“Nothing. We should go on our picnic now. It’s almost all ready,” I said. I went into the house without a backward glance at my sister, except the glance that told me she wasn’t paying attention to what I did because she was still wrapped around Boyd.
“The two of them could come eat with us,” Everett suggested, but I shook my head as I walked toward the kitchen and back to the cutting board where I’d been working before.
“They’re not invited.” It was the first time in my life that I’d purposefully excluded anyone. I had thought that it must have made people feel satisfied and important to cut out others, and that was why they did it so often. But I felt terrible about it now—I felt terrible that I was still fighting with my sister. I didn’t care that I was also being excluded, excluded from her life due to her new boyfriend. I wasn’t upset about that. No, that wasn’t it, not at all, not in any way…
Oh, geez. I was protesting too much.
“What’s going on?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re holding up a large knife and looking extremely pissed off,” he said. “What just happened with Willow and the guy?”
“Boyd,” I said. “That’s his dumb name. No, it’s not a dumb name.” I sighed and put down the large knife. “He drove her over here because she and I are having a disagreement.” I didn’t want to tell him too much about that, since it centered on him and she was wrong about what she’d said. “We didn’t make up but he apologized for the past. No, not really apologized, but he admitted that he’s a worm. That was his word, not mine.” I quickly put the sandwiches into a container and then into a bag I’d found, not a basket like in my daydream. “Should we go to the beach?”
He wanted to change and then I thought I should, too. I put on the bathing suit that Willow had told me was better for an old lady and I decided that I would get myself a new one for next summer. Maybe Everett and I would still be friends, and maybe he would still be with the Woodsmen as the starting quarterback if Kayden Matthews decided to retire after all, and if another team somewhere else didn’t offer him a better deal. Also, it depended on me having extra money to throw around on a new bikini rather than on something important like rent or food…and there were so many contingencies. I pulled a T-shirt over my head and walked out of my bedroom.
He carried the bag of food down the steps. “Watch out there,” he said, and I stepped over the broken board. “I should get this fixed.”
“It’s a rental house, though,” I said. “Would you want to waste your money?” Then I remembered how much money football players made, but still. “I bet the landlord would do it. Now you’re the Woodsmen starter, and he’ll be afraid that you’llpublicly mention something about tripping and someone would slash his tires.”
“Maybe I’ll buy this house. I like it a lot and if nothing goes wrong, I’ll be here for at least a few seasons.”
That was one contingency resolved.
“I heard that you got some publicity of your own,” he mentioned.
“My sister was mad about it,” I agreed, and then had a revelation. Maybe that was why she was saying nasty things! She was jealous that I was getting attention—no, Willow wasn’t like that. She tried to help me look better and attract more attention to myself, not less. “I don’t care if people are writing stuff about me. Do you?”
“Not really. I found out about it from my lawyer,” Everett said.
That was weird. “He follows Woodsmen stan accounts?”
“No, but he heard about it from Eris’s side. They think it paints me in a bad light because I would allow strange influences around her son.”
“Oh.” I stopped on the last step. “I’ll move out.”
He stopped, too. “No, I said that was all bullshit, that she should have been happy that a person like you would influence him. I also told the lawyers that I pay them enough to figure this out. She can send me videos of herself screwing other men, and I can’t have a friend come to stay? Bullshit,” he repeated. “As far as I can tell, they’re making zero progress on the custody case.”
“And you still want to pursue it?”
“I’ll show you some of Eris’s latest posts. She’s volunteering at his school and trying to make his breakfast. She’s trying to go around the lawyers and talk to me privately, too, and that’s also bullshit.” He put down our gear, reached out, and lifted me onto the sand. “There you go.”
I still didn’t move for a moment. I had kept track of the number of times he had touched me and that last one had been incredible. His hands on my waist, me flying through the air—
“What did you pack in this bag?” he asked. He started to look through the food. “I’m starving.”
It wasn’t exactly the picnic of my former dreams, but I had made a good lunch (easily, since he had all that good food). I spread out a towel (not a red and white tablecloth as I had pictured, but it would keep the sand out of our sandwiches) and he speared an umbrella into the ground. As Willow had said before, I only had a little color and I probably would have burned.
“You keep doing this.”
I looked over at Everett and he showed me what he meant: he dug his thumbs into his brow bones and made a face like he was in pain.
“I have a headache,” I said.
“You get them a lot. I see you doing this all the time.” He dug in again and made the ugly face.
“I don’t get them that often,” I disagreed. “Now I have one, because of what happened with my sister. But it’s ok.”
