Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
AUGUST
Lennon doesn’t stay in my RV every night… just most of them. We can’t keep our hands off each other.
Two weeks and I’ve been able to match her energy because I’ve been up. She brings it out of me.
If only I didn’t know that what goes up must come down.
With one half of my head, I’m fully in the wild joy of spending time with her and the sex, holy shit, the sex… meanwhile, I feel like there’s a clock ticking down at the back of my mind.
How long until the bubble pops?
Because that’s what it feels like. I’ll be soaring so high up in the sky, joyful and full of light and manic creative energy, and then pop—
The once soaring balloon becomes a chaotic torpedo losing air until it lands, time in the clouds forgotten once it’s deflated on the ground.
The rollercoaster takes a dramatic downturn and we’re all the way below the floor again in zero point three seconds flat with little to no warning.
Sure, Lennon thinks I’m great now.
That’s because I’m hyper-functional. What about the version of me that can barely hold down my job?
Not as fucking sexy, huh?
Still, while we’re in it, it’s easy to lose sight of that bigger picture.
Like, it’s so good right now that even after the sex, we lie there and just… talk.
I caress her hair back from her face because I’m obsessed with the soft little hairs that frame her face and will take any and all excuse to touch them, and her, even though our legs are already still tangled up from the intense, heart-pounding sex we just had.
“Do you want to tell me about it? What it was like growing up with your Mom?”
There’s just the light in the kitchenette on, and her head is snuggled on my bicep, my hand on her hip dropping from the curls framing her face to her hip, because I can’t not touch her.
She curls her fingers against my chest. “Mom was kind of man-crazy when I was small. She was so into my stepdad and tried so hard to make it work. I mean, I think she was trying to keep things stable for me, but for her, too. I’d gotten a scholarship to this fancy high school and she wanted a better life for me than the one she had. ”
I kiss the top of her head. “That’s every parent’s dream, isn’t it?” Excluding mine, but they don’t count.
She nods.
“Except it was awful. The girls at the school were awful to me because I didn’t know how to act right yet.”
“Act right?” I frown.
“You know. Like how you can be one way at home, but you have to hide it when you go out socially so you can fit in? Cover it up and kind of perform so everyone thinks you’re normal, too?”
Her eyes in the dim light are so sincere as she says it. Like it’s something she still believes.
I narrow my eyes. “Wait. Do you hide who you are around me and perform for me?”
She laughs and smacks me on the chest. “No, silly. That’s what’s so refreshing about you. About this.” She heaves out a big breath and smiles as she settles her cheek back in against my chest right over my heartbeat, eyes briefly closing like it’s the best feeling.
Which is when I understand.
Around fuckface, she did have to keep the performance up.
Even in her own home, the one place you’re supposed to be able to unwind completely.
Jesus.
I swallow, but love that she’s finally opening up. I want to be just as supportive for her as she’s been for me when I opened up. “So it was bad at that school in Dallas, then you moved here to Austin?”
The smile drops from her face, and I watch it cloud over. She snuggles closer like Owen does after a bad dream.
“The thing was, not everyone at that school was a bitch to me. There was a girl who became my best friend. Harper. She liked me for me. She adopted a cat when my stepdad was threatening to drown the litter— And she stood up against the bullies for me.”
“Damn right. I’m glad you had that.”
But Lennon is still shaking her head. “No, it turned out really bad.” She swallows.
“Some really, really bad shit went down. My parents were fighting all the time. And then Harper’s stepmom was dying of cancer and someone exposed this big secret she had, but it looked like I had betrayed her.
They planted weed in her locker, too and—”
Lennon looks up at me and there are tears in her eyes. “And I just stood there and watched it all happen, totally frozen. I didn’t defend her like she’d defended me. Then she just disappeared from school and I never saw her again or got to apologize for anything.”
“Babe.” I caress some hair out of her face, pushing in behind her ear. “You were what? Sixteen?”
“Fifteen. But still. It was horrible. Her dad went to prison for the weed. No one really thought he’d put it there.
He sacrificed himself for Harper and she split town.
She was the best friend I ever had. I felt so awful.
