“Nope,” she declares, sitting up. “Not doing that. The number one rule of a Girls’ Night is that there’s no boys allowed.”
“He’s not really aboythough. Kind of old.”
Kenny rolls her eyes and puts her hand out to help me up, pulling me out of bed and down the stairs. It takes thirty minutes to find something we want to watch that the Whittakers have a streaming platform for, interrupted only by our food arriving. I notice Maddox’s truck is gone when I open the door and assume he’s gone home. As I carry everything into the kitchen, I force myself not to look out the window over the sink to see if it’s at his cabin or if he might’ve gone out for the night.
It’s not my business.
We’re just casual.
I make a conscious effort to be more present for the rest of my time with Kenny, turning off my phone and burying it at the bottom of the overnight bag I brought. Dale’s the only person who may need to get in touch, and he knows to reach out to Kenny if he needs me and I’m not answering.
It’s the middle of April, and for Kenny, that means her entire life is about to change. She’s spent her last two semesters student-teaching at Cedar Creek Elementary and they’ve basically guaranteed her a job come September. In the meantime, she has what sounds like a million and ten things to do: exams, licensing, testing, interviews.
We both know the interviews are more of a formality though. She’s already started ordering things for the specific classroom the principal’s told her she’ll end up in. They’re desperate for teachers and Kenny is this town’s sweetheart.
Sometimes, when I let myself think about it too much, I can’t believe I’m going to miss watching Kenny achieve the dreams she’d been planning since we were kids. She talked about being a teacher almost as much as she talked about wanting to be a mom one day. I can’t relate in the slightest, but I love how she looks when she talks about it—the way her eyes light up and her hands move around just as fast as her mouth.
It’s bittersweet. I want to be gone come September, even if I don’t have as much money saved as I hoped. It just makes sense. Kenny will be too busy with her new job to spend her time missing me. I don’t want her to miss me. I just want to slip out of Cedar Creek quietly and unceremoniously, like plucking an apple off a tree—it was there once, and then it wasn’t, and the tree doesn’t mourn it, but instead focuses on growing other apples.
We’d keep in touch through FaceTime at first, and then, mostly texts that decrease in frequency until they’re coming every few weeks with obligatory excuses for their delay insteadof several times a day. She’ll send me pictures of her babies as they’re born and I’ll ooh and ahh like she’d expect me to, but I wouldn’t be a part of the Whittaker tree anymore.
TWENTY-EIGHT
AUSTIN
“Cute shirt,”Maddox says as he slides onto the barstool that’s become his in my mind.
“Thanks. I thought so.” I don’t even look up at him, busy making a cocktail.
It’s not a surprise when he comes in anymore, it’s a surprise when he doesn’t. It’s been a few weeks since our first date and he’s taken me on a couple more. I’ve stopped arguing that the outings aren’t dates and gave up on insisting that we’re causal. They still aren’t, and we still are, but I’ve decided to just let it ride. Sleeping in Maddox’s bed keeps me out of my dad’s house, so I might as well milk this situationship for all it’s worth, even though I know it’s just going to make leaving harder.
I’m seeing him and talking to him more than I’m even seeing and talking to Kenny lately, since she’s been so busy. He’s feeling less and less like my best friend’s older brother, more and more like I’ve got some sort of claim on him, too. The sense of permanence settling in between us makes me antsy and the past few days I’ve been a bit tetchier than I mean to be.
I take the drink to the woman at the end of the bar and set it down on a fresh napkin. I’ve never seen her around here before. Lord knows I’d remember her.
“Here you go, babe. Holler if you need a refill before I notice, and just a bit of advice, woman-to-woman, if you’re looking for someone to head home with tonight, I’d stay away from that one,” I tell her, gesturing with my chin in Chase’s direction. “Can’t imagine he’s clean.”
Before tonight, Chase hadn’t been here since the bar fight, but he was throwing back shots at the pool table again like he’d never left.
The woman chuckles, a throaty sound that would typically short wire my brain for a second. She’s gorgeous. Long, black hair and blue eyes framed with mascara-clumped natural lashes. She’s aced the smokey eye look and her lips are painted mauve.
She’s also older than me. In her late thirties or early forties, if I had to guess. You can say what you wanted about girls with daddy issues, but sometimes I thought the mommy issues were far worse.
“Not my type,” she tells me and I nod, not thinking anything of it, but she grabs my hand when I go to walk away. Her short, emerald green nails are stark against my pale skin, but her grip isn’t domineering. “You’re my type, though. I’m Sky.”
She’s so blunt with it.
I rarely ever have the balls to flirt with women. I’m always scared of saying something stupid or coming across as creepy or something, especially when I don’t know if they’re queer or not.
Almost all of my experiences with other women have been hushed up experiments—a box for them to mark off of their bucket list or something they had to drink several shots to allow themselves to try just to run back to their boyfriends the next day.
It didn’t leave me feeling very confident, just more or less like a circus attraction in a small town where being straight was the default and other sexualities were largely suppressed.
“Austin,” I’m finally able to get out. She plays with my fingers, rubbing her thumb over a hangnail.
“Tough name for a tough girl?” she asks, but it sounds rhetorical. “What time do you get off work, Austin? I’d like to take the advice of that little crop top you’re wearing.”
I look down at my shirt as though I hadn’t just discussed it with Maddox a few seconds ago.Treat your girl right,it read, but the ‘Tr’ was in a different color than the rest of the font, making it cheeky.
