Page 107 of Out of Bounds

She made a noise at the back of her throat in acknowledgment.

“Why don’t you like me paying for stuff?” I shifted in my seat, glancing over at her again. “I don’t understand it.”

“Ryan…”

“It’d make things a lot easier.”

“I’m not trying to be difficult.”

“You’re my girlfriend,” I stated. “I pay for things, it just makes sense, I don’t understand why you fight me on it.”

“Do you want to know for real?”

The sudden change in her tone made me focus more on the conversation. I did want to know. And I liked talking about these kinds of things with her.

“Yeah.”

Kassie took a deep breath. “If I tell you, do youpromisenot to get me NyQuil?”

“Yes,” I answered automatically.

Getting another piece of private piece of information from Kassie was worth having to figure out a workaround to get her medication. Maybe I’d send a gift card to Zariah. Either way, the extra work was worth it.

“My parents didn’t just leave. They came back a couple of times.”

What does that mean?

I nodded along like I understood and listened raptly, bringing the car to the next intersection.

“Every time they came bc, it was like Christmas. Earrings from the dollar store and those cheap art kits and keychains from places they went too…that’s how they came barrelling back in, you know? And then they’d leave.”

My eyebrows furrowed. It was difficult to imagine a little Kassie…less cautious. Now, I couldn’t imagine her putting up with that. How many times did they wear her down until she had to adopt that mindset?

She took a deep breath. “I started working and they said we were getting an apartment together and they needed the deposit down…”

Her words hung in the air.

“They took money from you?” I asked.

“Mm.”

“How old were you?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I hesitated. “How much money was it?”

“You don’t want to know,” she repeated. “But I got a nice luggage set out of it before they headed out again.”

I kept still in my seat as I tried to keep a level head thinking about it. Because I didn’t know what to say. If I understood her inflection more, I could’ve figured something out, but Kassie didn’t talk about it like she was bitter. She was just letting me know what happened.

“I don’t like gifts,” Kassie explained. “They feel like theJawstheme before the shark attack.”

There wasn’t anything I could do for her and it was a shitty fucking sensation. Everything in me wanted to offer help but there was nothing I could do. I didn’t even know how to navigate around this.

It was quiet in the car for a moment and for the first time in my life, I didn’t like the silence. I had another question. A dumbass question but I needed to ask.

“What happened to the money?”

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