The way he dug at his skin reminded me of my brother. He had skin peeling around every visible finger. Austin used to get so antsy during car rides, especially those to visit our mom in her apartment right after she’d moved out. She bounced from place to place and my brother’s hands bore the evidence of his pain and her instability. The first place on Clear Creek Road was right outside of Fort Hood . . . we ate frozen pizza off paper plates while my dad stood over us. The second one, only a block away from the first, was a little smaller and a little messier, and she said she lived alone but the soldier’s boots by the door said otherwise. By the time she was in the third and final apartment, with a handful of roommates she didn’t even try to hide, Austin had such thick scabs around every finger. One of Mom’s roommates walked in smoking a cigarette and offered it to my brother, who was sixteen at the time. Our mom and dad screamed at each other for so long that night that I fell asleep on Austin’s shoulder, and I woke up to my dad yanking open the car door and shouting that we were never, under any circumstance, to be around her without his supervision.
As I sat in the driveway, I shook my head, trying to jumble up the memories enough to lose them and stay present in this moment with Kael.
“Do you want a ride or not? I really have to get going,” I repeated my offer, annoyed at myself for persisting.
“Aren’t you already late? Elodie seemed pretty worried about you being late.” He leaned down to look at me and I noticed his eyes on my cell phone screen. “More worried than you, at least.”
I smiled sarcastically and plugged my phone into the cord connected to my car. “Are you going to get in or not? Last chance.”
He made eye contact with me and held it just a second too long. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror while I thought of something witty yet sarcastic that I might say as I drove off, leaving him in the driveway.
He changed my plan by trying to open the passenger door behind me. I pressed the lock button to prove a point.
“This isn’t an Uber,” I told him, only half joking, and unlocked the doors.
He walked around the car, opened the passenger door, and sat down next to me. This was different. Usually my only passenger was pint-sized Elodie, but here was this big guy sitting next to me with his knees touching the dashboard, smelling like my coconut body wash.
“You can adjust the seat,” I told him.
I put the car in reverse and my gear shift stuck for a second. It had been doing that lately. My reliable Lumina had been on this earth for more years than I had and was one of the few constants in life since I bought it for five hundred dollars on my eighteenth birthday. It was the first thing that was solely mine, and I didn’t ask for a penny from my dad.
I was the only one of my friends to have a job in high school, working part time and weekends as a server at a local pizza place. My small group of friends would complain, trying to pull me away from work to go to parties, to the lake, to smoke weed in the parking lot of the elementary school where we hung out. Yes, elementary school. We were mildly delinquent, but at least I could pay for my own delinquency. All of them relied on their parents for allowance, and all three of them had since moved away. One went to Kentucky for college, one to Colorado for a change of scenery and a more exciting life, and one to Kansas for a soldier who promised to love her forever.
“Ugh,” I groaned, and jiggled the gear, frustrated at my car and the lie of forever. No one could ever love someone forever. After all these years growing up, love itself was the biggest lie I’d been told throughout my life.
“Yeah, my car and my house are falling apart. I know,” I said, before Kael could.
He looked over at me, confusion clear on his face.
“Didn’t say anything.” He shrugged and looked out the window.
I jiggled the gear one more time and it finally moved. I looked at him again and I swear there was a tiny bit of a smile on his face. It was hard to look away from. He annoyed the shit out of me and I hated that his first impression of me outside of the spa had been a big, bright banner of my failing life. My tires crunched down the gravel driveway and we were on our way.
I picked up my phone and saw my dad’s name across the top. I didn’t need to read the text to know he was asking me where I was. I also didn’t need to respond, because why would I? I knew he’d lecture me anyway, and I’d rather keep it to one instead of two.
Yay for Tuesdays.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The alley across the way looked deserted as we pulled onto the street. It was after work, with the shops now closed. Everyone had cleared out in the last hour, but Bradley’s truck was still outside his mattress shop. Sometimes I would watch him drive from his shop to his house directly across the street with a truck bed full of mattresses, which always left me wondering what he was really transporting. Kael buckled his seatbelt across his chest and I ignored the annoying ding my car gave, the one that reminded me to put my seatbelt on. Luckily it was an old car so it would ding only once, sometimes twice. I always waited to put my seatbelt on later, a few streets away. I’m not sure why—a little bit of living recklessly, I guess.
As I got closer to my dad’s house on post, the familiar creep of dread was washing over me. I thought about trying to start a conversation with Kael, but from what little I knew about this guy, talking wasn’t really his thing. I glanced over at him and quickly turned on the radio. I had never been around anyone who made me feel this prickly awkwardness before. I couldn’t explain what this felt like—couldn’t even be sure that I disliked it—but I just had this weird desire to talk to him. What was that? The urge to pierce the air, the need to fill the space with words? Maybe Kael had it right by choosing his words sparingly, and the rest of us had it wrong.
My Spotify was playing a song I hadn’t heard before, but I recognized Shawn Mendes’s voice immediately. I turned the volume up a little, trying to contain my inner fangirl on hearing a new song from him for the first time. Kael didn’t react at all to the music, even when I turned it louder and played the song twice in a row. He sat there, like a statue, in my car as I drove closer and closer to the impending doom of the dinner table.
My gas indicator light came on, a bright reminder of my disorganization and irresponsibility. When the Shawn Mendes song finished, it was time for an ad break: a testimonial for a weight-loss clinic, great for my psyche, and an offer for low-interest car loans. “Huge military discounts!” the voice promised, with a borderline drill-sergeant shout. Someday I would be grown-up enough to pay for ad-free listening, but that day wasn’t here yet.
“I can play something else if you want,” I told him, ever the cordial host. “What kind of music do you like?”
“This is fine.”
“Okay.” I replayed the new Shawn song a third time.
I exited the highway and was glad to see there wasn’t a line to enter the base. I loved living on my side of town, close enough to the post, but far enough from my dad that I could breathe.
“Here we are,” I said, as if he couldn’t see the bright lights ahead of us.
He shifted his hips and pulled out a dog-eared wallet from the pocket of his ACU pants. He dropped his military ID into my open hand. The tips of his warm fingers grazed my skin and I jerked my hand away. His ID fell between the seats.