“Thanks?”
“Shut up, Rudy. He’s got a good heart. But he’s not a good kid. You stick with him, you let him call the shots, you let him put you on his magic carpet and show you his world, you’re gonna end up seeing it from between bars. Your parents have their issues. But they know how to stay on the right side of the law. They know how to run a successful business. They have a whole lot more real-world experience to offer you. They can set you up for life.”
Kennedy shook her head and opened her mouth, but Julio held up a hand to stop whatever she was going to say.
“I know you don’t think they’ll take you back. Trust me, though. I’ve seen this over and over again. It wasn’t goodbye—it was a last resort. A final play to get you to do what they feel is the right thing for you to do. It might even objectively be the right thing for you to do. This is your life we’re talking about, Kennedy. You’re not obligated to stay with Rudy. You aren’t required to drive your life into the ditch just because Rudy was the one who saved you.”
“I don’t feel obligated,” she murmured.
I wished she’d said that louder or more firmly or something. It came out sounding hollow and uncertain and my heart twisted in my chest.
Julio shrugged. “So maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re just stupid.”
“What the fuck, Julio?” I was ready to jump out of the cab and fight him until I felt Kennedy go very still beside me.
I bit back my temper and forced myself to relax all under Julio’s knowing gaze. Kennedy was watching the tour bus with a distant expression I couldn’t read. Julio let the silence settle for several minutes.
“If you go out there right now and tell your parents that you’ve had a change of heart and you want to come home so badly that you’ve left Rudy and have sworn off everything they take issue with and you’re ready to do whatever it takes to fix this—and you mean it—I can almost guarantee they’ll welcome you home with open arms. You’re lucky, Kennedy. One of the luckiest. There’s nothing standing in the way of you reconciling with your parents. Nothing but pride.”
A tear slid down Kennedy’s face and my heart sank. He was right—and she was smart enough to know it.
Chapter Thirty-Six
KENNEDY
Some part of me wanted very badly for Julio to be telling the truth. If all that stood between me and my parents was my own pride, I could handle that. I could find a way to fix this.
A very, very small part of me was almost willing to give up everything I had with Rudy to make a relationship with my parents happen. The pragmatic part of me heard what he was saying about my future and knew that it made sense.
He hit all my weak points and would have had a fighting chance at convincing me if he’d stopped the car on any other street on any other day. But it was prep day for the tour bus and I was watching it happen all over again.
They were leaving me behind again.
They were pretending that everything was fine and going on about their business again.
They didn’t want me. They didn’t want to deal with me. They made that clear every single time they scheduled a therapist appointment for me instead of talking to me, every time they hired a nanny to cuddle me and read me bedtime stories, every time they threw money at me instead of taking my phone calls. Their leaving me when I needed them most was consistent. At least I could give them points for that.
“Maybe I am stupid,” I said slowly. Rudy held his breath beside me. “Maybe Rudy will wreck my life if I let him. But maybe I’d wreck my own life anyway.”
“Kennedy, come on. You aren’t thinking rationally.”
I ground my teeth. Julio was proving to be just as infuriating as every therapist before him.
“Will you just listen for a second? Look, I know my parents can give me all the practical life skills and a line to a career and everything. I get it, okay? And—Rudy, I’m sorry, but it’s true—I know Rudy could get me into a lot of shit I wouldn’t know how to get out of.”
I struggled to put my feelings and the things I knew way in the back of my brain somewhere into words.
Julio waited patiently and I could almost feel him expecting me to come to the conclusion he wanted me to come to.
“If I go back there, I have nobody. You think I’ll have my parents, but you’re wrong. I won’t have them. I’ve never had them. They’ve always been there the same way the sun has always been there. You need it, it provides you with everything you need to live, but it doesn’t really give a shit about you. It comes and goes as it pleases. You can worship it, you can curse it, you can get in a rocket and fly to it, it won’t make a difference.” My hands curled into fists as I spoke. I paused to catch my breath in my burning chest.
“Kennedy. Do you honestly think your parents don’t give a shit about you?” The dripping compassion in Julio’s voice couldn’t quite hide the ghost of commiseration behind it.
He’d been through the system. He knew that what I was saying wasn’t just possible, it was almost disgustingly common. Some parents just suck.
“I think they love me as much as they are capable of loving me,” I said evenly. “Maybe as much as they are capable of loving any other person besides themselves. They rationalize their parenting, they think and research and plan and schedule and structure and therapize and all the right things, but they never fucking talk to me like a person.” Tears blurred my vision and I wiped them away impatiently.
“I understand where you’re coming from,” Julio said gently. “But the love that you feel you’re missing from your parents isn’t something you’re going to find romantically. Not with Rudy or anyone else. That pain can only be resolved inside of you, or with your parents.”
