“I’m asking you a question,” Tean said.“And I want you to answer it.”
“He’s your dad.He’s family.”
“Where were you?”
“I was dealing with something, okay?What’s the big fucking deal?”
“What’s the big—” And then Tean stopped.And in what sounded like disbelief, he asked, “Are you high?”
“No.”
But it came out too quickly, and it sounded too much like Daniel when he’d gotten busted.
“Jem, what is going on right now?”
“What’s going on is you threw your dad out and you’ve been reading something that’s supposed to be private.”
“You haven’t written anything!There’s nothing private in that book, Jem!And we’re supposed to get married in a few weeks!And you haven’t written a single word, Jem.What’s your plan?Are you going to stand up there and riff?”
Jem’s cheeks were hot.“I’m going to call around and figure out what happened to your dad.”
“What is going on with you right now?Why are you talking about my dad?”Shaking his head, Jem tried to walk around Tean, but the doc moved into his path.Under the soft brown of his skin, his face was red.The glasses, Jem could see now, had definitely had their frames bent.“Someone almost killed me last night.Kaialmost killed me.You told me you’d meet me at Amy’s—”
There was more, but Jem didn’t hear it.
Amy’s house.
The phone call.
Dropping off Daniel.
The fight with Zeb, discovering Wendell’s body, and then the desperate need to get away from it all—to get out of his own head.
As memory crashed in, Jem had the sickening feeling of his guts turning to water, and he thought, for one moment, he might shit himself.
Tean had almost gotten killed.
Because of Jem.
Because Jem hadn’t been there to protect him.
And then that other person said, “You went inside?”
“Yes, I went inside.You never showed up—”
“You went inside?”It was a shout this time.“What the fuck were you thinking, Tean?My God, I told you not to go in by yourself.”But a little voice in his head asked, Did you tell him that?Did you say anything?
Tean reached up for his glasses.The gesture was defensive, almost like he’d taken a step back.“I waited—”
“You waited?”The tightness in his chest, the dizziness, the way everyone had been watching him, the knowledge thatitwas going to happen, whateveritwas, that he was going to step wrong or turn wrong or blink wrong, and the floor would open up, or the sky would come crashing down, and he’d die, everything that had been building since he’d starting hitting the vape, everything he’d woken up with—and now Tean had gone and almost gotten himself killed, almost fucked everything up.The anger built the way Tean fed sticks into the fire, and then the sticks were gone, and the fire was hotter.Jem slapped the vow book against the counter.“You didn’t wait!You went in there without me after Itoldyou not to!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jem saw Scipio scurry behind Tean.
Tean took a deep breath.“You’re yelling at me.”
Somehow, Jem’s voice got even louder.The edges of the words were ragged.Probably because he couldn’t seem to catch his breath.“You’re goddamn right I’m yelling at you!What the fuck were you thinking?You could have gotten killed!”
The last words were a scream, and they ran through the house.
