Chapter 12
Lauren
Monday morning, I woke up to the smell of coffee and eggs.
Kevin was upstairs cooking. Weird, after the way he’d kept his distance yesterday. He’d come down twice to check my ankle, said maybe ten words total, then disappeared. Now he was making breakfast like yesterday hadn’t happened.
I took the basement stairs one hop at a time. My ankle still hurt like hell.
Kevin stood at the stove in jeans and a white T-shirt, barefoot. His hair was messy instead of doing the usual neat Superman thing.
“Hey.”
“Coffee’s made. Mugs are up there.”
I poured myself coffee and leaned against the counter, watching him crack eggs into the pan. He caught me looking once. I took a drink and stayed there anyway.
I needed to say something about the job situation before I lost my nerve.
“I need to find work,” I said.
He looked back at me. “Yeah?”
“I can’t crash in your basement forever. I’ve got some freelance design clients, but that’s barely covering my phone bill right now.”
“What kind of design?”
“Graphic stuff. Logos, Instagram posts, whatever people need.” I took another drink of coffee. “I was waiting tables in LA until about a month ago, when they fired me.”
“What happened?”
“Showed up late one too many times. Bad breakup, whole mess.” I shrugged. “My parents are off somewhere in the Caribbean right now. My brothers are scattered everywhere else. So no, there wasn’t exactly backup.”
“Three brothers?”
“Yeah. All older. I’m the baby.”
“That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Why you tried climbing motel stairs on a sprained ankle.”
I snorted. “You don’t grow up with three older brothers without learning to tough things out.” I drank more coffee. “Anyway, at least the freelance design work keeps me somewhat afloat. Barely.”
Kevin slid the eggs onto two plates, added toast, and handed one to me.
“Sit,” he said. “You keep leaning on it.”
I hated that he’d noticed. I hated that I sat.
“Jackson needs help at the bar,” he said.
“Really?”
“Haley’s been covering most of it alone. He’s complained about it like five times.”
Haley.
Great.
We sat at his kitchen table. I stretched my bad leg out underneath it and bumped his foot. He shifted half an inch, enough to tell me he’d noticed, not enough to get clear of me.
The eggs were better than I wanted them to be.
“I’ve waitressed before,” I said. “In LA. But would he actually hire me?”
“He needs help. You need money.” Kevin looked at me. “Seems worth asking.”
I ate a few more bites. I still wasn’t buying how easy he made it sound.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“Doing what?”
“Helping me. You don’t know me.”
Kevin put his fork down, looked at me, then looked away.
“My dad kicked me out when I was seventeen.”
I stopped chewing.
“We got in a fight about college. I told him I wasn’t taking over his mechanic shop. He punched me. I punched him back. He told me to get the fuck out.” Kevin picked up his fork again, then set it back down. “So I did.”
“Holy shit.”
“I lived in my car for two months. Parking lots, mostly. Worked at the mill, applied to colleges.” He took a bite of toast. “Got a scholarship eventually. But those two months sucked.”
“Wait. Your dad actually kicked you out? At seventeen?”
“Yep.”
“Where were you supposed to go?”
“Good question.” He shrugged. “Jackson brought me food, though. Every night. Burgers from the bar, whatever was left at closing. He’d find whatever parking lot I was in and hand it through my window.”
“Jackson did that?”
“For two months straight.”
“What about his parents?”
“They told him to stop. Something about liability.” Kevin shrugged. “So Jackson told them he was throwing the food away and brought it to me anyway.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” He looked at me. “So when I say Jackson saved my life, that’s what I mean. And when you showed up drunk with a busted ankle and nowhere to go, I wasn’t going to let you figure it out in some shitty motel.”
My throat went tight, and I looked down before he could see it.
“That’s really messed up,” I said. “About your dad.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Still.”
I couldn’t square it — the clean kitchen, the breakfast, the man who used to sleep in parking lots.
I looked around his kitchen again. The mugs over the sink. The clean counters. The breakfast he’d made me.
“You always this domestic, or am I getting the busted-ankle version?”
Kevin turned from the sink. “What?”
“You want it all? Wife, kids, somebody stealing your side of the bed?”
He dried his hands. “Yeah. Eventually.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Haven’t met the right person.”
“How old are you anyway?”
“Thirty-five. You’re what, mid-twenties?”
“I’ll be twenty-seven in December.” I looked down at my plate. “I keep picking men who act obsessed right up until it’s inconvenient.” I took a drink. “Then suddenly they’re busy, or confused, or emotionally unavailable, or whatever the hell we’re calling coward now.”
“What do they all have in common?”
I looked up. “What?”
“The guys you pick,” he said. “What do they all have in common?”
I laughed. It came out bitter anyway. “I don’t know. They’re the type who don’t stick around. Or they do until someone better comes along.”
“So you keep picking men who are already on their way out.”
“Yeah. Or maybe I’m just not the type worth sticking around for.”
He crossed back over, took my mug, and topped it off from the pot.
“I don’t buy that.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you drove drunk to Fairview, got in a bar fight, sprained your ankle twice, and you’re still sitting here trying to figure out how to start over.” He set the mug down by my hand. “That tells me enough to start with.”
“Or pretty stupid.”
“Could be both.”
That got a laugh out of me.
His gaze flicked to my mouth, then he forced it back to my eyes.
Kevin picked up his plate and went to the sink. Water ran while he rinsed it.
“Jackson’ll probably come by this afternoon,” he said.