I struggled to understand what he was saying. Reading between the lines wasn’t exactly my strong suit. “You think I’m using Rudy as a replacement for my dad?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly,” he said, looking mildly uncomfortable. He paused for a moment, rubbing his chin. “Here’s what I’m saying. You’re lonely and feeling rejected by your parents. Rudy cares about you a lot and you’ve spent a lot of time together. It might feel like he’s the only person in the world who could ever understand you, the only person who could ever want to be with you. What I’m saying is, that isn’t true. Your options extend beyond your parents and Rudy. There’s a whole world of people out there.”
I really thought Rudy would have exploded ages ago, but he hadn’t. Now he was sitting quietly; not with the guarded, hooded look he wore when confronted by authority, but with the soft frown he wore when he was really paying attention to something.
For a reason I couldn’t understand at the time, it comforted me. It settled me and allowed me to clarify something I had never been entirely certain of.
“Julio, I’m going to say something and I’m going to need you to try very hard not to dismiss it as teenage angst,” I said.
“I’m listening.”
I turned to him and looked him full in the eye. “I would rather be alone and penniless on the streets than go back there and beg them to take me back. I would rather hitchhike to Canada and start a maple syrup farm than spend another weekend lying in a bedroom surrounded by money in a big empty house wishing someone cared enough about me to check on me. I would rather live in a dumpster with drug addicts and raccoons than spend one single second more living with people who wouldn’t notice if I died.”
Julio managed to keep his serious listening face on for about two point five seconds before breaking into a boyish grin. “You know you make it hard not to chalk it up to teenage angst when you put it like that, right?”
“Figured you could use the challenge.”
Rudy smirked, which made my heart sing. He was going to be okay. We were going to be okay, one way or another. Julio was quiet for a while, watching the tour bus.
My dad came outside and my stomach twisted painfully, but he didn’t even look in our direction. He went and did his initial check—there�
�s always three, and he never fails to find something wrong the first two times—then came out for his traditional scolding session. Watching it made me feel tired somewhere deep in my soul.
“Mom will come out next,” I said. “She’ll give dad three minutes to blow off steam, then she’ll come out and defend the roadies. He’ll storm into the house, she’ll give them a generous tip, then they’ll go fix whatever he decided was a problem this time.”
We waited.
The three minutes came and went without a sign of my mother. He made it to four minutes before faltering, confused. They’d had the same routine since they first got the tour bus. He recovered awkwardly, then waved them off to fix whatever it was.
Once they were back in the bus, my mother finally came outside. I tapped Rudy’s arm urgently.
“Roll down your window.”
He did. I held my breath and listened hard.
“—cleaning up your messes anymore. If they quit, it’s on you. If we lose a contract, it’s on you. If we lose our daughter, it’s on you.”
I saw dad tense up and tensed right along with him. Her words stung my heart in a way I didn’t know how to deal with.
“Am I going to lose you?” he asked.
She stared at him coolly for an uncomfortably long moment.
“I’m going to finish getting ready,” she said finally.
She went back inside without giving him an answer. I thought he was going to explode. He drooped instead. It wasn’t long—his pride would never have allowed him to show the full weight of his emotions in front of his employees—but it was long enough to show me that he was still human, still capable of regret.
I wondered if that was enough to save our family. In that moment, I didn’t think it was.
“Can we go now?” I asked. The air seemed a little heavier than usual and my eyes burned again.
Julio pulled away from the curb and took us back on our aimless adventure.
“Do you like to read?” Julio asked. “Or listen to audiobooks, anything like that?”
“All of the above, and podcasts when I’m in the mood. Why?”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a few minutes, apparently pondering. “I have some books I think you should read. Not a professional recommendation or anything since I’m not technically your therapist—but there’s a couple I think you could really get something out of.”
“Text me the titles and I’ll look them up,” I told him. “If they’re self-help positivity bullshit, I’ll skim the first page, gag, laugh till I throw up, and pretend I’ve read the whole thing. Just as a heads’ up.”
He chuckled. “Fair enough.”
I leaned heavily against Rudy and laced my fingers in his. I breathed in his scent and brushed my cheek against his, soaking up the pleasant wonder of being so close to someone who wanted to be so close to me. He responded in kind, comfortably tangling himself up with me as much as possible in the tiny cab.
I knew I’d said things and neglected to say things that could have hurt his feelings or touched his insecurities. I knew those things would probably come up later.
I kissed his jawline and murmured softly in his ear. “Hey. We okay?”
He squeezed me a little tighter. “For now,” he said. “For as long as we can be. For as long as I can make us be.”
“I’ll help,” I promised.
He grinned at me and kissed me.
“Ugh, come on guys, not in my truck. Gross.”
Rudy punched Julio’s shoulder, jerking me hard against his chest in the process. Julio pretended to lose control just enough to make me scream. Then the cab was full of laughter and I felt like I was home.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
KENNEDY
The occasional sleepover was one thing, but if I was going to be homeless and crashing at Jason’s indefinitely, there needed to be some kind of clear and open understanding.
Rudy and Julio each offered to talk to Jason for me. I declined.
