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“Yeah, where are you?” asked Lilac. “Looks like a park.”
Brielle shrugged. “Just getting some fresh air.”
“Wow, pigs must fly these days,” said Lilac. Always smarmy.
“Check in with me next week about Broke,” said Gavin. “And sweep that comic book artist off his feet!”
“Look up how you have sex in a wheelchair—” started Lilac. Brielle quickly closed the app.
She was beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to follow Pembroke’s lead and cut off contact with her college friends.
Chapter Eight
Archer washalfway home when he finally decided he’d had enough of being a coward.
He was going to see her tomorrow. What was he going to do? Pretend she hadn’t kissed him? Why had he just turned around and gone home instead of going after her?
But it was just a kiss. Well, it wasthekiss to him, the one he’d dreamed of, the beauty offering it to him more gorgeous than he’d ever dreamed possible. But to her, it was just a pity kiss.
Just like his pity dates.
He’d sort of dated a girl from a support group back when he was a young teen, but that was just because their mothers had forced them together, mostly so the girl would have someone to go to her school dances with. Archer had quickly had enough with being gawked at as the two teens who’d arrived in wheelchairs and besides, he could barely talk to that girl, so that hadn’t lasted long.
He’d flirted with whom he hoped was a teenage girl online when he’d been in high school. He’d been lonely, but after seeing so many exposés about child/teen predators as well as catfishers and all sorts of online scam artists, Archer had stopped pouring his heart out to LisaUnderFire97x from Colorado, who’d never quite seemed real regardless.
Besides, he’d never told her about his disability. He wasn’t sure why.
In college, he’d mostly stuck to himself. He’d gone to some support and ally groups at his mom’s insistence, but he was done. Closed off. He’d had other things to focus on. Besides, it had been embarrassing to think any off-campus dates might have to be chauffeured by his nurse or worse—his mother—because he couldn’t comfortably fit in a typical small car his date might have. And then there’d been the fact that he’d have to ask her to drive and pick him up even if he did decide he wanted to squish in there. No. He’d considered asking his mother to help him get his license again, but he’d known how she’d react.
“Do you want me to never sleep again?” she’d said once.
The idea of him behind the wheel, no matter if he tried to explain how hand controls worked and how he’d be totally safe (at least as safe as any other driver, but with drivers like his mother on the road, that, admittedly, was only so safe), was enough to send her into a tizzy.
He was an adult now. Mostly. So he could theoretically do whatever he wanted. His dad would probably even pay for the car if he called him directly and hoped his mother wasn’t within earshot. But he’d already moved heaven and earth to get her to be sort of okay with him moving on his own just twenty minutes away from her—and that was only by letting her pay for the nurse to visit him most days and for a cleaner to come every day and by letting her have that one “Sunday Funday Mother Day” he’d keep open for her visit.
And to tell the truth, his dad still chipped in with even his basic household expenses.
He loved what he did for a living, but he wasn’t salaried. Which meant he didn’t really makethatmuch, even though he definitely made a lot more than a lot of artists. And he was just old enough to still be on his dad’s insurance, but that would end next year and his mother was scrambling to figure out some kind of disability coverage he could get.
Maybe he could qualify for disability aid, too, but, he was sometimes embarrassed to admit, his parents were wealthy. Even if he technically didn’t have to count them on any application for aid, he’d feel too guilty knowing he could just ask them for the money and there were other people in need out there applying who didn’t have that luxury.
So he walked this fine line of being too dependent on his parents at his age and asking for just the smallest bit of freedom, the smallest bit of privacy.
He’d drive someday. But he wanted to enjoy this bit of peace between him and his mother for a while longer before he opened the next can of worms.
Besides, he’d never had anywhere he wanted to go. But now, thinking about Brielle and how he wished he could ask her out, to see if the kiss meant half as much to her, had been half asamazingto her, as it had been to him… He wished he’d fought for getting his license earlier.
But then you’d just be riding around in a car your daddy paid for like a spoiled sixteen-year-old.No, there was nothing he had to offer a woman who worked an adult job and probably had a hundred adult responsibilities.
He looked over his shoulder, but the park was now barely visible from where he sat.
Forget it, he told himself, and he wheeled himself back home.
* * *
Archer hadn’t beenable to sleep much Friday night. He kept tossing and turning, thinking of what to say to Brielle when she showed up to clean today.
He decided the best thing to do would be to let her bring it up first. Feel out how she felt about it.
