Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

Eggs

Dad always woke up before me. His footfalls and clatters were my alarm when I didn’t have to set one, and even now, I could hear them from a different floor.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds longer, a few seconds for my imagination to let me believe I lived alone, in some apartment building, and I had a noisy neighbor waking me up every morning.

This one was the last straw and I confronted him with loud feet and loud knocks. It didn’t go over well, and we started having noise competitions, until we both got in trouble, then had to form a truce, forced to the same side. We were enemies who became lovers.

My eyes blinked open to more noises, my lids heavier than the first moment they opened, and I groaned out of bed.

My body had forgotten that it had to pee, the urge having faded once I’d got to my driveway, and now my thighs were doing the clench on my way to the bathroom.

I showered and dressed quickly in a tank top and a pair of leggings—I needed to do laundry—before piling my hair on top of my head and brushing my teeth.

The air conditioner wasn’t on. Dad was in complete concentration mode. He couldn’t focus if he was even the slightest bit chilly. I’d be going back to my room after breakfast and giving praise to my ceiling fan.

I padded to the kitchen, feeling like the eggshells I could spy in the trash were beneath my feet. A line of sweat was already forming between my boobs, and my knees were almost locking themselves, like I was fighting this walk.

“Dammit,” Dad muttered as I stepped around the entryway, my body bracing to defend myself, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was sitting at the table in front of his laptop. A sight you see most mornings, Summer.

I relaxed a bit as I approached the table, seeing the plate of sausage links and scrambled eggs waiting for me beside a glass of milk. And I smiled, a sight he saw most mornings. And he glanced up with a smile back, gesturing for me to sit and eat.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked.

“Not good,” I answered honestly, chewing my smile for why to hide it, then hid my zip of giddiness behind my bite of food, shifting the feeling to the sausage. That was the meat I had a serious passion for.

Trouble sleeping wasn’t suspicious. People didn’t always sleep well. And neither of us had that track record.

“Well, eat up. That’ll give you a boost.”

Consuming sustenance for another day on my ass.

For another night on the town , I told myself now, with a shimmy I shifted to a bite of eggs.

Dad had a cup of black coffee he was sipping on. I got my love of food from both my parents, but coffee was usually his only sustenance in the mornings. He loved cooking too. But he wouldn’t teach me. Why would I need to learn something he could do for me himself?

I did like breakfasts with my dad. Lunches were kind of eat-what-you-want-when-you’re-hungry. And I liked our dinners.

I liked many moments with my dad. On the outside—which was where I had to put myself sometimes to feel that way—it would seem like we had the perfect father-daughter relationship. Mom’s death brought us closer, made our love stronger. Us against the world.

It was hogwash .

On the inside, it was me against his world.

There was a distance we couldn’t close, our moments just moments, with no real connection. I would be keeping peace while trying not to be rejected or shamed. A common ground of his foundations I’d build upon.

I didn’t like to fight. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted my dad’s smile shining on me like that all the time.

That was part of the trouble. It was unrealistic. His own fantasy. And I had to have my own world too.

I chewed and sipped and swallowed to his narration of work—numbers and security systems and meetings—eyeing his tapping fingers over the keyboard as he raved over this new position, not knowing I was out of the house with his boss’s son a lot of the night.

Adam’s dad ran one of the biggest companies outside of Rosalee Bay, and Adam looked at me like he already knew my dad was a new employee. A lot of people who lived here worked there.

Everyone around here knew Adam’s dad, too, but from the little he’d told me, I’d sensed his dad knew him about as well as my dad knew me.

I took my last bites and last sips in between answering Dad’s questions about which classes I was most excited for my senior year and watching the wind in the bushes outside the windows.

He followed my stare, and the back of the chair pressed hard into my spine when my body and my heart slumped at his weather report; incoming rain storms for not one but two nights in a row.

“You love the rain,” Dad said, an absolute statement, like I couldn’t change my mind. I felt tied in that way when his mouth was the one finalizing a piece of myself. Somebody else might’ve said it with a bit more curiosity, with some furrow, a nudge for me to express my possible new aversion to something.

