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Before he can protest, I duck out of his arms, heading down the hall to the bathroom.
I’m not sure if he’ll follow me to argue that I’m imagining his good-guy, ooey-gooey center. Or follow me to fuck me on the bathroom vanity. Or run from my unflinching view that everyone, including him, is good deep down. I’m kinda excited to see, though.
I hear the front door open and then close and have my answer.
CHAPTER 8
COLE
“Breathe. In through your nose, two, three, four. Out through your mouth, two, three, four.” Janey stops talking to herself for a moment to actually do the breathing exercise, but after only one round, she goes back to her pep talk. “It’s gonna be fine. Lovely, even. We’ll walk in, say hello, and hug Mom, Dad, and Jessica. We’ll sit down and enjoy dinner.”
We’re driving into Bridgeport for Paisley’s rehearsal dinner, and Janey’s been freaking out all day. She took two showers, saying she needed to rewash her hair because ‘it wasn’t acting right’, but it looked beautiful to me both times. She has on makeup tonight, making her lashes dark and long, her cheeks extra pink, and her lips shiny. And her dress? Fuck me, her dress.
She walked out of the bathroom in bare feet and a dress that had all my blood running south in a heartbeat. I’m a complete sucker for one thing and one thing only . . . sundresses, and though it’s a fancy version, that’s what Janey chose to wear tonight.
It’s peach with tiny flowers all over and floppy ties at the shoulders that make me want to undo them and test gravity, and the hem falls to below her knees. She’d done a twirl and it’d flared out, tempting me with a peek of her knees. Her knees, for fuck’s sake. Knees I’ve seen all week in her shorts but that suddenly seemed newly interesting when she hid them away like there was a fresh mystery to find.
Oh, there’s a mystery under that dress I want to explore, but it’s not Janey’s knees. It’s higher, much higher.
Fuck, I sound like Kyle.
Get it together, Harrington!
Janey’s still itemizing things out like bullet points on a to-do list. She’s up to dessert and clapping politely through the toasts now. I do the same thing sometimes because it helps me feel in control when there’s a chance everything might go haywire, and I wonder if she’s doing it for similar reasons.
“Tell me about your parents and sister,” I demand as a way to distract her, another effective coping mechanism.
“Huh?” she utters, opening her eyes where I suspect she was visualizing tonight’s dinner as she talked it through. “Oh, yeah. The more info you have, the better this’ll go.”
Mom, Dad, and Jessica. That’s the sum total of Janey’s immediate family, and I want to know everything. Not because I need it to play the boyfriend role but because I want to know everything about Janey. And morbidly, the people who’ve hurt her. For no reason in particular . . . none at all.
“They’re the Three Musketeers, which left me on the outside, mostly. I completely understand why, though.” She sounds resigned to that reality, something I can’t agree with in the slightest. I harrumph in response, and she tries to convince me.
“My parents adopted my sister when she was barely two, basically saving her from the rough start at life she’d been born into. I was fourteen and through the worst of it with my family. I’d figured out that staying ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was my best bet, and I was already looking for the silver lining in literally everything by then. So when they brought home an adorable almost-toddler, I had this dream that we’d be sisters and Jessica would be my friend. I mean, I had friends at school and stuff—I wasn’t a total outcast, thank God—but not in my family, you know?”
She goes quiet, and I reach over to take her hand in mine, running my thumb along the soft skin between her thumb and index finger. She sighs like she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders, and capable as they may be, she was only a child. It shouldn’t have been her that had to carry pain from what should’ve been a happy time.
“Instead, she became the instant center of attention, coddled and spoiled in nearly every way to make up for her early years’ mistreatment, and through no fault of her own,” she says emphatically, making excuses for her family, “she made me even more of an outsider. Only this time, it wasn’t in my extended family. It was in my own home. Mom joked that Jessica was their ‘Do-Over Child’ and that they wouldn’t make the same mistakes with her that they made with me.”
