Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
AUSTIN
Kenny and I have a much-needed girls’ night the weekend after my date with her brother and she texted him to forbid him from coming over to bother us.
He immediately came over to bother us, of course.
“I know she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to this world, but you can stand to spend a weekend away from my best friend!” Kenny argues as she tries to shove him out of her room.
I lie back on the bed and snort, scrolling through my phone. I’m nowhere near the best thing that’s ever happened to this world, even if my tits are in the running.
“Extra cheese?” I ask Kenny, not even bothering to raise my voice over their squabbling because Kenny and pizza are a match made in heaven and she’ll hear me for sure.
“Duh,” she throws over her shoulder, still trying to get her brother out of her room, but he leans against the door frame and stares at me. I ignore him until I see him move in my peripheral. My eyes flick toward him, rolling afterward when he tosses his wallet onto the bed beside me.
I don’t argue though. It’s pointless for one, and for two, if Maddox wants to pay for his little sister’s supper even though she has a whole-ass job and money of her own, who am I to stop him?
Adding another two-liter of pop and some cheese sticks to the cart for good measure, I open his wallet to dig out his card.
Why do old people keep so much in their fucking wallets?
Does he need to carry his insurance cards on him?
Doesn’t he know he can keep all of this on his phone nowadays?
And don’t they explicitly state you’re not supposed to carry your social security card on you?
A flash of gold from one of the wallet’s many slots catches my attention and makes me pause.
I tug it free and fan it through the air, eyebrow raised at Maddox.
“Magnum?” I mouth behind his sister’s head, trying to walk the line between ‘woman who is fucking this man’ and ‘best friend of his little sister.’
He grins wide, arms still crossed over his chest as he leans against the frame, like he intended for me to find it and give him shit for it. Kenny looks over her shoulder to see what he’s so smiley over and her face contorts. “Ugh.”
Maddox’s smile vanishes, brows furrowing as he finally looks down at his younger sister. “You said you were okay with us…”
“Fucking,” I supply the word for him.
Kenny groans again, but Maddox looks genuinely concerned that he may have overstepped with his sister. In an effort to ignore how endearing that is, I start typing his card number into the pizza app.
“I don’t care what the two of you do,” she agrees. “I’m not particularly appreciative of the implication of that particular type of condom when it came out of my brother’s wallet, though.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not that big. He’s overcompensating,” I tell her, flipping the card over to read the code on the back. I didn’t even know they made cards with the numbers on the front still. This man is positively geriatric. Incredible in bed though.
“Austin!” Kendall squeals.
“Pencil cock, for sure. Your other brother’s is much bi—”
“Austin.”
Maddox growling at me like that isn’t a great way to discourage me. It honestly has the opposite effect, but tonight is Girls’ Night, and as soon as Maddox’s card goes through, I plan to push him entirely out of my mind for the next twelve hours or so.
Card already on file as default payment method.
Of course it is.
I shove it back into his wallet with the condom, both in the wrong spots just to piss off his anal tendencies. Kenny snatches it from me and walks back over to him, pushing it against his chest. “Out.”
“Thank you for paying for our supper, Bubba. You’re the best,” Maddox mimics.
Kenny rolls her eyes and continues to push him out.
“I’m not going to thank you for paying for your girlfriend’s food, Maddie.”
“Not just hers,” Maddox argues.
“Not his girlfriend,” I correct at the same time, hyper-focusing on the screen of the phone even though it’s just the confirmation page for the order.
It’s getting harder and harder to draw that line and I hate seeing Maddox’s face when I do, but I’m scared that if I stop, I’ll forget he isn’t mine to keep.
Leaving Kenny behind is going to be hard enough.
I don’t need to add leaving Maddox to that, too.
But Maddox doesn’t know I’m leaving. He probably thinks I’m just constantly rejecting him for the hell of it. Best case scenario, he attributes it to my bratty side. Worst case, he thinks it’s a flaw on his part. I pray he never thinks it’s that, but I’m too chicken-shit to bring it up.
Kenny rolls her eyes at me. “You’re both far too old for this shit,” she grumbles, closing the door before I can make another joke about Maddox’s age.
I toss her phone on the bed when she plops down on it beside me.
We stare at the ceiling, at the little glow-in-the-dark stars we’d put up there with pieces of blue putty that were visible through them.
We’d run out of putty at one point and raided the boys’ room for alternatives.
Big Red was the only thing we’d found and my lips twisted at the knowledge some of the stars were still being held to the ceiling by old chewing gum.