I did love the rain. But I couldn’t climb a trellis in it.

Dad was slurping the last of his coffee as I carried my dishes in a clutch to the sink. He didn’t make me clean. It was something to hold over my head— you should be thankful for the life we have, Summer —like the roofs he provides and the food and the clothes. He made sure I was physically protected.

Thanks, Dad, for the least you could do.

I left the dishes to rot in the sink, for his hands. If he taught me anything useful, it was to take my wins where I could get them.

I caught the outline of my reflection in the window, my hair bigger, drying to its frizz, silently talking to that girl, reminding her not to feel bad. I wouldn’t let the way he did take care of me cloud over the ways he didn’t. I wouldn’t let the outside picture summon this sickly guilt that lived low in my stomach. Because other sickly things lived there, too, feelings that would change us forever when they washed over me entirely.

There were so many pretty bushes in our backyard. So many tall trees. Greens, browns, pinks, yellows, and blues, all looking happy and alive. I couldn’t imagine anything happening out there, around all the blooms, because nothing would.

Wishes to be the daughter he wanted, the daughter who only needed her dad, the daughter that this was enough for, still whispered against invisible flickering flames. Us against the world.

What was so wrong with this life?

Everything.

The feeling from that knowledge hollowed me, the experience from last night being the first true thing to fill me up. It was like my love of food. One taste and I needed the whole meal.

I couldn’t help what I wanted, what I yearned for, any more than he could. We’d never align our perspectives. I deserved to grow up, to grow.

“You’re gonna hang around here,” my dad said—told me, with just enough inflection in his voice to seem like he was asking my plans for the day. I wasn’t baited. We both knew I was hanging around here.

I faced him with my new shield of possibility. “Yeah, I’ll find something to do. Probably just watch something or finish my book.” That same shame I felt some last night when I thought about reading leaned me against the sink before I straightened right back up. I can change , I told myself. And I can still love something and want more.

I didn’t like that I had to talk to myself that way, but somebody needed to.

The crinkle in Dad’s eye said good answer . And I said nothing else to keep us on the same side of our family feud .

Ironically, my current read was about a single dad. I’d read a lot of those types of romances, the dads who had healthy relationships with their kids. I’d also gravitate toward stories with mothers who were still alive. And I would always read those, because I would never actually have those.

He never asked me about what books I read, or even what I watched. It wasn’t like I could be influenced by anything when my life was school and home, with practically no other people in my life to push the influence.

I’d considered taking a cue from my books and trying to set my dad up with one of my single teachers or some other single ladies to loosen him up, but he would have never gone for it, because none of them would be my mom.

“We’ll finish the unpacking after lunch,” he told me, with a smile for the plans we’d have together, a smoother for the loneliness. I could almost act like it wasn’t there.

He brought his empty cup to the sink and I moved aside with another smile back. His showed off like he was open to anything, open to me, but every time my mouth opened in response, I still had to watch what I said and not ruin his idea of me.

I wished I could reach my fingers into my chest and rub away the ache from not being able to tell him about my night, how I was making friends.

How could I love someone so much yet hate how he is?

I had to turn my thoughts upside down. Take my wins. I wouldn’t have even met Levi and Adam if I hadn’t had to sneak out. At least not the way I did. It wouldn’t have been the same at all, and my next small shimmy reminded me that I, for sure, won something last night.

Cha-ching!

Mom was no longer here.

She wasn’t here in North Carolina. She wasn’t in Georgia. She wasn’t in Tennessee. She wasn’t in Ohio, or Maryland, or Alabama.

But she stayed with us everywhere we went. She was in the pictures and the paintings she loved that we still had to hang. And we did, saving the best for last. A tradition in each new house.

Dad played her favorite country songs, smiling so big, he aged several years, his crow’s feet dented deep into his skin.

He loved Mom more than he loved me. I knew that before he’d later confirm it. Her spirit put the truest light on his face. This wistful happiness for a time before I was born.

We danced, and sang along, like we always did, our own worlds orbiting each other.

I’d still miss these moments once his eyes would be permanently glazed with disappointment.