for that and then he just vanished.
I’m so confused now.
“What is it?” I shake the box for the tenth time as though shaking will tell me what she got me for my birthday. If it were one of those magic balls, sure, or some sort of shaking device.
“Just open it. It’s the answer to your problems.”
There’s a pen on my nightstand that I use to stab into the tape on the box and open the flaps. There’s a black box on the inside with a red satin ribbon tied around it.
