Page 62 of Star-Crossed
I know that you’ll find a way to call me on my bullshit. I know that you’ll tell me what I don’t want to hear. I know that I’m making a mistake, but I don’t want you to talk me out of it.
“Slug bug blue!” Kiki announced, then frogged him on the thigh hard enough to send an electric flash sizzling along nerves that were no longer there.
“Fuck’s sake,” Cy muttered, but his grip on the steering wheel loosened slightly as they turned down the road that would take them out to their father’s house. “Are you still going to do that when I’m eighty-five and you’re ninety-one?”
“Probably not when you’re eighty-five.” His sister shot him a sideways smirk. “You’re totally going to get Tupia’s skinny thighs.”
Cy suppressed a snort. Kiki had teased him about inheriting his grandfather’s slim shanks since they were just kids and his grasshopper-skinny thigh would fit in the circle of her fingers.
He’d packed on considerable muscle in high school, lifting becoming his first immersive obsession following their mother’s death. And Ethan’s example.
Before the locker room dust-up where Cy nearly had his ass handed to him by a pair of linebackers built like one of Myrtle’s Shit Shacks, he’d had only one asset to justify his presence on the Townsend Harbor High Seamen.
Cy wasfast.
Just how fast, he only discovered following his mother’s funeral, when he lit out from a house crowded with mourners, attempting to outpace his grief.
Following his accident, that particular option was lost to him, and working took its place. Throwing himself into long days and lonely nights bathed in the monitor’s blue glow.
He’d become quite adept at pushing himself beyond what felt like his physical limits, and he could work for hours with his body’s screaming drowning out the unwelcome thoughts. And any mental energy he had left when that was done could then be sunk effectively into gaming strategy.
He only hoped it would work as well for coping with Lyra’s revelation as it had with the suck-hole of self-pity that had threatened to consume him during his recovery.
The truck rumbled to a halt in front of the home they had moved to during Cy’s senior year, its façade both familiar and suffocating.
He stared at the chipped paint and overgrown hedges, memories of arguments echoing in his mind. The warm but chaotic atmosphere that awaited him inside was a stark reminder of why he’d been so eager to leave for college. A decision his father had accused him of making only to emulate Ethan Townsend, whom he’d started spending even more of his time with once they moved to this place.
His father had cited needing more space for the foster kids. But they’d both known what it was really about.
The home where Kiki now lived was haunted by his mother’s memory.
“Ready to do this?” she asked as she unbuckled her seatbelt.
The short answer was no. The idea of spending his entire day working on building a retaining wall to the soundtrack of shrieking kids and the tag-team hectoring of his father and sister sounded like as much fun as having his toenails pried off with a pair of hedge clippers.
But the sooner he got this out of the way, the sooner he could slough the accusations of isolating himself off his back.
“Let’s do it,” Cy said.
They exited the truck and walked through the backyard to find their father already carting out a wheelbarrow of stones for the rock wall.
Because he didn’t want Cy to do it.
Another of the areas in which his father and Ethan seemed to have developed an unlikely bond: the mistaken belief that his injury now made their perpetual intervention to spare him physical labor necessary.
“Morning!” Marty called, mopping sweat from his umber brow as he parked the wheelbarrow by the base of the dirt mound on the back patio.
“Morning, Pop,” Kiki called back, bundling her onyx hair into a bun above a flannel Cy suspected she’d stolen off one of her many brief conquests.
“Just…uh, getting some of this out of the way before you got here.”
Cy and Kiki exchanged a look.
“And here I thought the whole reason we were here was to prevent that very thing from happening,” Cy said.
His old man’s jaw took on a familiar stubborn set that always made Cy’s eye twitch. “I want to keep doing what I can do as long as I can do it.”
“That sounds familiar,” Kiki muttered.
