Page 67 of Again, In Autumn

A sound of astonishment gags in my throat. “When did you become in charge of me?”

“I’m just laying out some ground rules,” he says.

“Then, that sounds like a challenge I want to accept. I think I will cause a scene and ruin your happy, fun time. Which would you prefer: steaming dog shit outside your door, glitter bomb in the living room, or bucket of water over your head?” I clap my hands sadistically. “It’ll be like we’re enemies at camp!”

Eyes narrow. “That would actually be a welcome distraction.”

“From what exactly?”

“Me thinking about what you could have done with your life.” Adam’s mouth twists into distaste. “And what it actually turned out to be.”

I brush back hair that’s been whipped into my mouth. My hands and arms shiver in the cold. I watch his frustration bubble into meanness, the ripple of it elongating him an inch or so as he lords over me.

“That’s what’s fucking me up,” he says. “That you wanted things fourteen years ago and you’ve never gone after them. You’re a shell of the person I knew. I didn’t think this is what your life would turn into.”

Ouch.

My chest caves in, my stomach twists. The wave of pain I felt when I heard him call me “boring” reverberates through me again. How dare you? I wanted to say in the woods. So, I say it now for good measure: “How dare you?”

He feels pretty good about himself. His smug expression sits, and his eyes wander to my chattering teeth.

“Your mother’s bakery?” he asks.

I spit, “A pizza shop.”

“Apartment in the city?”

“Expensive,” I hiss.

“A great love that doesn’t need your father’s approval?” He’s steady on that one. Sticks the landing.

I can’t handle the smugness. “You don’t know anything about my love life.”

His jaw clenches. The anger on his face relents to allow discomfort to pool in the deep lines between his eyebrows.

“Are you seeing someone?” he pries.

“None of your business! I’m not interesting enough for you to find attractive, remember, so what do you care who I’m sleeping with?”

I’m furious, my mind and bones hollow, that he would have the balls to ask me any of this, to think he has any right to question my life choices. I’m so blind with fury that I halfheartedly notice a warmth around my shoulders.

“You don’t know anything about me!” I cry.

Adam hikes up his crinkled white sleeves. “I do, Vienna! That’s the point. We did exist. And I gave everything to a girl I loved and she’s not here anymore!”

My eyes fill with water. I’m angry for that, too.

He continues, his own eyes turning red with feeling, “I meet people every day who are busting their ass to become musicians and artists. Everything is possible if you want it enough, if you’re brave enough, and don’t let other people tell you what to do. If you don’t give up!”

I wipe a tear and step back. “If you think it’s been easy to make my choices, then you don’t know me at all,” I answer quietly.

He insists, “You have money! Your father has connections! You could have had it way easier than most people do.”

“All I have is my father and I barely have him at all.” I press a hand to my cold, wet nose. “I can’t afford to disappoint him.”

Adam’s hands ball into fists. “Now…or then?”

“I made choices back then because they were right. If I had walked away from him then I’d be left with nothing.”

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