Chapter 9
Dakota
I'm fucking dying as I watch Molly bend over, line up her shot and send her ball rolling down the lane.
As soon as we got into the lane, Lucy decided that it'd be 'couple' against 'couple'.
Right now we're winning, but I'm wondering if it's fucking worth it because I'm hard as a rock behind the zipper of my jeans.
"Mind getting me something to drink?" Molly asks, waving a hand in front of her face. "I'm thirsty and it's getting hot in here."
Damn right it's getting hot in here. "Yeah, what do you want? Beer or water?"
"Bring me a beer. Whatever they have in a bottle." She has a seat and watches as Lucy walks up to bowl her lane. "Thank you."
"No problem."
I inhale deeply as I walk over to the concession stand, and tap my knuckles against the counter.
"Hey Dakota," Ms. Francie says as she comes out of the kitchen area. "What can I get for you?"
"Two beers and nachos with cheese."
"Coming right up, give me a few minutes."
I nod toward her and then turn so that I can rest my elbows on the ledge of the counter, watching Molly.
She's smiling and laughing at whatever Lucy is saying to her.
Luce has had a rough couple of years. She doesn't have dyslexia like I do, but she is painfully shy, and a lot of people haven't understood how hard it is for her to open up to others.
It got her ostracized before she'd finally gotten to high school.
It warms my chest to watch Molly give her the attention she deserves.
The two of them are leaning toward each other now, talking about something I can't hear from here, and Lucy's got that full, easy laugh going — the one she only does when she's actually comfortable — and I have to look away for a second because it gives me a buzz in my stomach.
The fact that Molly has always made space for my sister, long before she and I were whatever it is we are right now, is not something I take lightly. It never has been.
Ms. Francie sets the bottles and the nachos on the counter, and I settle up and carry everything back to the lane.
"Thank you," Molly says when I hand her the beer, and the way she tips it up and takes a long pull from the bottle while she's watching Bryan line up his shot might be the single most distracting thing I've seen all night, which is saying something given the last two hours.
We finish the first game with Molly and me ahead by a comfortable margin, which Lucy argues loudly and at length is not a fair reflection of her actual skill level.
Bryan is gracious about it in the way of a teenage boy who is very motivated to be agreeable, and I respect the strategy even if I'm not going to say so out loud.
The second game is closer, and that's mostly because Molly and Lucy get into a conversation somewhere around the fifth frame that involves a lot of gesturing and laughing and not a lot of actually paying attention to whose turn it is. Bryan and I end up sitting together for a solid ten minutes while the two of them get whatever they're talking about fully out of their systems, and he asks me about Fish and Wildlife. I’m not sure if he really wants to know about it, or if he’s trying to make small talk, but I humor him.
"It's work," I tell him, and I mean it. "You spend time outside, you actually help people, and you're not stuck in a building all day."
He nods like he's filing that away somewhere, and then Lucy calls his name and he's gone, and I'm back to watching Molly set up her shot, and we're right back to where we started.
By the time we turn in our shoes and head back out to the truck, it's close to nine-thirty and the temperature has dropped another few degrees since we went in.
Lucy is walking close enough to Bryan that their shoulders keep bumping, and when we pull up to his house, she turns to me with a look on her face that I know well enough to brace for.
"Give us a minute?" she asks, already opening the door.
"One minute, Luce."
She and Bryan hop out, and I watch them in the rearview mirror as they walk up toward the edge of the driveway. Molly shifts in the seat beside me and I can feel her trying not to smile.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
"I was going to say that it's sweet," she says, and her voice is so full of sweetness that I almost let it go. "She’s walking him to his door, and he talked to her every time they were waiting for their turn to bowl. That's a good sign."
I watch him lean in and give Lucy a quick kiss, and Lucy's hand comes up to his arm for just a second before she steps back, and something happens in my chest that I genuinely was not prepared for.
It's not anger, and it's not quite protectiveness, though both of those things are in there somewhere.
It's more like the distinct and sudden awareness that my little sister is growing up in real time and I don't have any say in the matter and never did.
"She's too young for this," I mutter.
"She's sixteen, not twelve."
"She's my little sister."
"And she's going to date people," Molly says, patiently. "The best thing you can do is be someone she feels comfortable talking to about it."
I drag a hand over my face. "I know that."
"I know you know it."
Lucy climbs back in, and she's grinning with bright eyes. I don't comment on it. I just pull out and head toward my parents' house.
"That was so fun," Lucy announces from the backseat. "We should do this every week."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," I tell her, not looking forward to having to do this with my sister every week.
"You're just grumpy because we almost beat you in the second game."
"You didn't, though,” I argue, rolling my eyes up so that they meet hers in the rearview mirror.
"Almost," she repeats, like that counts for something.
I glance over at Molly, and she's got her elbow resting on the door and her chin in her hand, watching the road go by, and I have to physically redirect my attention back to where I'm going because the bowling alley did a number on me that I have not fully recovered from.
Two hours of watching her bend and stretch and reach and laugh, close enough to touch and not able to do a damn thing about it, has left me in a state that I'm doing my best to keep contained.
The light's still on at my parents' place when I pull into the driveway, and Mom comes to the door when she hears the truck. She steps out onto the porch and waves, and Lucy is already out and heading up the steps before I've fully stopped. I roll the window down.
"Thanks for taking her," Mom calls, and then her eyes move from me to the passenger seat, and back to me again, and she gets this look.
It's not a bad look. It's the look of a woman who has been waiting for something to happen and has just clocked that it might be happening.
She raises one eyebrow, doesn't say a word, and then she smiles and ushers Lucy inside, and the door closes.
Molly makes a quiet sound beside me.
"Don't," I say again.
"Your mom just figured it out."
"My mom has been trying to figure it out for years, she just finally got a reason to." I back out and head toward her place, and this time the truck is quiet between us, but it’s a comfortable one.
I pull into her driveway and cut the engine, and neither of us gets out.
The porch light is on, and it throws just enough light into the cab that I can see her clearly. She's turned toward me slightly, her jacket still on, her hair curling around her face, and she's looking at me with those eyes that I have never once in my life been able to look away from.
"You drove me absolutely out of my mind tonight," I tell her, because there's no point in not saying it.
"At a bowling alley," she says, the corner of her mouth curving. "With your sixteen-year-old sister three feet away."
"I don't know what to tell you, that's just what you do to me.
" I reach over and tuck a piece of hair back behind her ear, and my hand doesn't come back right away, it stays there along the side of her jaw, and she lets it.
"I've been thinking about this since the second we walked through the front door of that place. "
"Thinking about what exactly?" she asks, and her voice has gone lower.
"This." I lean in, and she meets me halfway, because she always does, because that's the thing about the two of us that I don't think either of us fully accounted for when we started this.
There's no hesitation here. There never has been.
Her hand comes up and grabs the front of my jacket and I slide my hand back into her hair, and we're kissing in the dark of my truck in her driveway like we've got nowhere else in the world we need to be.
She tastes like the beer she had and something underneath it that is just her, and I feel the tension that has been sitting in my chest all night finally let go.
When she pulls back, she's breathing a little harder than usual, and so am I, and she's still got her fist wrapped in my jacket.
"Pretty Girl, if you only knew what I wanted to do to you..." my voice trails off.
"Why don't you show me?" Her eyes glow in the lights from the dashboard.
"Don't tempt me," I groan.
Leaning in, she grabs my lips with hers again. "But that's exactly what I want to do."