9. Kennedy
“So, did Linc let Dom pull that tick off your ass?”
Even the mention of Linc’s name sends my brain back a week. His hands on my hips, and the look in his eyes when he didn’t think I saw him. News flash, I had. I couldn’t crane my neck hard enough when he dropped to his knees.
Hell, I struggled for the entire interaction not to lean back and press my ass against his face. The tick being stuck on my skin made things inconvenient, but it didn’t take away the desire for Linc to claim me as his own. Then, way too soon, he stood up and his hands weren’t blazing a path of arousal and need through my body anymore. Instead, I was left practically panting with a need that only he was capable of creating or fulfilling.
Just like that, all the years that passed between us vanished. I was hurtled through time and space back to a night when Linc, against all odds and reason, let me claim him as my own.
“Hellooooo. Earth to Kennedy.” Mom snaps her flour-covered fingers in front of my face, smiling when I blink owlishly and stare at her. “I asked you if Linc actually let Dom get that tick off you last week. You didn’t call to tell me how it went, and I almost resorted to calling Dom to find out.”
Heat steals up my cheeks at the memory replaying itself over and over in my head and I have to swallow to try and buy myself time to give her a vague enough answer so that she will leave me alone.
But she doesn’t even wait for me to say anything before she starts talking a mile a minute, turning her back to me in favor of the food she is making. “I don’t think he did. Not Linc. He had that growly look in his eyes. The same one your father gets when one of his rookies gives me a compliment and he wants to break him in half and then gives him the shit shift for a month to make himself feel better about it.”
I sigh, hoping she’ll get the hint and let me off the hook without eventually giving her an answer, but she doesn’t bite. Instead, I stand in the kitchen and watch while she wipes her hands impatiently on her apron and goes back to cooking like she’d been born behind a stove. The look she gives me would have had me confessing my worst sins ten years before, but I’m not a little girl anymore. So I don’t give her the answer she so desperately wants.
Instead, I pull out my phone and send my little sister Casper a text.
K: Your mother is absolutely batty.
C: She’s your mother until after the babies come. Then she’s mine so I get free babysitting.
I snort at her response, completely ignoring the righteous indignation coming from Mom’s direction.
K: Hurry up and pop out the twins. You’re getting fat.
C: I’m telling on you.
Mom gasps, and I look around to see her staring at her phone, her mouth hanging open. Damn, Casper really did tell on me.
“Kennedy Marie Townsend.” I wince at her use of my full name. “You called your sister fat? How dare you? She’s pregnant, with twins. You better be careful, or karma”s gonna bite you in the ass. Just like that tick. How do you even get a tick on your ass anyway? It’s barely spring. What did you do, just go sit in the grass naked until you got bit?”
I watch her sniff dramatically and then turn back to the massive bowl of what looks like biscuits that she is kneading with every bit of the frustration I can tell she wants to take out on me.
“Stuff it, Mother.” My words come out bratty, but I won’t be taking them back. I’m a grown-ass woman, and if I want to call my annoying, pain-in-the-ass sister fat because she deserves it, I will.
But I also take out my phone again.
K: This means war, you know.
C: Yeah, but it was soooooo worth it. How’s your ass?
K: I’m gonna kill you.
C: You want my babies. You won’t do shit.
Mom completely ignores the fact that I’ve gone silent during my conversation with Casper, and I look up to see her staring out the window almost longingly.
“Cassie should be here.” Those words hurt her. Her shoulders are slumped when she glances at me with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Kennedy. I shouldn’t have said that.”
A ball of moisture appears in my mouth out of nowhere, and I know there isn’t any way to get out of the conversation we are long overdue for. Not the one about Linc and the tick on my ass. Or Casper and the twins. Or the fact that Parker and Remy finally pulled their heads out of their asses and have their own chance at happily ever after. No. We need to talk about me.
“You know,” I swallow down the immediate rush of bile that fills my chest and threatens to spew out. “Cassie saved my life.”
The scar on my wrist itches, like it does whenever I think about my little sister or the night I tried to kill myself.
More tears fill Mom’s eyes, and I immediately regret saying anything. But instead of turning away from me, she turns off the stove and wipes her hands again before taking a seat at the bar attached to the side of the counter, staring at me expectantly.
“My senior year in high school, I was raped.”
Mom’s gasp fills the otherwise silent kitchen, and I have to look away so that I don’t get caught up in the tears that I know are falling down her cheeks. But she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t break the moment, and she doesn’t try to minimize what I’m going through.
“Cassie and Casper spent months trying to figure out why I’d try to kill myself out of nowhere. They started this entire murder board of reasons, and they couldn’t.” I start to mentally count the grooves in the wood floor of our kitchen in an attempt to keep my heart from bursting out of my chest with how hard it is beating. “I wasn’t depressed. You know that. Even after everything that happened, I wasn’t depressed. I just… I couldn’t control anything in my life except that, and I was bound and determined to get it done.”
