Chapter 10
Aspen
Present
“Inever saw any of that money.” My words are stolen by the sea breeze and pulled out into the dark sky beyond.
The two of us sit shoulder to shoulder on an overlook on the ocean’s edge.
We’re the only car up here, and it feels like we’re the only two people in the city as we sit before the ocean.
It’s calm, despite the raging discovery between us.
Reid’s silent next to me as he digests my words, before his shoulders start to shake with anger. “Those selfish fuckers,” he mutters.
I don’t bother disagreeing. Our foster parents, Gina and Patrick, didn’t give a shit about us kids. They liked collecting their paycheck, being praised for being such good people, taking in us “unfortunate children,” and having extra hands around the house for chores.
They weren’t abusive physically, or like a lot of the horror stories you hear about foster homes, but they were neglectful, and not the parental figures I needed emotionally or for stability.
They gave us kids enough resources to scrape by, just barely most of the time, to not have any questions raised about the environment they provided.
“I mean, I knew they kept the government money they were being handed out for us, but I never would’ve thought…” I trail off.
“You never even thought that I’d send anything back for you?”
I shrug and watch the waves crash against the shore in a steady, hypnotic beat. “Yeah, I mean, you never tried to reach back out once you left. I thought you abandoned me just like everyone else.”
“I couldn’t take you with me,” he argues, but it lacks his usual hardness. “You were too young, and I was a kid myself.”
“I know. Logically, I know that.” Emotionally, the wound is still more tender than I thought.
Reid looked out for me that year we lived together more than anyone ever had in my life.
Not my biological mother who got pregnant with me when she was fifteen and was shunned from her family, church, and community.
Not my aunt and uncle who took me in to try to keep up appearances for the rest of my family, until they decided I wasn’t worth the stain on their names too, and certainly not Gina and Patrick.
But I shouldn’t hold him to the same standards that I hold the actual adults in my life that failed me. He’s right. He was a kid himself, and he did all that he could for me.
The idea that he sent money back for me for college? All this time when I thought he never looked back?
I chew on my lip and force the burn in my throat down.
“Do you still talk to them?” he asks.
“Not since the day I moved out.”
He looks over at me, his cold eyes calculating. “Good.”
“I wonder if they ever think about us.” Or my mother, or his. If any of the ones who left us along the way do.
He laughs bitterly. “I hope they do, every time they turn on the damn radio and hear one of my songs. I hope they think about me and wish that they had stuck around long enough to try to leech off of me. Not that I’d give any of them another fucking cent, but I just want the opportunity to spit in their faces. ”
“I’m sorry they took all the money from you.” Guilt that doesn’t belong to me heats my cheeks. “If I would’ve known—”
“You have nothing to apologize for, so don’t,” he cuts me off.
“Was it a lot?” I hesitate to ask but do anyway. I can’t help it; I’m curious.
He rubs the back of his neck. “Enough for you to have gone through vet school, if that’s what you still wanted to do when you graduated.”
The breath is knocked from my lungs like a physical blow hit me square in the chest. That amount of money…of his money, that he selflessly tried to give me.
“Oh my god,” I choke.
“Yeah,” he says between clenched teeth. “I should sue the fuckers for it.”
“I wanna sue them for it,” I half tease. “Especially with my loan payments coming out of my checking account every month for a degree I didn’t even get to finish.”
He cocks his head. “You went to vet school?”
A choked laugh bursts from my throat. “No. I’d never be able to handle the sad parts of that job, and as you now know, I knew I didn’t have the money for it.”
He swallows thickly.
“Once I moved out here, I went to a small community college for a business degree, but I only made it through the first two years before I dropped out.”
“Why?”
A simple question with a complicated answer.
“I was lost.” Still kind of am I guess. Maybe a little bit like him.
“I was pouring money into it and racking up loans, all for a degree that I didn’t even really want.
” I only chose business because I thought I needed to go to college and have that slip of paper, not because I had any idea of what I wanted to do.
Still don’t.
“So I decided to cut my losses, Kevin offered me full-time hours at On Tap, and I figured once I decided what I wanted to do, I’d go back.”
Reid narrows his eyes on me in a way that heats my blood. “But you haven’t.”
