I shrug and watch the waves crash against the shore in a steady, hypnotic beat. “Yeah, I mean, you never tried to reach back out once you left. I thought you abandoned me just like everyone else.”
“I couldn’t take you with me,” he argues, but it lacks his usual hardness. “You were too young, and I was a kid myself.”
“I know.Logically, I know that.” Emotionally, the wound is still more tender than I thought. Reid looked out for me that year we lived together more than anyone ever had in my life. Not my biological mother who got pregnant with me when she was fifteen and was shunned from her family, church, and community. Not my aunt and uncle who took me in to try to keep up appearances for the rest of my family, until they decided I wasn’t worth the stain on their names too, and certainly not Gina and Patrick.
But I shouldn’t hold him to the same standards that I hold the actual adults in my life that failed me. He’s right. He was a kid himself, and he did all that he could for me.
The idea that he sent money back for me for college? All this time when I thought he never looked back?
I chew on my lip and force the burn in my throat down.
“Do you still talk to them?” he asks.
“Not since the day I moved out.”
He looks over at me, his cold eyes calculating. “Good.”
“I wonder if they ever think about us.” Or my mother, or his. If any of the ones who left us along the way do.
He laughs bitterly. “I hope they do, every time they turn on the damn radio and hear one of my songs. I hope they think about me and wish that they had stuck around long enough to try to leech off of me. Not that I’d give any of them another fucking cent, but I just want the opportunity to spit in their faces.”
“I’m sorry they took all the money from you.” Guilt that doesn’t belong to me heats my cheeks. “If I would’ve known?—”
“You have nothing to apologize for, so don’t,” he cuts me off.
“Was it a lot?” I hesitate to ask but do anyway. I can’t help it; I’m curious.
He rubs the back of his neck. “Enough for you to have gone through vet school, if that’s what you still wanted to do when you graduated.”
The breath is knocked from my lungs like a physical blow hit me square in the chest. That amount of money…of his money, that he selflessly tried to give me.
“Oh my god,” I choke.
“Yeah,” he says between clenched teeth. “I should sue the fuckers for it.”
“I wanna sue them for it,” I half tease. “Especially with my loan payments coming out of my checking account every month for a degree I didn’t even get to finish.”
He cocks his head. “You went to vet school?”
A choked laugh bursts from my throat. “No. I’d never beable to handle the sad parts of that job, and as you now know, I knew I didn’t have the money for it.”
He swallows thickly.
“Once I moved out here, I went to a small community college for a business degree, but I only made it through the first two years before I dropped out.”
“Why?”
A simple question with a complicated answer. “I was lost.” Still kind of am I guess.Maybe a little bit like him. “I was pouring money into it and racking up loans, all for a degree that I didn’t even really want.” I only chose business because I thought I needed to go to college and have that slip of paper, not because I had any idea of what I wanted to do.
Still don’t.
“So I decided to cut my losses, Kevin offered me full-time hours at On Tap, and I figured once I decided what I wanted to do, I’d go back.”
Reid narrows his eyes on me in a way that heats my blood. “But you haven’t.”
“It’s only been a little over a year since I dropped out,” I argue.
He nods to himself. “Fair enough. How much debt did you rack up?”
