Chapter Seventeen
Travis
When Travis volunteered to hang out with Kit so Parker could go to Lottie’s house for some girl time and self-care, he’d wrongly assumed that the little girl would have plenty of ideas on how to entertain herself or things for them to do, but he had been dead wrong.
After they’d had pizza for dinner, Kit pulling faces the whole time at the fact that Travis liked mushrooms, they moved into the dining room where he’d laid out a puzzle for the four of them to work on.
That lasted all of five minutes before Kit declared that she was bored and wanted to do something else.
Travis took her outside where they played with Boots for as long as the stray would let them which turned out to be about twenty minutes.
Then they walked around the orchard for a bit, stopped by the chicken coop to say hello to the gals, and ended up back on the porch with another few hours to kill before Parker got home.
When he was younger, the farm had provided its own entertainment, but Travis had also had brothers to chase around and mess with.
For Kit, it had just been her and her mom for pretty much her whole life.
His heart ached to think of the little girl feeling as lonely as he did most nights, so when he’d run out of ideas, he asked Kit exactly what she wanted to do.
“Are you up for anything?” She’d asked him about half an hour earlier.
When Travis replied with anything that her mom would approve of, Kit dragged him into the house and asked his mom for her nail polish and hair styling products.
Travis figured she wanted to give herself a spa day like the one her mom was experiencing at that very moment.
Little had he known that she had no intention of using any of those products on herself, but on him instead.
“Which do you like better, the pink or the purple?” Kit held up two equally bright nail polish colors for him to choose from.
Travis wasn’t against nail polish for himself on principle, but it had just never been his thing.
When you worked with your hands all day, the only thought you gave to them was which gloves to wear to keep the worst calluses at bay, not how to make them prettier.
Travis stared at the bottles thoughtfully for a moment before tapping the purple with his finger. “Think that one will look better with my hair. Don’t you?”
The moment they’d gotten upstairs and into his parents’ bathroom, Kit had sat him on the closed toilet and gathered the longer strands of his hair into two tiny pigtails, after which she added two purple bows around each one.
One look of himself in the mirror had Travis nearly bursting out laughing, but he’d held it in, not wanting to offend his tiny stylist.
Kit nodded and started to shake the purple bottle. “You’re right. Pink would have looked good too though.”
Travis held out his hand and watched as Kit concentrated on polishing his large thumbnail, her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth as she did.
“You could always wear some if you want.” He caught another glimpse of himself in the mirror and smiled as he thought of how badly his brothers would raze him about it if they could see him in such a state. “Unless you think your mom would mind.”
Kit looked up at him, her expression thoughtful. “I don’t think she would care, but she wouldn’t want me to get used to it.” She focused back on her work while Travis let her last words play over in his mind.
They hadn’t had many luxuries. Hell, they hadn’t had many necessities, that much was obvious from the few meager belongings he’d spied around their apartment.
The ache that formed in his chest anytime he thought about either or his girls going without was back, quickly followed by the sweeping realization that sometime over the last two months, he’d come to think of Parker and Kit as his.
“Fuck,” he breathed out. The fierce determination to keep Parker and Kit safe and happy, and with him permanently had been growing for some time, but now it was as deeply rooted into him as caring for the orchard was.
When he looked up to see Kit with a wide-eyed look of shock on her face, he winced. “Shit, I mean shoot.”
Kit giggled at his floundering. “You said some bad words, Travis.” She shook her head in disappointment even as a mischievous smile played on her face.
Travis sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Parker might never trust him to watch Kit again if she found out he couldn’t control his cursing.
Maybe he should finally listen to his mom and make a bigger effort to stop.
“Not advocating you lie or keep things from your mother, but think we can let this slipup go without mention?”
Kit twisted up her mouth for a moment as she considered his question. “Damn right we can.” When it was Travis’s turn to look wide-eyed, Kit just shrugged and laughed more. “Now we’re even. Mutually assured destruction.”