“It’s only been a little over a year since I dropped out,” I argue.
He nods to himself. “Fair enough. How much debt did you rack up?”
“It started at about thirty-five thousand, and I think with a year of payments, it’s at a solid thirty-four thousand.” I laugh but it’s definitely not funny.
Reid blinks. “I’ll pay it for you.”
He says it so casually. So easily. Like that amount of money is nothing.
To him, it probably isn’t. But still.
I baulk at the offer. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
My mouth opens and closes like a fish on a line, nothing coming out. “You just—you can’t. I couldn’t accept that.”
He frowns deeply and squares his shoulders toward me. “I wanted to do it for you in the first place. Just accept it—”
“I don’t want to owe anybody anything!”
“You wouldn’t owe me,” he rears back. “I’m not giving you a loan. I don’t want, or expect, you to pay me back.”
“No.” Even though part of me is dying to say yes, to be free of the weight on my shoulders that the debt brings to my life, but I can’t do it.
It was a hard lesson to learn as a kid when I was bounced from one person to another who wanted nothing to do with me, that I never wanted to rely on someone else.
And whether or not Reid would want to be paid back, I’d always feel like I owed him something. That he held something over my head, even if he didn’t use it against me.
“Penny, don’t be stubborn just—”
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “My answer is no, so you’re wasting your breath.”
He looks like he still wants to argue, his shoulders tight with the desire for a fight, but he must see the stone resolve on my face and drops it. He sighs heavily and looks back out toward the water.
Only the sound of the waves fills the air for a while, before I ask the burning question that’s been on my mind since I first found out about the money. “Did you think I was just ungrateful? That I never tried to get in touch with you and thank you for it?”
A muscle in his jaw clicks as he stares out toward the water. The salt in the air brings out the slight curl in his dark hair. “I didn’t care, honestly. And I sort of forgot about it.”
My stomach drops at that and I turn away from him slightly. Well, that fucking hurt.
Noticing my reaction, he straightens up and holds out a hand. “I didn’t mean it to be a dick.”
That’d be a first.
“I didn’t send you that money expecting you to send me fucking flowers or something in thanks.
I didn’t expect anything from it, or you.
Hell, I didn’t care if you even used it for school.
I just wanted you to have a shot when I knew no one was going to be looking out for you except you.
And if I could make it a little easier for you to get out of there”—he runs a frustrated hand through his hair—“then I wanted you to have that chance.”
When no one was worried about my future, he was still thinking ahead, planning, trying to do what the adults in my life should’ve been doing. My heart thunders in my chest so hard I wonder if he can see it in the moonlight.
“Once I started getting more steady income and had hired an accountant to my team, I had her send through payments each month automatically,” he explains.
“So I never had to think about it after the first couple of times. That’s what I meant when I said I forgot about it.
And yeah, over the years I blocked all of it out. ”
“Including me,” I say.
He nods gravely. “Including you.”
He doesn’t try to apologize for it, and I don’t expect him to. Not after getting to know him more the last few weeks. If there’s one thing I’ve picked up from him, besides the fact that he loves to pick a fight, it’s that he’s completely unapologetic.
I was too young for him to ever tell me much about how he ended up in Gina and Patrick’s house, but I can’t imagine it’s good. If he wanted to block everything out from his past, including me, I can understand it. I try to do it myself, although he seems better at it than me.
And I need to stop holding that against him, or try to.
“Do you still want to forget about me?” I ask so quietly, the sound of the water almost drowns out my question.
A beat, a wave crashing, a blink of the stars in the moonlit sky, the air in my lungs locked up tight while I wait.
I’ll respect his decision. If he doesn’t want to ever see me again, to completely put his past behind him, I’ll be okay with it.
I will.
But he turns, those blue eyes finding me in all the darkness that surrounds us, and traces each line of my face like he’s trying to memorize it, not forget it.
“No,” he says, voice as gritty as the sand below. “I don’t.”
My heart catches in my throat and I lean closer, just enough for our shoulders to brush. The brief contact sends a warm tingle down my arm and throughout my body. “Good.”
“Do you want to forget about me?”
“I never did.”