Penn comes over, taking the seat across from me. I wasn’t going to tell him, but the guilt has been eating at me. I’m ready to cleanse myself of all this toxic bullshit.
I sigh. “I don’t know where to start, so I’m just gonna say it…I was taking Adderall.” His eyes flare, but I throw up my hand. “I’m not anymore. I’m sorry I’ve been lying to you, but… Fuck.” I hang my head, unable to handle the hurt in his eyes.
“Why?”
I lift my head, frowning. “Why what?”
“Why did you start?Whendid you start?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t sleeping, and I was tired of being tired. I started a few weeks in.”
“Why stop now?”
I don’t want to confess the coke incident and how close I came to possibly dying, along with the thought of losing my band. How much I scared Ellie.
It's quiet for a minute before he nods, like he knows. In fact, he doesn’t seem surprised about any of this. I thought he’d ream my ass, but it’s almost as if he was just waiting for me to confess.
He stands up and slaps my shoulder. “I love you, you know that, right? I’m here if you need me.”
I swallow a golf ball-sized lump. Of course I know. He’s my brother, but hearing him say it hits different. Because we normally don’t. It’s an unspoken thing because it makes me feel funny. My own parents don’t even say it.
“I’m not the only one, either,” he says as he walks out.
The hell does that mean? Tanner and Liam, maybe. Does he mean Ellie? Nah, Ellie’s like me. We talked about it. We don’t do love.
Do we?
Just as I’m about to text her, Calvin pops back in. “There’s someone here to see you.” My hackles go up. “She found her way back here and says you know her.”
He steps aside, and in she walks. The girl I thought I’d never see again—neverwanted to see again. My blood boils. She smiles at me, like she didn’t gut my nineteen-year-old heart and leave me a bunch of fucked-up trust issues.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Calvin says, closing the door.
I spring to my feet. “What the fuck are you doing here?” It’s been years since I’ve seen her—not long enough.
“You were amazing. I knew you could do it! I’m so proud of you Trav,” my ex, Candace says.
My lip curls in disgust. Is she for real? She never believed in me. She called me crazy for staying behind and not going to Cali with her because of my “little band.”
“Doesn’t answer my question.”
“I came to see you, duh.” She giggles. It isn’t sweet and soft on my ears like it is when Ellie laughs. It sounds like someone is scraping the inside of my ear drums with a rusty blade. She moves around the table to get closer to me, but I step away.
“You need to go. I thought I made it pretty clear last time I had nothing to say to you.”
“I apologized a hundred times since then, Travis. I thought we could move past that. Maybe start over? Be friends again?”
I scoff. We were never friends. “No thanks.”
“Did you know I’m moving back home?”
“How the fuck would I know that?”
“My brother said he’s seen you play a few times at home and talked to you.”
Yeah, I see her brother sometimes and we’recool, but we never talk about her.
I shake my head. “Thanks for coming out and supporting the ‘little band’ you thought was nothing, but you can go now, Candace.”
