Five #2
Pulling up in front of her house, I had to unlace our hands to put the car in park and turn off the ignition. She climbed out and tossed a cute, crooked smile at me before closing the car door.
Chloe did say she didn’t need the car back tonight, but I never expected to actually spend the night at Renée’s. And even though we made out in the rain, I still wasn’t expecting sex.
I followed her to the front door, and she let me inside. “How do you do laundry?” I asked, scanning her small space for a washer or dryer.
“I handwash a lot, but I also use the laundromat next to the grocery store. Sometimes Bennett lets me use the machines at the pub, too.” She took my coat from me and hung both of our jackets up before turning on the space heater below.
My jeans were pasted to my legs, so I wasn’t sure where to sit or what to do. I just glanced around the cozy space that just screamed Renée’s personality from every corner.
“You want me to hang up your pants, too?” she asked, opening a drawer and pulling out what looked like a pair of fleece pants.
“Uhhh …”
She rolled her pretty gray eyes. “I’m assuming you have boxers on?
You can hide your chicken legs under a blanket if you’re worried about blinding me with their WASPy paleness.
” She ducked into the bathroom, then came out a second later wearing the navy fleece pants.
She hung her dark green jeans over the space heater.
Shrugging, I unbuttoned my jeans and fought to get them down my legs, grateful my boxers were black and mostly dry.
She accepted my jeans and jerked her chin toward the bed. “I don’t really have a living room, as you can see.”
“Right.” I swallowed and went to sit on the edge of her bed. She grabbed her laptop and brought it onto the bed from the nightstand. “So … movie?”
I spied a quilt on the edge of her bed and dragged it over my legs and waist before settling against her headboard. “Sure.”
We settled on a comedy with Melissa McCarthy, but all I could really focus on was how damp her white tank top was, and how thin the material of her bra beneath it was. Her nipples poked out hard, teasing me, as the flicker of light from the movie cast moving shadows across her face.
“You want something to drink?” she asked, getting up from the bed to open the mini fridge. “I have beer, cider, water, juice.”
“Water is great.”
Even in those baggy fleece pants, her ass was rocking when she bent over. She brought back two bottles of water and handed me one.
Sitting beside each other on the bed, we both unscrewed our bottles and took long sips.
Shit, things were awkward again.
Even if that word didn’t hold meaning to me right now, it still meant something.
We needed to get back to when we were at the pub, or in the rain making out in the high beams of the car.
I glanced around the room, but kept landing back on her face. “Um …”
She faced me. “You need to pee? The compost toilet is just like any other toilet. I just have to take it to the sanitation dump site about once a week. That’s all.”
I shook my head. “No … Penny read me your texts to her earlier today. The ones where you were freaking out about the date and what to wear and stuff.”
Her jaw dropped, and unease crawled across her face.
“Don’t be mad at her. I was freaking out, too, and she did it to let me know that you were feeling similar. I just want you to know that … you were at the pub first. Just because they’re my cousins, doesn’t mean I’ll let nepotism screw you out of a job.”
She glanced to the side for a moment before focusing back on me. “Okaaaay … are you ending this?”
“No!” I blurted out. “I just … if this doesn’t work out, I want to reassure you that I won’t let them keep me and fire you. But I want this to work. I don’t want any of those things to need to happen.”
“Okaaaay …”
Exhaling, I shoved my fingers into my hair. “Sorry, I …”
“Why were you freaking out?” she asked softly.
Swallowing again, I swirled my finger around the intricate pattern on the handmade quilt. “I know my sudden arrival on the island has been met with some speculation and curiosity. My cousins have kept things quiet, which I appreciate, but at the same time, I feel like a bit of a fraud.”
“A fraud?”
I took another sip of water—liquid courage in sober form. “I’m ashamed of what happened and how I handled things, but at the same time, I need to own them. I don’t believe in just forgetting your past. It shapes us. The good and the bad.”
“What did you do, Logan?” Her words came out slow and quiet. Cautious.
I glanced at her for a second. “I’m not proud of any of this, okay?”
Her head bobbed.
“Brooke said I should maybe wait to tell this on the third date but …”
“Don’t tell me you’re married. Or have a secret love child with someone loosely related to the Trumps.” Her eyes went wide. “Oh god, you’re not a Republican, are you?”