The scar on my wrist starts burning, searing through my skin as I remember the night I tried to take control of my fate.
“I couldn’t tell you… or Dad. Dad would never look at me the same again.” Rambling is the only thing I can do, because the thought of Mom being disappointed in my choices is just too frightening. “I didn’t want to sit at the kitchen table across from you every night, wondering if you were thinking about me being hurt. I just couldn’t do it.” Emotion clogs my throat, and I clear it before continuing. “Cassie found out what happened, and she brought me back to myself when I couldn’t see through the darkness. She reminded me that I have all the control, that he didn’t take that from me. That it’s up to me to move forward and put it behind me. To live. She was such a smart-ass for a little sister. But she was there, and she saved me.”
Mistakenly, I look at my mother and see all the pain and heartache I’m putting her through written on her face and in the short jerking movement her fingers make as she fidgets.
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You’re right.”
Mom’s words are a slap in the face, a dash of cold water that I don’t know if I can ever recover from.
I look up to see her taking one hesitant step after another until she crosses the kitchen to stand directly in front of me. Her trembling fingers clasp around my hands.
“You should have said something to me when it happened, Kennedy. I’m your mother. I love you, and I would do literally anything for you. Murder someone, help you hide a body, or even keep a secret from the rest of the world. Being a mother doesn’t just mean being there for the good, my sweet girl.” She pulls me into her arms, and the choked sob that breaks free from my throat takes both of us by surprise.
“I love you, Kennedy Marie Townsend,” Mom whispers against my hair. “No matter what happened, or what happens in the future, nothing is going to change that. You should never worry about how your father or I will ever look at you. You are perfect. Every one of our children are. No matter what. Looking at you doesn’t do anything to me except make me happier than fuck that you’re still here. Losing Cassie destroyed a piece of all of us. But you’re here. You’re here, my sweet girl. And you’re loved.”
I cry, tears that I hadn’t shed after the rape. Tears that never fell when I tried to kill myself and take control of the only thing left. Tears stream down cheeks that stayed dry when Cassie died in a car accident. Tears that I’d held in for years burst through the dam of emotion that I’ve kept built up, and my mom is there to catch every single one of them.
“Who did it, Kennedy?” Her question, asked with a hoarse voice and halting words, brings back all of the memories from that night. “Can you tell me? It’s not too late to make him pay.”
“He already paid his price.” I sniff, trying not to burst into tears again. “He died that summer when he overdosed.”
Mom stays silent, and I can practically see her rewinding the clock, back through time, as she tries to think of who died that summer. Who she can hate. Who she can try to curse. Who she can dig up and kill again for hurting her child. She’d already gone to see the man responsible for killing Cassie.
“I’d kill him again,” she admits quietly a few moments later. “I’d bring him back to life, and I’d stab him in the chest just so I could watch the life drain from his eyes.”
I chortle against her chest. “Yeah. And then you’d go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“Only if they found the body,” she practically snarls in reply.
Before either of us can say anything else, or I can ask her to keep it a secret from Dad, the back door flies open with a crash and slams against the wall.
“The party’s here!” Nox screeches when he steps inside with a flourish. “What’s for dinner, Grammy?”
Mom lets me go and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand before turning to see the new additions.
Nox, standing there in an actual superhero costume and his hands on his hips, eyed the two of us suspiciously. He can’t say anything, though, because his mom pushes him out of the way with her arms full of grocery bags.
“We brought extra food,” she says from behind the brown paper bags. “Because Remy invited half the shop to dinner tonight.”
When she steps aside and Remy walks in with Linc at his side, I can’t look away. I watch him, and he stares right through me.
“Uncle Linc said that he’s gonna come to Career Day tomorrow too.” Nox starts babbling on like I’m not staring at the love of my life and trying to remember how to breathe. “So, if both him and Auntie Kenny come, you won’t have to come, Dad.” Wide-eyed, he stops talking as he realizes what he’s just said.
The silence that fills the air at his words has the power to do two things simultaneously. First, the rest of the oxygen in the room is suddenly vacuumed out, and my heart beats heavily against my chest while I try to breathe. And I’m not the only one affected.
Parker has tears leaking from both eyes and she is visibly trembling. Mom doesn’t bother hiding her sniffles and tears, staring at Nox like he is the most precious person in the entire world.
And Remy… my big brother drops to his knees faster than I’d ever be able to imagine. When he is at eye level with Nox, he pulls the child into a tight embrace.
Everyone watches the two of them in a moment that will forever be branded into our hearts. Everyone except Linc.
I would have missed it completely, except I lean back to keep the tears from leaking out. When I finally feel like I have control of them, I blink and find myself staring directly into his eyes once more. Only this time, he isn’t staring through me. He is devouring every inch of my face. The longing I see matches my own, and for almost a minute, I get to see that he wants me just as much as I want him.
Until the back door opens again, and Dad shatters the moment I’ll be happy to spend the rest of my life reliving.
The one I’ll give anything to experience.