16. Colton
sixteen
Colton
“W hy did you and Valerie break up?” Kiara asks out of the blue on our way home. During brunch I played the part of the loving boyfriend, but the way she felt under my touch tore at me. I don’t know if I’m more upset at her for wanting me to help her get it over with —I hated how it sounded like something to cross off her to-do list — or if it’s because she thinks she wouldn’t be missed if she left Emerald Creek.
How did we fuck up so majorly that she doesn’t feel at home there? Does she really think her asshole family (except Bill and Eloise) comes anywhere close to us in the way we feel about her?
“Colt?”
“Huh?” Oh, yeah. Valerie. Why the fuck is she talking about my ex? “What?” I snap.
She turns the dial of the radio down, and I feel like taking her hand in mine and keeping it there. Squeezing it to show her how much we all love her.
“Why’d you and Valerie break up?”
I frown. “What’s that gotta do with anything?”
She tucks her left foot under her, so her body is twisted toward me, like when she’s about to start a long conversation. “What happened?”
“Been years, grasshopper. Who cares?”
“Maybe I do.”
I’m not going to ask why. Despite the poor way she’s been treating me, she still has best friend privileges. “It just ran its course.”
“Ha!” she says softly.
I raise an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She spreads her hands like I just made her point. “Relationships run their course, and then people are over each other. Friendships don’t.” If there’s anything I know about Kiara, it’s that she likes to examine all aspects of a problem in a scientific way. I can see where her thoughts took her from me refusing to get it over with, back to me asking her to date me. She’s trying to understand my logic.
The thing is, there is no logic.
“We were never friends, Val and I.” If Kiara thinks she can convince me we can be friends with benefits, like she says, she’s got the wrong angle with Valerie. “And she was nothing like you,” I add to drive my point home.
Kiara untucks her foot and looks straight ahead. With a bitterness in her voice that sounds a lot like jealousy, she snaps, “Didn’t she move in with you?”
Yeah, she did. Kiara got that right. It was Valerie’s decision, not mine. But I’m not getting into that with Kiara. Somehow I don’t think bringing my past relationships into the conversation is going to help my case at this juncture. “She moved in, and then she moved out,” I answer Kiara’s question.
“What happened?”
“She didn’t like hanging out with me, I guess. You’d have to ask her.” I don’t share with Kiara the part about Valerie wanting us to move away. It’s irrelevant. Kiara is the one person I’d follow anywhere.
“Didn’t she tell you?”
There had been some shouting, but honestly, at that point, I was done listening. I’d stopped listening to whatever she said right around the time she decided I spent too much time playing video games and we should take up backgammon, and when I came back from work that day my gaming stuff was stashed in a box next to the trash. It might have been that week that she moved out. “I don’t think we really gelled,” I tell Kiara.
“What about Country Club?”
From a live-in girlfriend to someone I’ve never met, she’s giving me whiplash. “What’s with all the questions?”
“I’m trying to figure out why you won’t… help me out. What’s wrong with me? I’m not asking for anything more than… you know…”
Her hands move around each other in little tumbles. Is this her representation of people sleeping together? Despite me, a smile forms in my belly. I pinch my lips to keep it from spreading to my face. “Than sex ?” I ask, letting the word pop out like a mini BB gun.
“Yeah! Sex,” she repeats, drawing out the x . “You have a lot of experience, and you don’t seem to need to looooove the people you sleep with. So…”
“Nope.”
She sighs. “So let me recap. I won’t date you so we don’t ruin our friendship and you won’t… sleep with me… because…?”
Because I already feel more for you than friendship. And when we sleep together— if we sleep together—it’s gonna have to mean pretty much the same for both of us.
It’ll mean the beginning of forever. Or at least, an intention toward that.
I make the mistake of glancing at her. Her eyes are watery when she says, “You don’t find me attractive.”
I huff, upset that she’s placing this on the purely physical plane, but I do need to set the record straight. “That thing in your lower back wasn’t a gun, sweetheart.”
“You said it was just morning wood,” she hisses.
“I was lying.” Her sister’s voice alone would kill anyone’s boner. But Kiara’s body giving into my strokes, her nipples pebbling, her thighs tightening, her nails digging into my forearm, and most of all her head falling against me when she needed my support: That did me in.
“Then why won’t you sleep with me?!” Her hands spread out in disbelief, her tone is exasperated.
“Because I don’t want to just sleep with you.” There. I’ve said it. I want more with Kiara. And I’m done being her tool. It was stupid of me to initiate the fake dating. I know why I did it: to be closer to her.
All I got was a raging hard-on, some information I wish I never knew, and the confirmation that Kiara sees nothing more in me than a good friend with a functioning dick.
“Fine,” she snaps.
I stupidly hold my breath, thinking she’s going to agree to be my not-fake girlfriend.
I’m honestly ready to beg for Kiara. She’d be worth it.
We’d be good for each other.
She crosses her arms and looks out the passenger window. “We’ll stay friends.”
My stomach plummets and I clench my jaw. Pressing on the accelerator, I move us to the left lane to pass a line of trucks, then stay there for a while just for the heck of it. After three miles, the silence in the truck gets to me and I start looking for a radio station that’s not playing stupid breakup shit.
Turns out, heartache is favored by songwriters. I turn the radio off.
“When I was seventeen,” Kiara says, her gaze straight ahead, “I thought I was in love with David. I thought I was going to spend my life with him. I had planned on sleeping with him after prom. We had planned it.” She turns her face to the passenger window. Is she crying? Is she not over him?
Shit.
She turns back and looks at her hands. “After I found him cheating on me with Maya, I took the car I’d bought with my dad’s help for my sixteenth birthday. I drove, aimlessly at first. Found myself in Burlington, where my dad had an office. He’d said that morning he was going to work from there before catching a plane for a business trip. I’d never been, but knew the address. It was in a building close to the lake, right next to the ferry. I’d memorized that somehow. I don’t know how or when and I wish I never had.” She shakes her head as if to clear the rabbit hole of memories and continues with her story.
“I just needed to… I guess go cry to him. Not sure what I was thinking. Point is…” She takes a deep, shaky breath. “That’s the day I found out he had another family. I was walking up to the building, totally focused on my little sob story, when he came out the door. He was on his phone, didn’t see me. He had a big smile and was talking to someone he called son . And then he said, ‘Tell your mother I love her.’ And then, ‘I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’ For a minute I thought he had a clone or a doppelg?nger or something. A twin he’d never told us about. But he was wearing the same shirt he’d put on that morning. I remembered—it was a Father’s Day gift. I didn’t think. I just called out to him. And he turned around. And the look on his face…
“He tried to deny it. Said I was ‘ reading too much into things ’. Kept repeating that, like what I heard could mean something different.” Her mouth purses and she takes a shaky breath. “‘Reading too much into things’? Fuck that… Yeah, it all went downhill from there.”