I glance over her shoulder at her car. Honestly, I don’t really want her driving home in that thing either. It looks about two weeks away from being made into soda cans. But I keep my mouth shut, because it’s really not my place to comment on her mode of transportation. I’m paying her well. Surely she’ll upgrade soon.
“Drive safely,” I call as she moves away from me, digging her keys from her purse.
“Always,” she shoots over her shoulder.
“Message me when you get home so I know you made it in one piece.”
“Sure thing, Dad,” she teases.
I tip my head back and close my eyes.
Fucking hell. What am I doing?
I’ve never asked a single person ever to message me when they’re safely home. What is this?
I stand there in the middle of the parking garage long after the rumble of Freya’s old beat-up engine has disappeared, wishing I had played that differently. Wishing that she were still here. But despite what I might want, I know I just did the right thing.
Freya is too good for the likes of me.
She’s just getting over a fucked-up relationship with a guy who clearly had major issues. The last thing she needs is to be entangled with another.
To the world, I might put on a good show, but underneath it all, I’m just a lost, broken, lonely little boy desperate to find love.
But she’s not the one.
She can’t be.
She deserves so much more.
27
FREYA
The second I shut the front door behind me, Mom practically drags me into the kitchen to hear all the details from girls’ night.
Dad is out having a drink with some work friends, and she is desperate to live vicariously through me.
Mom was never a party girl, but she loves nothing more than hearing all about others who do. She never understood my need to go to Vegas. She couldn’t comprehend me wanting to spend all my nights working in a bar surrounded by drunken partygoers. But as soon as I started relaying some tales of my shifts, she was instantly sucked in.
“Did you meet any boys?” she asks as I sip the hot chocolate she had waiting for me.
“Mom,” I warn, my cheeks heating suspiciously.
“What? That’s what you go out for, isn’t it? To meet people.”
“I was spending time with Casey.”
“She was your wing-woman,” she states confidently, probably having seen it on some TV show.
“No, that wasn’t?—”
“So you didn’t meet a boy?”
“I wasn’t looking for a boy, Mom. I’m not?—”
“Sorry, sorry. A man,” she corrects, remembering that I’m not her little girl anymore.
The second she says it, one face pops into my head, and my cheeks blaze crimson.
