Page 20 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

“Much? So he has changed some?”

“Well, he’s taller.”

“Really? I wouldn’t have thought he could get any taller.”

“I know. He was already a tree when we were kids. But trust me, he’s taller now. I thought he was going to hit his head on the doorframe when he was leaving the house this morning.”

“Wait, so is he staying there at Jason’s with you?”

“Yeah,” Taylor said.

“That’s crazy. You’re letting him stay in your house?”

“It’s his house too. I can’t exactly tell him that he’s not allowed to stay here.”

“No, I know. I guess I’m surprised he would even want to,” Maddie said. “I mean, he must be able to tell you don’t want him there, right?”

“I don’t know,” Taylor admitted. “I don’t know how much I mind having him here, to be completely honest with you.”

“Are you serious? I mean, I know he must be interesting, after everything that’s happened — everything we don’t know about him. I want to find out all about his life as much as anybody does.”

“You want that a lot more than most people do,” Taylor said with a laugh. “That’s why I called you, Maddie. I always know that I can count on you when I want to indulge my need for gossip.”

“Okay, okay,” Maddie agreed. “So I want to know everything about what’s been going on with him. But my point stands, I think. Even though he’s an object of curiosity, it doesn’t change what we know about the kind of person he is. I don’t know if I’d even feel safe sharing a house with him.”

“That’s not fair,” Taylor objected. “We know the worst thing he ever did — at least, we’re assuming it’s the worst thing he ever did. Burning down the Chesterfield farm and then running away instead of sticking around to deal with it. But before that happened, he was our friend for a long time. Does everything we liked about him just go away because of one action?”

“I never liked him that much,” Maddie said. “You and I hung out with him because he was friends with Bradley, but I never felt great about it. He wasn’t, like, one of our friends.”

Taylor frowned. She hadn’t realized that Maddie felt this way about Kane. In fact, she was fairly sure that Maddie hadn’t felt this way when they were younger, and that this was some sort of revisionist history. Maddie was rewriting the old story and putting herself on what she felt was the right side of it, because she found it too difficult to admit to the fact that she had been part of Kane’s circle of close friends before the disaster at the Chesterfield farm. She was trying to put more distance between herself and that event.

Taylor didn’t entirely blame her — she understood the desire. She also knew that it wasn’t something that could be done. There was no denying the fact that they had been friends with Kane, that they had partied with him out at the Chesterfield farm on numerous occasions, and that no matter how much they might want to pretend that Kane had been his own special kind of delinquent, what had happened that night could have happened on any night. They had just been lucky that they weren’t there.

But we wouldn’t have run away from it, Taylor thought. That was the one difference between Kane and herself. She would never have turned her back on her responsibilities the way he had. She would have stuck around.

“I don’t feel unsafe having him here,” she told Maddie. “Not at all. It’s a little awkward, but that’s all. I can deal with it.”

“Are you sure? Because I can come stay with you for a while, if that would make you more comfortable.”

Taylor laughed. “You mean, you would be happy to hang around and try to dig up dirt on Kane yourself?”

Maddie was unashamed. “Well, then you wouldn’t have to do it.”

“Generous of you. No, we’re okay, I think. I’m not going to subject him to the third degree, even if I do want some of those answers myself. I think it would only make things more uncomfortable. The best thing I can do is try to keep things as civil as possible and hope he leaves quickly.”

“Do you think he will?”

“Probably. I mean, it’s Kane. Leaving is what he does best. And he’s already made it beyond clear that he doesn’t want to be in Miller Creek. He’ll hit the road as soon as he feels like he’s accomplished what he came here to do, and we’ll probably never see him again. We might as well get as much information about where he’s been and what he’s been doing as we can out of him while he’s here, to be honest.”

“And you don’t want me to help with that.”

“It’ll be better if he’s relaxed. I don’t want him to feel like everyone is knocking down doors trying to find out what’s going on with him.” Taylor sighed. “Anyway, he made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone he was here.”

“You told me, though.”

“Right, so can you please not tell anyone? And I don’t want him to know that I told you, either.”

“I’m not even going to get to see him while he’s here, am I?’

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