That made me smile. “No. My parents are registered Democrats. We all are.” Clearing my throat, I glanced away from her again.
“I made a deal with my parents that if they let me go backpacking for two years, I’d declare the major they wanted me to in college and buckle down.
So, even though they didn’t want me to take a gap year, let alone two, I did.
But when I turned twenty, I had to come home, and I enrolled in college. I hated every second of it.”
“Some people aren’t meant for it. It’s not the end-all-be-all. There are other paths to take. Trade school. Culinary school.”
My head bobbed as I collected my thoughts.
“Yeah, they don’t see it that way. And since we made a deal …
anyway, against my parents’ wishes, I bartended at a nightclub while going to school.
They didn’t want me to work. They wanted me to focus on school, and my dad wanted me to pledge the same fraternity that he and my brothers were in.
I didn’t want to be in a fraternity. That whole vibe just turns me right off.
And I wanted to make my own money. I hated being beholden to them for anything. ”
In my peripheral vision, I could see her head move with a nod of understanding.
“One night, this beautiful woman came into the club. We started chatting, hit it off, and quickly became a couple after a few dates. Everything was great. I felt like I could really fall for her. Only when she came to me and told me she was pregnant, and that she wasn’t twenty-two like her driver’s license said—her fake driver’s license—but actually only eighteen, my life kind of imploded. ”
“You do have a secret love child,” she whispered, an attempt to break the tension.
I cracked a crooked smile. “She was a smart girl with a wild side. She finished high school at sixteen and was a legit sophomore at eighteen. But because of her brains, her parents gave her too much credit, too long a leash, if we’re going to use archaic terms. Her dad was also a Republican senator. ”
“Fuck.”
“Which I only found out after she told me she was pregnant. With a name like Johnson, it’s not like I’m immediately going to assume anything, right?
He sent guys after me, claiming that I needed to marry her or he’d make my life a living hell.
That no way was his daughter getting an abortion when he was very vocally pro-life. ”
Her face grew stoney.
“Obviously, I said I would. I wasn’t going to abandon my child.
Even though I was really mad at Leila for lying to me for three months, and definitely wasn’t ready to be a father, I agreed to do the right thing.
But then she lost the baby, and by that point, my parents were already livid with me.
Leila’s dad shipped her off to Europe to go live with family there, and my family went no-contact with me. ”
She reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze.
“I’m not proud of what I did next. I’m not proud of any of this, really. But after losing Leila, the baby, and my family, I … I didn’t know what I was going to do, so I took a bunch of ketamine, then wrapped my car around a pole.”
“Whoa.”
My throat grew tight, and I nodded. “I don’t remember everything, but a part of me thinks …
wonders if maybe I did it on purpose. Like I drove into the pole while high just to end things.
Because the pain was too unbearable. A lot of that night is a blur.
” Tears I absolutely did not want to shed burned the backs of my eyes.
“Oh, Logan …”
“And when I woke up in the hospital, nobody was there. My parents never came. They wouldn’t let my siblings. Even my brother—and it was his hospital—never came to visit me. Even though I didn’t die, I was dead to them.”
“That’s fucked up. As much as my sisters drive me nuts, I know they’d still come to see me if I crashed my car and wound up in the hospital. No matter what my parents said. No matter if we were fighting, not speaking to each other, or had just tried to kill each other over a cardigan.”
“I never felt more alone than I did at that moment. I was homeless, without any family or a support system. While still in the hospital, I saw a social media post about the island, and that’s when I remembered that I still had family.
Family who might not disown me because I made some mistakes.
So I dropped out of college, packed up what I could in my backpack and flew out here. ”
“Whoa,” she said again. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“And you haven’t spoken to your parents since?”
“I haven’t spoken to my parents since they told me how big of a disappointment I am to them when I confessed that Leila was pregnant.”
She still held my hand, her thumb running back and forth across my knuckles. I took that as a good sign. That she wasn’t so repelled by my news that she couldn’t bear to even touch me.
“I regret all of it,” I said quietly. “I should have gotten to know Leila better. Figured out—somehow—that she was lying. And even though we used condoms … accidents happen.” I shook my head and shrugged one shoulder.
“I mean, maybe she poked holes in them? Anything is possible. She lied about so much.”