Plus… I pressed the voice text icon to inform my dad, “He’s not my boyfriend.”
But before I could send it, another text popped up.
DAD: Seriously, Lydsie. If you’re dating someone, your mom and I would really like to meet him. No matter who he is. This is a (serious?) milestone, and you’re our daughter.
My stomach twisted. Dad rarely showed affection—to me or Paul, his naturally born son. The old (but apparently never gone) desire to please him—to prove he hadn’t made a mistake when he let Mom convince him to adopt me—rose in my chest.
“Hey! Your hot hockey player’s manly woman bodyguard is here to pick you up,” Val called out.
She’d made a habit of standing at the window and peering through the shades before the end of my shift.
I didn’t send the denial message to Dad. Or ask Rina about the kiss, though I had several voice texts from Trish, low-key commanding me to do just that. I just didn’t have the heart to help my bestie chase someone who considered her a distraction.
I told myself I’d explain everything to my dad after I finished outlining my midterm paper for my Animal Behavior seminar..
Right before my heart stopped as soon as I entered my study haven.
A gigantic teddy bear leaned against the empty left wall, so tall its head nearly touched the ceiling. And on my standing desk sat a vase with a huge bouquet of red roses.
As fascinating as the bear was, I rushed over to the flowers with my heart in my throat.
I held my breath as I rifled through the bouquet, careful to avoid the thorns, my stomach tight with hope. There had to be a note. Something that would make sense of all this.
But… no note.
Of course there wasn’t. Why would there be?
Just another mixed signal, which I guess I was supposed to interpret as… What?
The impulsive anger I’d worked so hard to regulate since my ADHD diagnosis flared hot and fast, only to crash into a hollow despondency. I looked between the huge bear and the flowers, realizing that I was right back where I’d started—totally confused about where I stood with this guy. I felt even more stupid than I had last night. For daring to hope for clarity that was clearly never coming, no matter what I did.
Maybe that was the answer—that there were no easy answers with Yom Rustanov.
He was a player. And this was just another game to keep me guessing—a reminder that whatever we had would never besimple. Maybe I needed to accept that—at least until the end of the year, when I could finally walk away from all this confusion.
Until then…
I glared up at the gigantic teddy bear with an idea for what to do with it.
Tommy
“Order just camein from Mr. Rustanov. He says we can let you down now.”
Stepan, who Tommy had previously thought was just some senior who’d never had the skills to come off the bench, made this announcement when he walked into the Hanson family’s dilapidated barn.
Was this another hallucination?
Tommy had been hanging from a set of heavy-duty chains used for lifting farming equipment in the barn for... Days? Weeks? Months? He couldn’t tell. Time had lost all meaning after the first few sessions of Rustanov coming into his family barn to use him and his pa as punching bags.
But Pop was dead. He hadn’t been given an IV port like Tommy had to ensure he stayed alive—if not lucid. Stepan hadn’t dutifully bandaged the older man up and tended to his wounds just enough to keep him breathing for Rustanov’s next kickboxing workout.
There hadn’t been any daily walks to pee and shit in a bucket for Pop like there’d been for Tommy.
“To keep your arms and legs from completely locking up,” Stepan had cheerfully explained. “But if you try to run, I’m gonna put two in the back of your legs. So, don’t do that.”
Tommy hadn’t done that.
But his father hadn’t been given any of these options. Sometime during the eons Tommy had been hanging from the chains, Pop had stopped breathing, then started rotting with a stench that filled Tommy’s nose until suddenly it didn’t.
