Page 94 of The Brave and the Reckless

“Right now? I’m incredibly hungover. This guy I have no memory of meeting or giving my phone number to keeps blowing up my phone. And you’re yelling at me.”

So her phone definitely hadn’t been dead the last two days. She’d just ignored me. She had looked at her phone long enough to see some other guy’s messages though. I tried to swallow the bitter taste that left in my mouth but couldn’t hold the bite from my words. “Great, partying and gettingblackout drunk around random men, then coming back here hungover when we have to be at work in three hours? That sounds like you made all the right choices this weekend.”

She wasn’t Dad.She wasn’t Dad.She was just a normal twenty-three-year-old who partied with her friends. I’d seen her hang out with the others and stop after one or two drinks. She’d made some bad choices this weekend. Normal people got drunk and made bad choices every now and again. Maybe she could come back from it. Come back to me. Give me the rest of summer.

“Yeah. I had a great weekend, actually,” she quipped and pulled a feathered pen from her jacket pocket. “I got this from Adriana’s Stallion. They put them down the crotch of their Speedos. I had to pull it out with my teeth.”

My gut twisted with jealousy at the image of Esra’s teeth anywhere near another man’s crotch. We hadn’t talked about being exclusive, but the last few weeks hadn’t felt casual.Wehadn’t felt like there was enough empty space between us for another person to slip in. Not some stranger she gave her number to, and definitely no fucking Stallion.

I blinked at the pen, then at her tired smirk. She really was ending it. She had to know that I’d been developing real feelings for her, so she was putting me back in my place. “Do you even realize how many people worried about you this weekend? Missed you? God, you’re selfish.”

“Yes. So what if I am? It’s my life, isn’t it?” She tossed the stupid feathery pen across the table, brows drawn deep. “I should be allowed to live my life however I please. I can go wherever I want and do whatever I want.”

“And apparently dowhoever you want. Is that whatyou want me to say? Do you want me to ask whether you fucked some Stallion covered in body glitter and feathers this weekend?”

“Isn’t that what Buckle Bunnies do?” She pursed her lips.

“I’m not rehashing that with you just because you want a fight. I shouldn’t have called you that. I know you better now. We moved on.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Will you just tell me what the hell is actually going on?”

“Yeah, you know me better,” she bit the words out, teeth showing. “Is it because you actually bothered to get to know me? Or because you talked to Sinan about me behind my back?”

“What?” I’d barely mentioned Esra to her brother. At first, because I’d been too worried about keeping our hookups secret– then, because I was sure I wouldn’t have been able to mention her name without smiling like an idiot.

“I know that my parents can’t handle me. I know that I’m too much for Sanny. But you knew what you were getting into. You can’t fuck Esra and expect to wake up next to perfect little Annie Lou. And Sinan can’t help you turn me into her either.”

It took me a second to follow her train of thought. Annie Lou was Little Miss Perfect, and she hadn’t been interesting until Esra had breathed new life into her. This wasn’t really about her role in the park though. This was about the fact that I should have known all along that she wasn’t here for anything serious. I’d fucked her and now I got jealous if she went out and had fun all weekend. I’d fucked her and I wanted commitment. I’d fucked her andI’d talked to her brother about her staying in town. “Is this because Sinan asked me to give you a job at the ranch?”

Her face dropped into an expression that was too neutral. She was clearly trying not to let it show that I’d hit the spot.

“You don’t want to stay here? You want to run off and fuck around? Fine. Leave. I don’t want to work with whatever the fuck you’ve got going on right now anyway. Not in the park and not at the ranch.” I grabbed a trash bag and tore open the cabinet we kept our food in. I dumped the contents of her shelf in the bag one after another. No point delaying the inevitable if she didn’t want to be here. “You need to get your shit together.”

“I had my shit together for twenty-two years! Shit fell apart. My life is an explosion of shit. Shit is dripping from the ceiling. I don’t want to keep it together anymore.”

“You have a job here. You have friends. You have family. You have me.” With each phrase I counted off, another item landed in the trash bag. “Other people would consider themselves lucky to have all that.”

“Yeah, well, good for other people,” she scoffed and pushed herself off the table. “I don’t want it. Not like this.”

I dumped the bag of groceries and followed her when she marched upstairs. “Like what?”

“Like I’m just exchanging my overbearing parents for an overbearing brother and an overbearing boyfriend. Why does everyone always think they need to handle my life for me?”

She’d just called me her boyfriend. Kind of didn’t matter when she was about to leave, but it still pulled a string inside my chest that had been coiled tight for weeks.

“When did I try to handle your life for you?” I asked.

She whirled around in the doorway to her room. Now it was her turn to count items off. “When you did my laundry. When you tried to stop me from drinking at the saloonandthen stalked me home afterward. When you literally threw me over your shoulder to carry me home after the cast party. I mean, I could go on about the ones I know about. But then there’s the ones that happen behind my back. When you told Sanny to send me back home after my first week here. When you ran to Renee’s office to get me fired– yeah, Vivi told me about that. And when you started planning a whole future for me with Sanny without consulting me. Anything else that I should know about?”

“Have you ever paused to consider that I do those things for you and for Sanny? That I care?”

“If you care about someone, you let them make their own decisions.”

“If you care about someone, you consider how your actions affect them instead of acting like an entitled brat!”

She threw the door shut in my face.

I deserved that for calling her a brat. Fuck. If I’d had any hopes of her staying before, they’d been completely eradicated now.

Rubbing my chest, where that taut string still trembled after she’d called me her boyfriend, I automatically turned and left the house. There was only one place that had always been safe when the world around me went to shit, when my mother got sicker and needed more care, when my father pawned our car to afford another bottle of Jack. There was one place quiet enough for me to sort through my thoughts, where I could allow myself to feel hopelessand angry for a few minutes before I had to make plans to fix things.

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