Travis huffed a laugh, staring at the precocious little girl as she resumed painting his nails. “How do you know a big concept like that?”
Travis had never been the sharpest tool in the shed, barely making it through school due to his sensory processing issues and general preference to be out of doors rather than in them, but even he knew that was some pretty big vocabulary for someone so young.
Kit hummed in thought as she painted. “I don’t know exactly where, but I read a lot.
” The confession surprised Travis as he hadn’t seen more than a handful of books lying around their apartment.
As if she could sense his skepticism, Kit clarified even further.
“Sometimes my mom would bring home a newspaper that someone left in a diner booth or on a bus bench, and when we drive from one town to the next, we stop by some of those free little libraries in town to move books from one to another as we go.” She smiled up at Travis as she gestured for his other hand.
“Did you know they have a map of them on the Internet? That’s how we find them all. ”
Travis shook his head. “Nope. Didn’t know that.”
Apparently there was a lot about the world that he didn’t know, mostly because he hadn’t needed to know.
Parker was younger than him by a good five years and Kit by at least quadruple that, and yet they’d figured out how to survive in a world that seemed determined never to cut them some slack and threw every obstacle imaginable in their way.
A swell of pride in the two of them filled his chest as gratitude that it was his farm that they’d landed on flooded his veins.
Clearing the lump of emotion from his throat, Travis attempted to change the subject to something less serious. “How are you liking school?”
Kit paused for a moment before sweeping another coat of paint onto his pinky. “It’s actually really good.”
Travis waited for more, but Kit seemed determined to stay quiet. It was unlike her, at least as long as she was in a good mood, which she seemed to have been so far this evening. Travis prodded a little more. “Seem surprised by that.”
Kit sighed heavily and capped the polish.
Waving her hands over his to create a drying breeze, she looked up at him with sad eyes.
“I am.” She kept waving despite her tiny hands not creating much wind, and Travis smiled at her determination.
It would serve her well in life, but more than that, it reminded him of her mother.
“The last few schools weren’t the best,” she mumbled.
Travis nodded to the side of the tub next to him. “Pull up a chair. Tell me about it.” Holding up his hands, still wet with polish that was more on his skin than his nails, he wiggled his fingers. “We’ve got time.”
Kit did as he asked, her hands smoothing down the front of her pants that were covered in sparkly butterflies.
“No one makes fun of me at this school,” she confessed, her voice low.
“The kids used to poke fun at my clothes and how I didn’t have a proper backpack and some other stuff that made going every day really hard, but I knew I had to because my mom had to work and I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. ”
Travis couldn’t help but reach out and rub Kit’s back with the hell of his palm, not wanting to get polish on her new clothes but needing to provide comfort in some way.
“Sorry you had to deal with that. Sounds pretty awful.” Kit sighed and nodded.
Wanting to help more, Travis thought that maybe it would help if she felt a little less alone in her struggle. “Kids used to make fun of me too.”
Kit gazed up at him in disbelief. “Really? But you’re so cool.”
Travis barked a laugh that echoed around the tiled bathroom. “You are the first, hell only person to say that to me. Appreciate it.” He smiled and sat back. “Did your mom tell you that I have sensory processing disorder?”
When Kit shook her head, Travis felt a little zing of happiness travel through him at knowing Parker kept things to herself. He wouldn’t have minded if she’d told her daughter, but it was nice to know he could trust her.
“What’s that?” Kit asked, genuinely curious. Her curiosity was another thing that he admired about the little girl and made a note to tell her mom what a wonderful job she was doing raising her daughter.
“Means I don’t like loud noises, bright lights, strong smells, things like that.
” He bobbed a shoulder. To some it might not seem like a big deal, but it sometimes made everyday living an exercise in avoiding triggers.
“Sometimes wear headphones in class to block the sound or sunglasses to block the fluorescent lights. Stuck out a lot. Kids will pick on just anybody for any reason if they want to. I definitely made it easy for them.”
Kit crossed her arms, seeming angry on his behalf. “That sucks.”