Page 95 of Callow

Daphne

Okay.

It was kind of stupid.

I mean, there wasn’t even any ‘kind of’ about it. It was really stupid. Especially when things were going so well.

My plan to get my mom together with Callow was going even better than I first imagined since I first spotted them together on the picnic table at the clubhouse.

And, even better than that, the three of us were kind of, I don’t know, becoming a little family.

I would never say it to my mom, who worked her ass off to be more than enough parent for me, but some part of me kind of always wished she’d dated, found someone, made a trio out of us.

I guess I figured she just wasn’t into it. Like maybe she didn’t have that desire or whatever. I knew an ace girl at school. I couldn’t relate, but she just… didn’t want anyone. Not that way. I started to think that was what was going on with Mom and her chronic singleness.

Until I saw her with Callow.

And it all sort of just clicked.

She was single because of, well, me.

She’d been too busy raising me when I was little, then trying to keep me out of jail, detention, or from becoming a teen mom myself to think of doing anything for herself.

Like getting a boyfriend who made her smile like Callow did.

I was patting myself on the back about how it all turned out.

But then Tammy texted, breaking a several-day silence that I’d sort of initiated after the whole attack thing. Mostly because Tammy tried to play it off and act like I was being a baby about it or blowing it out of proportion. Like I didn’t literally have a broken bone in my arm for it.

She’d been really insistent. And, well, she even offered me some money to help her with her hair since she couldn’t get into a salon, and she had some client who was paying her a shitton of money to have a different hair color.

I knew Mom had some strong feelings about Tammy and her job. But listening to Tammy talk about her clients kind of turned me off of guys in general.

There was one who talked about wanting her to pee in her panties and send them to him.

Gross.

Like, seriously.

The guys in Allie’s books were a lot better, in my opinion, than these real-life guys that Tammy had flocking to her.

The thing was, I wanted the money.

The holidays were coming up again, and with my arm, I wasn’t going to be able to work a job again like I had the year before to get my mom something nice.

She’d always gone above and beyond for me. Even when money was tight, she always made sure it didn’t feel that way, that there were pretty wrapped presents under the tree.

I wanted to give back a little.

And helping Tammy was the only way for me to do that.

It was just a couple hours, I figured as I hooked my bad arm around the rungs, so I didn’t actually try to use it to lower down.

I could have just removed the alarm from the door and gone out that way. I had two hang-ups about that. One, it left Mom a little less protected. Even if she had some big, armed biker guy in her bed. But also, two, if I went out that way, there was a chance they might review the camera feed and see me. Going down the ladder meant that, if I was quiet enough on the way back in, they would probably never even know I’d snuck out.

It was a win-win.

But Tammy had dropped me off nearer to the front of the building than the back, leaving me to stumble around in the dark because I worried the neighbors might call the cops if they saw me using my phone’s flashlight outside of their apartments.

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