If there was one thing I’d learned that year, it was that I shouldn’t rely on other people to do the things I really should be doing myself.
That doesn’t mean I was brave about it. I had plenty of openings and opportunities to bring it up, and Rudy tossed me a couple of golden segues, but I was bound and determined to whip myself into an anxious frenzy before I spoke to Jason directly. It wasn’t really intentional—but with every passing minute and missed opportunity, my heart rate raised a little bit more.
Finally I reached a level of misery where I would either need to leave the house or talk to him.
He had just finished reading to the littles and sent them off to play when I found him alone in the playroom.
“Kennedy, hi! I’m sorry, you just missed story time. I could read it again if you like.” His gentle teasing might have put me at ease some other day, but I was far too wound up to appreciate it properly.
“Um—no, thank you. I actually—I just—can I talk to you?”
I was twisting my sweat-dampened fingers together so hard I thought they would break.
Jason gestured to a velvety-soft bean bag chair.
“Step into my office,” he said kindly.
He sat down in the low, wide armchair across from the bean bag. That chair must have been specially designed for lap-sitting and snuggles. I could imagine some of my nannies getting a lot of use out of a chair like that.
I sank into the bean bag and released a long sigh. It was impossible to remain at peak anxiety in a room like that.
The soft pastel walls, the comfortable rugs and chairs, the friendly little toys—it was the safest of places, big and soft enough to absorb the best and worst of everything. Jason was the same way. He seemed to just hold space around him. I didn’t think anything could ever faze him.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard. I mean, I assume someone told you, but just in case no one did, I figured I’d better, but I didn’t—um—can I start over?”
“As many times as you like,” he said with a genuine smile.
I breathed a little easier and pulled my thoughts together. I realized that I simply did not want to say it out loud and that avoiding the words themselves was scrambling all of my feelings about it.
I focused on the sentence, repeating it over and over in my head until it didn’t hurt anymore.
“My dad kicked me out,” I said. It still hurt to say it, but at least I managed to get it out there. “I have nowhere to go. He said he’d give me money, but he hasn’t yet and I don’t know how much or when he’s intending to do that. With that being said, I am definitely planning on getting a job as soon as possible, so I will be able to handle my own expenses and get a place—and a car—and everything, but with school I’ll only be able to work part-time unless I give up sleeping which I could definitely do, I mean not long term of course, but short term definitely—”
“Kennedy,” he interrupted gently.
I gasped for air then swallowed hard. I licked my dry lips and tried to steady myself.
“Yes?”
I bit off another rambling apology with more than a little effort.
“Ask me what you need to ask me,” he said.
I took a couple of quick breaths, then stared at my fingernails. “Um—can I stay here for a little while? Just until I get on my feet.”
“No,” he said, still in the gentlest of voices. Tears sprang instantly to my eyes and the apology started creeping up my throat again, but he kept talking. “I don’t want you trying to get an apartment and a car and utilities and all of that established while you’re trying to graduate. Rudy tells me that you’re near the top of your class…or that you used to be. And I know you missed some school that you’ll need to make up in order to graduate on time.”
Anxiety clutched at my chest. If I tried to do all of that I’d have to graduate late or test out, and both of those would wreck my chances at getting into good colleges or earning scholarships. I bit my lip hard.
“I w
ant you to succeed,” Jason continued. “So I am going to ask you to stay at least through graduation. After that, it’s up to you. The world is your oyster. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I like the way it sounds. I don’t want to hear anything about rent between now and then, either. If your father does send you money, you can save it or spend it, whichever you prefer. I suggest saving seventy percent of it, only because it’ll make your life easier in the long run, but that is entirely up to you.”
I wanted to believe my ears. I really did. I wanted to be able to just relax and focus on school without all the drama and heartache—but after the year I’d had, I couldn’t make myself believe that it could really be that easy.
“What are the conditions?” I asked.
His eyes softened and he smiled.
“The conditions are simple,” he said. “First, you’ll have your own room. I have a spare or three. Comes with the territory. Not because I don’t want you and Rudy sleeping together—you’re adults, you can do what you like—but because I don’t want your security to be tied up in any way to a sexual relationship.”
My cheeks and ears burned with embarrassment while my eyes blurred with tears. Too many feelings.
I rubbed my palms over the comforting softness of the bean bag.
“Second, you’ll have household chores to complete. Everybody pitches in around here. It’s the only way to keep this old house from falling to pieces.”
I nodded. “That’s fair.”
“Third—and most importantly—you will respect the other people who live here. This is a safe place and must remain so. Friends are allowed to come over, but they must also show respect for the people and the house itself. Everyone is permitted to feel how they feel—including yourself—but no one is allowed to weaponize those feelings to hurt another person living in the house. Understood?”
A friendly warm buzz curled over my harried nerves, soothing them. Safe. Emotionally permissive. No weaponized feelings. A knot I didn’t even know I had loosened between my shoulder blades.
Something Wicked: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 2) Page 23
