My father flops onto the couch, directly on that bloodstain, and pops the beer open. “Get your money and get out,” my dad tells him.
Kevin ignores that. His eyes gleam as he observes me, his hands in his back pockets. “How long are you here?” he asks. “This could prove useful.”
My heart is drumming in my chest. I could tell him the truth, but what good would that do me? I’m best off letting him think he’s got time to figure it out.
“Not sure,” I reply with a casual shrug. I’m the master of looking blank when I need to, as if my soul has left my body.I’ll give you something to cry aboutwas a threat I heard at least once a week growing up—I’d get hit before I’d even had a chance to stop. I learned, over time, that it was best to show no reaction at all. “I have to be in New Orleans a week from next Friday.”
His grin sends a chill down my spine. If I wasn’t already leaving, I’d be on the first plane out tomorrow. “Good to know,Dr.Walsh.”
“Where’s the goddamn remote?” my dad demands. He’s slurring so badly I’d need an interpreter if I hadn’t grown up with this shit, and he probablydrovehome like this too. “I didn’t ask you to clean in here, and now the fucking remote is gone.”
Do not react. Do not react. Do not react.
I cross the room to the shelf below the TV, grab the remote, and toss it to him.
“Why the fuck was it on the shelf?” he demands. “That’s not where it fucking belongs.”
“I was vacuuming the couch and cleaning the coffee table, so I moved everything while I did it.”
“Then you should have moved it back!” he bellows. “Take some goddamn responsibility, for once in your life.”
Are you really going to lecture me about responsibility, you drunk prick?Are you really going to lecture me after you drove drunk over the bridge, a bridge kids bike on every goddamn night?I know better than to say it aloud, but not well enough to keep my fucking mouth shut the way I should. “Noted,” I reply. There’s too much sarcasm in that single word I uttered, and I know it before my mouth has even closed.
He whips the remote at my face. I don’t have time to duck, to block it. I manage to swing my head to the right so it hits my cheekbone instead of my nose, but that’s not much better.
Bull’s-eye, asshole. Well done.
The one goddamn thing I didn’t want was a fucked-up face at the wedding, and now there will definitely be a bruise.
Sometimes, in Boston, my luck at escaping this life hits me like a bomb blast—sudden, shocking, too huge to be understood. Like when Thomas and I are having some serious conversation about a point-one degree temperature drop on his Oura ring or the way our favorite restaurant took a beloved item off the menu, and I recognize what aprivilegeit is to care about something so stupid. And then a moment like this one arrives, and it’s as if I was simply playing theroleof a normal girl and that it was too good to last. That there are people who get to sit around discussing a fractional change in body temperature and people who get remotes thrown at their heads or have brothers making them commit felonies and I’ll always be the latter, no matter who I marry, no matter how many degrees I get.
“Go upstairs,” he says. “Get out of my fucking face.”
I turn on my heel.Thank God I’m leaving tomorrow.
I get up earlierthan necessary the next morning to start camouflaging the bruise. I know this routine well by now: orange concealer first to neutralize the color, followed by two rounds of my regular shade. My dad has only hit me when he’s drunk. Sean and Kevin, however, were happy to hit me whenever the mood struck, and it struck fairly often.
When I’m done, I carry a mirror to the window to check my work in the sunlight. Someone could see it if they looked carefully. Fortunately, it’s on the right side of my face, not visible to Elijah if I’m in the passenger seat.
I knock on my dad’s door and walk in. “I’m heading to New Orleans early with Elijah. So bye.”
He opens one eye. “Don’t tell him I threw the remote,” he says.
I wouldn’t. I don’t spill my family’s dirt, but why the fuck would my father suddenly be worried aboutElijah? And why can’t he just be the tiniest bit sad? The tiniest bit remorseful?
“Elijah wouldn’t care.” Even as I say it, though, I suspect I’m lying. The enduring mystery of what occurred between the two of us is the way he seems to care a great deal while his words insist otherwise.
“Just don’t tell him,” my father says. “And don’t come back.”
He’s said it before. I don’t know why the fuck that hurts as much as it still does.
I wait outside the house—I’ve never invited Elijah in once—until he pulls up in a huge Yukon that looks brand new...and expensive. I throw my suitcase and garment bag into the back,then slide in beside him. “I never took you for the guy who’d continue living with his mom so he could buy multiple cars.”
He glances over with a quirk of his brow. “It’s a rental, but I’m glad you’re already establishing how the next few days are going to go. Anything else you want to put out there?”
“I would also like tore-establish that you were a dick to me five years ago,” I reply.
“Tell you what, Easton,” he says, throwing the car into reverse. “You get to bring that up once a day for the rest of the trip. I know it’ll be tough, only whining once a day about something that happenedthat long ago, but that’s my limit.”
