Page 73 of Amethyst Flame
“Twenty-year-old guy chatting her up via text,” I told her.
Swann looked over at Bri. “You never said anything about him.”
“I knew how you would react.” Bri folded her arms and hunkered down, bottom lip pouting. “It’s how everyone reacts.”
“Fora reason,Bri,” I told her. “No decent twenty-year-old man is interested in a fifteen-year-old girl.”
“It’s not acceptable, not at all,” Swann said. “Maybe you needed a sister to tell you. And here you have two saying the same thing.”
“I thought I was a pet,” she snarked back. Still mulish.
Swann was ready. “My mom won’t let me have a pet. So I guess I’ll have to make do with another sister.” She jerked a thumb my way. “I can’t seem to get rid of this one.”
After a long sec, Bri shrugged dismissively. “I wasn’t, like,seriousserious about him.”
Saving face, which was totally fine. But I had to make sure. “Then you’ll block the asshole? And if he comes sniffing around again, you’ll tell me?”
Another dismissive shrug. “Yeah. Okay.”
Swann put her hand on Bri’s knee. “We care about you. You know that, right? We just want you to be safe.”
“I saidokay.” Back to being a brat.
Swann sat back again, but with a lightning-quick glance at me.
Yeah, yeah.
“That’s a great start…” I took out my mobile, unlocked it, and handed it to Bri. “Let’s keep it going. We can’t move into an apartment together, but you do have a chance right now to influence the decisions that your father is going to make about you.”
Yes, that’s right, I was pulling an Adley Ruskin. Boom.
Swann sat up straight, her eyes wide. “Damn, that’s good.”
“Someone used it on me today,” I told them. “It took me a second to swallow, but then yeah, I decided to weigh in on my future. To, uh, how’d they put it?Find and exert my personal power.” More Adley.
“But my dad’s the one with all the power!” Unshed tears made Bri’s eyes shine. “He’s going to say whatever he thinks I want to hear, then first chance he gets, he’s going to lock me up and throw away the key.”
The kid had a point. “Worst case, you have two and a half shitty years before you turn eighteen,” I said, “and then you’ll never have to see him again. Whichhe knows.Which means long term,youhave all the power.”
“And since he knows that,” Swann added, “he might try to save his relationship with you now. Tell him you want to negotiate terms.”
I nodded. Yup. If her dad wanted her to come home, and stay home, he’d make an effort to communicate with her.
I took a well-earned bite of pizza. Because damn I was good. Solving problems. Saving the world.
Bri sniffed. “But I don’t know how tonegotiate. He’s a fucking doctor!” She hesitated, then added, “It’s just… I don’t even know how totalkto him.”
I nudged the phone. “You’re not alone anymore, panda face.”
“We’ll be right here,” Swann told her.
After we made a list of demands and concessions, we called Bri’s rat bastard bio-bum and worked out the basics of her going back to school and the rules of his house that they both could live by. We celebrated our defeat of the patriarchy with mani/pedis and half of the first season ofBrooklyn-99.
The whole time Jacob-Dane was lighting up my phone demanding that I return to Spy Central.
Once our polish was dry—mine was bright purple, of course—we reviewed our plans. Bri’s dad was finding someone to take the end of his shift at the hospital and then he was coming to get her. He’d offered a stop at one of BoSa’s 24/7 donut shops on the way home, and of course Bri had agreed; she was my lil sis after all.
“He said he wants to talk for a while, just the two of us,” she told us with a little sniff. She probably thought she sounded dismissive and cool, but the way her freshly groomed eyebrows tilted together made her yearning painfully obvious.