It’s one of the reasons Mom moved us here after my stepdad split.
For a new start. And I swore to myself—”
She swallows hard, not meeting my eyes.
“What? Lennon. I’ll never judge you. You heard what a maniac fuck-up I was. You were just a kid in a screwed-up situation.”
She shrugs, tears in her eyes. “I think it’s why I threw myself so hard into youth group when I got here. Performing extra hard. Not to just be accepted, but to… like… atone. When they all said I needed to be sorry for my sins, I was really, really sorry.”
A tear falls down her cheek, and it kills me. She’s guilty not for some bad thing she did, but just for freezing in the moment, and as a kid no less?
“They said I could be forgiven if I was sorry enough,” she says, “and I was. So then I wanted to be perfect to have earned that forgiveness. To demonstrate how hard I meant it. I even changed to start going by my first name again instead of Marie, the middle name I’d been going by since I was a little kid.
I just wanted to be a new person so much. ”
I pull her into my arms as she cries then, stroking my fingers through her hair.
I can imagine teenage Lennon Marie. Trying to perform perfectly for everyone and learning it was a way to gain acceptance.
And then my asshole brother swooped in.
She hasn’t talked about it much, but I know their age differences. And I know how old she was when she got married.
Eighteen.
Jake was twenty-three. He’d been volunteering at the church to help with tech when he met Lennon.
She was a vulnerable people-pleasing teenager, and he was a goddamned predator.
He didn’t fall for her.
He groomed her.
I’m still seething over it as I pull into the gravel lot behind the shop still gripping the wheel too hard. My jaw aches from clenching it the whole drive over.
I keep picturing my brother at twenty-three years old with a clipboard and a youth-group polo, sizing up a girl who’d spent years teaching herself to disappear for a room full of strangers to blend in perfectly with them. How easy that must have been for him.
He probably barely even had to try.
I want to drive across town and put my fist through his teeth.
And then the clinical little corner of my brain—the same one that runs the morning checklist—flags that want as exactly the kind of thing I’m supposed to sit with instead of act on. I’ve done real damage running hot before.
So I sit there an extra minute with the engine ticking as it cools, hands still on the wheel, and breathe until the red backs off from a boil to a simmer.
Which is when I see the line of people already waiting outside the shop, and Mack out front working the key in the lock like it personally offended him.
I shove the gearshift into park and hop out to go join him.
Twenty-some people, maybe more, strung out along the sidewalk in the shade of the awning, fanning themselves with folded-up flyers. Several women in line let out little whoops and one calls, “August, I love you!”
Mack and I exchange looks.
“Give us half an hour to get set up,” Mack calls, “then we’ll take walk-ins in order of arrival.”
Cheers erupt as Mack and I slip in the door he’s just unlocked.
“What the hell?” Mack whispers, staring through the glass doors at the line.
“Uh,” I stall. “This might be my fault.”
Mack’s eyebrow pops as he looks my way. “Why am I not surprised? What did you do?”
I shrug and hold up my hands. “I didn’t think it’d be a big deal. Lennon’s just been helping me with social media and I thought it could bring in more press for—”
“Lennon?” he breaks in. “Who’s Lennon?”
My mouth opens. Then closes. I suck in a big breath and lean against the counter. “Look it was only supposed to be her helping me with socials. But now I dunno we’re maybe kinda seeing each other.”
Mack dramatically drops his face into his hand.
“Look, it’s exposure for the shop, right? More money for me is more money for you.”
He looks back up. “What happens when you fuck it up with this girl?”
Ouch.
Because that’s always been the question, hasn’t it? I hear it in Priscilla’s voice sometimes, the one from the doorway the day she left with Owen’s diaper bag over her shoulder and didn’t look back: You’re not safe long-term, August. You’re only safe until you’re not.
But Mack never is one to pull his punches.
I shrug and tell him the truth. “Then things go back to normal?”
Mack rolls his eyes. “Why do I put up with you again?”
I grin. “My charm and charisma?”
“As if,” Mack snorts. Then he shakes his head and glances out the window at the line, which, if possible, has gotten even longer. “Well get ready for a long day, because I’m going to let them in.”