AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Don’t tempt me.”
I slid up against his body, until I felt the hard length of him on my thigh. “We can start with the space thing in, like, twenty minutes,” I said.
“Forty-five?”
“An hour, max.”
“I can work with that,” he said, and grabbed my ass with both hands, pulling me on top of him.
NINETEEN
I DID EVENTUALLY MAKEit back to my dad’s house, although not until two in the morning. So when Conner showed up bright and early—without bothering to text first—he didn’t quite get the reception he’d obviously been hoping for.
“This is dedication,” he said, holding up his injured wrist, which was now wrapped in a simple bandage. A full cast had ended up not being necessary, or else Conner hadn’t wanted to pay for it. It wasn’t clear. “If I could’ve been this responsible in college, I wouldn’t have failed so many eight a.m. classes.”
“How many did you sign up for before you realized eight in the morning was too early?”
He scrunched up his face, thinking. “Four? To be fair, I only failed one. I dropped two others and skated through another with a B-minus. The prof even stopped coming by the end of that one.”
I’d been so focused in college, determined to take as many classes as possible and maintain a mind-boggling number of lists to keep everything straight. Sometimes it felt like the only semiwild thing I’d done was the time I’d performed a parody version of Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK” for a fundraising event for the undergraduate literary magazine. I’d consumed an uncharacteristic amount of liquid courage beforehand, so all I could remember was the first line of the song.Wake up in the morning feeling like Joan Didion / I grab my laptop I’m out the door I’m gonna write some fiction. After that it was a blessed blur.
“So,” Conner said, waggling his eyebrows like something out of a cartoon. “The neighbor, huh?”
“I can’t believe you and Shani took a bet on it.”
“After the party, Shani was like, oh,nowI see why she’s so obsessed with him,” Conner said. “Which I was fine with, because I’m secure like that. She said she bet there was more going on there than just your supposed fear of being mutilated in your sleep, and I said, nuh-uh, you don’t know my sister. She really does think about serial killers that much.”
Bizarrely, I was kind of touched by Conner’s defense of me. But I didn’t feel like giving him that ammunition, and Ireallydidn’t feel like discussing Sam. So instead I turned my attention to the pantry, trying to see what paltry breakfast I could scrounge up. I wasn’t normally a big breakfast-eater, the occasional Waffle House trip notwithstanding, and the leftover groceries at this point appeared to be mainly Pop-Tarts or granola bars.
“No cinnamon brown sugar?” Conner asked, then shrugged as he opened a packet of strawberry frosted and popped them in the toaster.
“Whoa, look at you,” I said. “Actually toasting your Pop-Tarts. How nouveau riche.”
“I’ll have you know that we made enough on-time payments that the electric company took us off their EZ-Pay plan,” Conner said. “It’s ACH all the way now, baby.”
“I thought you had that glow about you.”
“But seriously,” Conner said, taking his breakfast from the toaster with the corners pinched gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. “You don’t toast yours? You know they’re made to be toasted, right? It says so on the box.”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Mom didn’t really like me snacking too much,” I said. “So if I did, it was usually something quick snuck into my room.”
“Oh.” He seemed to think about that for a minute. Then, as if we’d been debating the topic and he needed to make one final point, he said in a burst, “That’s the main reason I picked to live with Dad, you know.”
“Because he let you have the run of the toaster?”
“Because he’d let me do whatever,” Conner said. “You remember how he was. If I’d wanted to go to Busch Gardens with my friends, Mom would’ve wanted to know who they were, who their moms were, had I cleaned my room, did I have my own money saved because she wasn’t about to give me twenty bucks for food, and on and on. Dad didn’t care. I think he was relieved if I was out of the house, or playing video games all day, or whatever, as long as I didn’t botherhim.”
I did remember that about our father. It had been one of the most paradoxical things about him, in a way. He could be the most generous person; he wanted you to have everything you’dever wanted. But if those wants pushed some invisible boundary he didn’t want you to cross, that’s when he could get cold, and angry, and mean. Eat all the marshmallows you can stomach. But if he reaches in the bag and there’s none left, he’ll lose his mind.
“Well, ironically, Mom did get a little looser once she met Bill,” I said. “New lease on life or whatever.”
“True.” Conner had had the opportunity to see a little of that when he’d come over every other weekend per the custody arrangement, but of course it hadn’t been the same. We’d spent at least one of those days playacting as a Family, filling our time with board games or mini golf or, once, a Pink Floyd laser light show that must’ve been Bill’s idea. There had been some legitimately fun times, but it also felt like we were alwaysdoingsomething, like we never had time to just talk and be.
It was going to be a long day if a sugary breakfast snack was already causing this much self-reflection. Conner went to take a bite, recoiling when he got too much of the hot filling at once.
“It’s like watching Icarus fly too close to the sun,” I said, shaking my head. “Come on. Let’s go see what we’re dealing with.”
?ALL THIS TIMEI’d built up my father’s room as the great white whale, and it turned out that it was just... stuff. Some personal stuff, for sure—clothes I remembered him wearing, bills and other paperwork, oldAuto Traders that still had faded pencil circles around cars he’d probably never planned to buy. But a lot of it was junk that could easily be stuffed into garbage bags.
