Page 86 of Unbossly Manners

I shrugged. “I don’t talk about it. It’s in the past. I had a shit ton of therapy after it happened, but I’ve accepted it as part of my fabric as best as any kid can accept their parent abandoning them.”

“Why did he leave? Do you know?”

I held my breath, but then I did something brave. I told the truth.

“My mom’s happiest when she’s not tied down. Men come and go but her true north is untethered. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have long-term relationships. They just look different. These days they’d call her polyamorous, I guess. Or non-monogamous. She may have steady relationships, but she wants to be free to express herself any way she wants with anyone she wants. Her body is hers and hers alone. No man owns it. And she can do whatever the fuck she wants with it when she wants; laugh, dance, run, fuck. And a man can either be there for that—and also have that freedom—or he can leave.”

I let out a shuddering breath. I hadn’t said that so succinctly in all my life.

“Would you be happy in a relationship like that?” I asked.

Jackson looked out the window. “No.”

“Would Kat be happy in a monogamous relationship with you again?”

Jackson swallowed, then said in barely a whisper, “No.”

I opened the car door. “Then let her go.”

thirty-two

It was the day of the bike journey/race thingy, and I hadn’t spoken to Jackson much since our conversation in the car.

I didn’t know what was going on with him and Kat, but his race partner, Jovan, had to cancel the trip, so she stepped in to ride with him. Kat was an amateur rider, so they switched to the twenty mile course, like us.

Nellie and Bee had stayed up late drinking, playing Ping-Pong, and watching movies, but they were in the kitchen at five am, ready in their gear. Or kit, as Jackson would call it.

Jackson was the only one that wore the spandex for professional cyclists. The rest of us were in athletic shorts and tank tops. Jackson made sure we had nutrition on our bikes or our person. But I could hardly call energy bars, nuts, water, and jelly beans nutrition.

Jackson stepped out of his room and Nellie roared with laughter. Jackson was wearing neon pink spandex shorts and cycling top and pink polka-dot shoes.

“What?” He shimmied his hips. “It’s for a breast cancer charity. The whole team is in pink.”

“We won’t be able to miss you,” I said.

“But we might want to,” Nellie joked.

After our conversation in the car last night, Jackson had been in a crummy mood, but Serena and I had called it a girls night, and tucked away in our room watching rom-coms until we passed out. My mind wandered to him and if anything I’d said had resonated, but it didn’t matter. Jackson and Kat were not my problem and his love life wasn’t my business anymore.

“Have you done anything like this before?” I asked Kat, filling my water bottle. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet all morning.

“I prefer the type of adventure where my feet are flat on the ground. This has always been Jackson’s thing. But if we’re gonna make our relationship work this time, I’ve got to make more of an effort, you know.”

Disappointment swelled in my belly. If she still had hope, nothing I’d said to Jackson had done a damn thing to change his mind.

Kat walked out the front door and the rest of us gathered our items for the ride. Selena bent her head to me and whispered under her breath.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that Kat took you under her wing, pushed you into a relationship thing with Jackson, and now acts as if nothing happened?”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging my backpack on. “What’s your point?”

“Don’t you want to punch a bitch?”

I laughed. “Yeah. But it won’t change anything.”

“On to the races!” Nellie said, punching the air with one hand while holding a beer in his other. Bee wore a Camel Pak and I was pretty sure it wasn’t water in the bladder.

The race was thirty minutes away, in a small town that had been taken over by the participants. There was a campground, vendor tables set up around the post-race village, a medical tent, and two large inflatable arches, one for the start of the race and one for the finish.

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