AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“That sounds good.” After a second, I add, “Thank you. Really.”
He looks up at me and grins. “No problem at all. Thanks for coming out with me.”
I smile back gratefully and nod.
Our server reappears, so we order.
After she walks away again, I ask Landon, “What happened to your hand?”
He has just folded his hands together on the table, so he quickly separates them. He knows which one I’m talking about, and he holds it up.
“Oh, well, I’m a bartender at Abby’s dad’s place—I think I told you that—Kinley’s. A glass broke while I was cleaning it.” He leans forward and extends his hand, and I lean forward, too, to look at it more closely.
Rae is interested for about a second, and then she says, “Ew,” and resumes coloring. I guess this is one area of Landon’s life that she doesn’t care much about.
Even though the cut doesn’t look terrible right now, I know it was a bitch to deal with at first. I had my fair share of bothersome injuries when I lived with my mom. “I bet that needed stitches, huh?”
He nods and studies the wound. “A few, yeah. I got them taken out just the other day.” To my surprise, what looks like anger flickers in his expression.
I wonder what about that would make him mad. “Were they a big ordeal?”
As he looks at me again, puzzlement mixes with the anger. “Nah, they were fine. Why?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. You look like you’re upset about them.”
He catches on to what I mean. “Oh…. Oh, no, they were fine.”
He glances at Rae like he’s checking that she’s not paying close attention.
She’s humming aFrozensong to herself while she works on a word search, so he tells me more quietly, “I don’t know if I mentioned it or not, but I broke up with my girlfriend the day after I choked on that candy. It needed to happen for a lot of reasons. One is that I was prescribed pain pills for my hand and I caught her selling them behind my back.”
My mouth drops open. “While you still needed them?”
“Yeah. Stitches were still in and everything.”
“That’s awful.”
I remember the times Kelle and Mom sold our stuff for their drugs of choice. We never had a lot to our name in the first place, but sometimes they were so desperate that they pawned off even our plainest possessions, like our toaster and our sheets.
I wonder what Landon’s ex wanted that money for. If pills weren’t her thing (there’s no way she’d have sold them if they were), what was?
And now I feel a hot swell of concern about what she might’ve been mixed up in, because what if Landon was mixed up in it, too?
Pretty quickly, though, I’m mentally shaking myself.No, I know what people look like when they’re messing with drugs, and Landon hasn’t given me the smallest reason to worry.I haven’t brought Rae around someone with the same problems her own mother struggles with.
I’m rather surprised when he says nearly the same thing about his ex: “I don’t know why she did it, because she wasn’t even into…you know…that whole scene.”
Huh.
Well, I guess her motive is irrelevant since she’s not around anymore. He clearly decided he’d had enough of her shit, whatever it was.
He frowns and says pensively, “I don’t know why she did—or didn’t do—a lot of things.”
I let out a sigh. “I know that feeling.”
More quietly yet, he asks, “Do you?”
I nod and glance at Rae. “Between her mother and mine….”