Kenny catches my eye and we both burst into laughter, knocking our heads against each other’s, which only makes us laugh harder. “Remember how spicy we thought it was back then?”
I snort. It was pretty spicy for two little girls who didn’t have very refined palates. “We thought the boys were so grown up for being able to handle it. You cried the entire time, chewing so damn fast.”
She nods as she continues to fall apart, making it ten times funnier than it is. I swear, even if I didn’t know what exactly we were laughing about, as long as Kenny was laughing, I’d be laughing too.
Melancholy settles in my stomach and I feel like I’m watching the scene from above. My eyes rake over her face, trying to implant every second of this memory into my skull, so when I’m gone from here, I can look back on it and remember how this felt.
Whittaker Ranch has always been the only place I’ve felt safe.
Kendall Whittaker has always been my best and only friend.
I hate the thought of leaving, but I can’t see a way to stay. In a fantasy world, I’d move here. Not into Maddox’s cabin. I don’t let myself consider that an option, even in the fantasy world. Maybe into a guest house.
But even then, even if the Whittakers could protect me from my dad, they wouldn’t always be there. I’d still have to go to work and I’d run into him at some point. He wouldn’t be violent toward me in public, but he’d find a way to lure me home.
Even though I know better, even though I hate myself for it, there will always be a little girl inside me that wants her dad’s love and who will demean herself for it.
I’d never want the Whittakers to know about my dad.
I’m sure they suspected my home life wasn’t great when I was growing up, but I’m twenty-two now.
It’s ridiculous that I’m still letting my dad shove me around, that I’m letting him sit on his ass and drink and snort his way through the money I work two jobs to make.
If they found out, they’d see me differently.
They’d pity me at first, but then they’d realize how weak I was.
How much I let that child inside me rule.
That’s not an option.
“You alright, Aus?”
I blink, realizing I’d been staring at Kenny so long her features had all blurred together. “Yeah,” I say, smiling. “Fine. Just thinking about your brother.”
She doesn’t react quickly enough for it to be her genuine reaction, but after a second, she scrunches her nose in mock-disgust again. She knows better than to push, unlike Maddox.
“I still can’t believe you’re sleeping with him.”
“Not much sleeping going on, really.”
“Nope,” she declares, sitting up. “Not doing that. The number one rule of a Girls’ Night is that there’s no boys allowed.”
“He’s not really a boy though. Kind of old.”
Kenny rolls her eyes and puts her hand out to help me up, pulling me out of bed and down the stairs.
It takes thirty minutes to find something we want to watch that the Whittakers have a streaming platform for, interrupted only by our food arriving.
I notice Maddox’s truck is gone when I open the door and assume he’s gone home.
As I carry everything into the kitchen, I force myself not to look out the window over the sink to see if it’s at his cabin or if he might’ve gone out for the night.
It’s not my business.
We’re just casual.
I make a conscious effort to be more present for the rest of my time with Kenny, turning off my phone and burying it at the bottom of the overnight bag I brought. Dale’s the only person who may need to get in touch, and he knows to reach out to Kenny if he needs me and I’m not answering.
It’s the middle of April, and for Kenny, that means her entire life is about to change.
She’s spent her last two semesters student-teaching at Cedar Creek Elementary and they’ve basically guaranteed her a job come September.
In the meantime, she has what sounds like a million and ten things to do: exams, licensing, testing, interviews.
We both know the interviews are more of a formality though. She’s already started ordering things for the specific classroom the principal’s told her she’ll end up in. They’re desperate for teachers and Kenny is this town’s sweetheart.
Sometimes, when I let myself think about it too much, I can’t believe I’m going to miss watching Kenny achieve the dreams she’d been planning since we were kids.
She talked about being a teacher almost as much as she talked about wanting to be a mom one day.
I can’t relate in the slightest, but I love how she looks when she talks about it—the way her eyes light up and her hands move around just as fast as her mouth.
It’s bittersweet. I want to be gone come September, even if I don’t have as much money saved as I hoped.
It just makes sense. Kenny will be too busy with her new job to spend her time missing me.
I don’t want her to miss me. I just want to slip out of Cedar Creek quietly and unceremoniously, like plucking an apple off a tree—it was there once, and then it wasn’t, and the tree doesn’t mourn it, but instead focuses on growing other apples.
We’d keep in touch through FaceTime at first, and then, mostly texts that decrease in frequency until they’re coming every few weeks with obligatory excuses for their delay instead of several times a day.
She’ll send me pictures of her babies as they’re born and I’ll ooh and ahh like she’d expect me to, but I wouldn’t be a part of the Whittaker tree anymore.