Page 104 of Bad & Bossy

And why the hell did he want to see me?

My thoughts spiraled as I watched the clock tick by. I had AA in an hour. I’d need to make this fast if I had any chance of making it on time, and considering I hadn’t been late in exactly one year, I didn’t want to ruin my streak.

The door creaked open and in stepped a younger, spitting image of me as a teenager.

But maybe a little edgier.

His black hoodie was zipped almost all the way up, the hood of it covering his mess of dark blonde hair. His eyebrow and lip piercings told me that Mom had calmed down on her life goal for her children to look as respectable as possible. His baggy grey jeans were covered in patches from brands I didn’t recognize, but the Converse on his feet were classic.

“Hi,” he said as if it were the least weird thing in the world that he was there in my office.

“Uh, hey.” I watched him carefully as he collapsed into the leather wingback opposite my desk.

Well, my therapist did say I needed to start bridging the gap between me and my family.

Just wasn’t expecting it to happen today.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You’re, what, sixteen now? Are you alone?”

He shrugged as he picked at something on the base of his shoe. “Almost sixteen. Mom and Dad are in Denver so I got an Uber.”

I blinked, watching as he stared at me and spoke with such lighthearted indifference. As if it didn’t matter if they panicked wondering where the hell he’d gone.

I snorted. “You just left?”

His sneaky little grin grew as he sunk down further into the chair. “Yeah. They’ve been blowing up my phone.”

A weird sense of pride overwhelmed me—my kin, my brother, was doing to them exactly what my parents had done to me.

“I should probably head back soon before they put out an amber alert,” he laughed.

“Do they not track your phone?”

He shrugged. “They try, but I think they’re too old to realize I can just turn off my location settings. So they freak out when it goes off but they never blame me for it.” His fingernail dug into a patch of dirt in his shoe before dropping it on the ground. “Dad once called our network and screamed at them for like, two hours about having unreliable tracking.”

I covered my mouth with my hand, trying to keep in the absolute hilarity of it. I’d assumed my siblings would be the perfect mold of my parents. I couldn’t have been more wrong. “You’re lucky your sister doesn’t rat you out.”

“Harley wouldn’t dare,” he smirked. “She knows damn well I have too much dirt on her.”

“Why did you come here?” I asked again, relaxing into my chair. This wasn’t at all the shitstorm I imagined it to be when Laura had told me Hayden was downstairs.

He shrugged as he bounced his leg. “I don’t know. Just felt like it, I guess. Wanted to see what you were all about when you didn’t have Dad in a chokehold.”

Heat crept into my cheeks. “I’m sorry about that. You shouldn’t have had to see it.”

He tongued at his lip piercing, forcing it to poke out at the front. “I know it’s probably weird for you that we, like, exist and all that. But if it makes you feel any better, Mom and Dad felt bad about dropping that bomb on you. And us. We had no idea you existed, either.”

It was like being burned and soothed at the same time with this kid.

Of course, I was glad to know that my parents felt like shit. And I was glad that he understood the complexities of how weird it was for me. But they hadn’t even mentioned me to them.

Hayden’s phone dinged and he glanced at it, his eyes bugging out of his skull. “Shit. Harley says Mom’s calling the cops.”

He scrambled up out of the chair and stuffed his phone in his pocket. “I’ll have my driver take you back out to Denver,” I offered, and he beamed at me over his shoulder.

“Thanks.”

I didn’t know what to do, whether I should hug him, just wave, or walk him out. But he beat me to it as I came around the side of my desk.

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