24. Rhett
If you’d asked me what to expect when meeting Scarlett’s family, I would not have said a raging pack of assholes, but here we were. The whole evening just felt like a constant string of slights, all directed at Scarlett. I wasn’t sure she even noticed, but I sure did, and it made me fucking furious.
Until I remembered that it was actually none of my goddamn business. We weren’t a couple and she wasn’t mine to protect. Which was exactly how I wanted it, wasn’t it?
Still, once we were in the car, driving away from the never ending dinner, I couldn’t stop myself from asking. “Sooo, has your family always been a pack of fuckheads, or is this a new development? Tyler is, uh, something else.” That was me doing my best to be diplomatic.
I liked the way she laughed; the sound skittering across my skin. “Yeah, it”s old news. A tale as old as time - The golden child and the perpetual disappointment, that’s us.”
“It wasn’t what I was expecting, you know.”
“No? How so?”
“I guess I’d thought they’d be a bunch of hippies and everything would be peace, love and mung beans.”
That made her laugh again, which in turn had me smiling. Until the smile faded, because that wasn’t what it was like at all. “I thought you’d be the star of the show, because you’re so…”
“So?” She asked when I didn’t go on.
Everything. But that was skating way too close to things I wasn’t prepared to admit to, so I said, “Full of yourself.”
“Asshole.”
“So, the golden child and the perpetual disappointment?” I echoed. The city lights outside played across her face, painting her in shades of neon and shadow. “Is that how you see yourself? Because of your brother?”
She shifted in her seat, the seatbelt tugging lightly across her chest as she turned to look out the window. “It’s not just how I see myself, Rhett. It’s how they’ve always seen me. Troublemaker. Rebel. Black sheep.”
Things went quiet for a bit, but I just had to know. “Did you always know you were adopted?”
“No.”
“How old were you when you found out?”
“Twelve or thirteen. When I found the papers in Dad’s office.”
Fucking hell. “So up until then, you had no reason to think you weren’t all blood related, but the adoption news changed everything.”
Her laughter this time was brittle. “Oh, it’s the cornerstone. The foundation of why I can never measure up. I’m not blood, after all. Tyler is, though. A lovely little surprise for them when I was six years old. Such a gift. Now they were a real family.”
Inside me, something tightened, hot and mean. “Blood doesn’t make a family, Scarlett.”
She turned back to me, her eyes searching my face for sincerity. “No, it doesn’t. But try telling that to the Wrights. I wasn’t kidding when I said Tyler was the golden child. He knew before I did.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah, what the fuck? He used to tease me about it all the time, but I figured it was just a thing that kids did. He was always a little shit, so I just thought it was part of that. Nope, he was in on the secret the whole time.”
“That’s really, really fucked.”
“That’s what I said! It couldn’t have happened at a worse time, either, heading into my teenage years. I was a fucking mess.”
I could imagine it and the feelings it stirred up in me were…stop doing that.
“The hardest part about it was that they just couldn’t see why I was so upset.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I felt totally betrayed and like I didn’t know who I was. But also I couldn’t trust them. They’d lied to me my whole life, even making up stories about Mom’s pregnancy.”
“That’s…that’s incredibly fucked up.”
“It was. Then, on top of that, it was having to hear it from Tyler. I felt like I’d had a bomb dropped on me. Why did they tell Tyler and not me? Or stop him all those times he would shout it at me like it was an insult? They gave him the ammunition and just let him fire at me whenever he felt like it.”
My hands gripped the steering wheel so tight I was in danger of veering off the highway. If I’d fucking known this while I was sitting across the table from the fuckhead, the evening would have had a very different outcome. Clamping down on the rage that was surging through my system, I said, “I can see why your teenage years were shit, then.”
Her laugh had an unmistakable edge of bitterness to it. “That’s an understatement. I was wild.”
“I can’t imagine that.”
“Oh yeah. Sex, drugs and rock” n” roll. The whole nine yards. You know me, if I’m going to commit to something, it’s with my whole ass. But I was in so much pain and it all came out as anger, because they just wouldn’t listen to me. My heart hurt so much that I didn’t know what else to do to cope with it. One time, we got into a huge fight because I’d come home late. I was nearly eighteen, about to finish high school, and they still wanted to set my bed time. Such bullshit. So yeah, we fought. I was crying and so mad. I just screamed at them, ‘I hate you! You’re not even my real parents!’”
The thought of a young Scarlett, hurting and lashing out in anguish, tugged at my heart. “I’m guessing that didn’t go well.”
Scarlett let out a humorless laugh. “My dad slapped me across the face and said, ‘We’re the only parents you’ve got, you ungrateful brat. You should be glad we took you in.’ Can you believe that? As if they had only done it as an act of charity and now I owed them for the cushy life they’d given me.”
Jesus fuck, I couldn’t deal with this. But who was I to say anything against it? “Scarlett, I’m so sorry you had to go through that. You didn’t deserve it. What they did was unforgivable.”
“Yeah, well, it’s all in the past now. Forgive and forget, you know.”
I shook my head adamantly. “You had every right to be a mess. The way they treated you...” Words failed me as an inexplicable need to protect her, to take away her pain, almost overwhelmed me. Until I remembered I wasn’t the man for that. “I’m surprised you still talk to them.”
“I didn’t, for a while. I went away to college and basically didn’t speak to them for four years. Didn’t even come home for Christmas. Didn’t respond to their messages on my birthday.”
“That sounds fair enough to me. But obviously, bridges were mended somehow?”
“I put myself through therapy, which helped a bit. Still, I didn’t invite them to my graduation. It was after that, that Dad reached out. Of course, he never apologized, just said enough is enough, it’s upsetting your mother. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that Dad wanted the clout of having a lawyer for a daughter is what prompted it. You can imagine his crushing disappointment when I became an environmental lawyer. It was like a personal insult to him. Like I’d done it just to spite him.”
“Fucking hell, these people sound exhausting.”
This time, her laugh sounded more natural. “You can say that again. But they’re all the family I’ve got, so I guess I’m stuck with them. I gotta say, though, you come with a few extra side benefits I wasn’t expecting.”
“Such as?”
“Family dinner has never gone like that before. Tyler didn’t know what to do with himself, not being the center of attention for once. If I’d known that all I needed to do to become the favorite was to bring home a billionaire, I would have done it years ago!”
I laughed at that, then we fell into a comfortable silence. After a few miles, I gave into the urge to ask her something I wasn’t sure she wanted to answer. I knew I probably shouldn’t, but I found her utterly fascinating, so I asked, “You’ve never tried to find your birth mother?”
“I did think about it for a little bit, after college, but decided not to. Too scared of more rejection, to be honest. It’s kinda weird when your own family doesn’t really like you and it bleeds into everything else. You always have that feeling of not quite fitting in and you assume that most people don’t like you.”
Christ, that hurt more than anything else. It was all I could do not to pull over and drag her into my arms. “I like you, if that means anything.”
“It does, thanks. Although be honest. It’s the tits, isn’t it?”
Okay, so she wanted to make light of it. Fair enough. “It’s definitely the tits.”