Page 15 of Valentine Dare

8

Brent

I arrived home pretty late.The guys wanted to hang out after our shift. The only thing I had waiting for me was preparing for class tomorrow. I could get up early and do it. I’d forgotten all about Jenny as I headed into the living room and noticed her sitting there, staring at the screen. It wasn’t on.

“What are you doing?”

She shrugged. “Everyone’s gone to bed. It’s pretty late.”

Maybe in her world, but in mine, ten wasn’t exactly late. Maybe she’d lived like a fairytale princess and going to bed at this hour was way past her bedtime.

“You’ve eaten?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, so I’m not hungry. Do you want me to make you something?”

I chuckled at the idea of her heading to the kitchen and getting me something to eat. Even mom never did that. She’d taught us our way around the kitchen, well, pretty much from the time we were in middle school.

“I’ll do it. Don’t worry, you can go back to doing…”

She laughed. “Nothing.”

I nodded in agreement. I didn’t beat around the bush.

“Do you mind some company?”

“No, Jenny. Come. We want you to feel at home. We don’t want you to feel like you have to hide yourself away or anything. We’re an easy going family.”

“I can see. You have a nice house.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You seem surprised.”

“Just that you and your brother work a lot, so I just I assumed…”

“We were poor?”

I stood in front of her. She was in a Mikey Mouse short PJs. They were cute, but then I saw her nipples through the small shirt, and I turned away. It wasn’t something I would dream of doing, nah not to my brother, because I could tell Trent was into her. Sure, we yelled at each other all the time. Him for being so uptight and me for being so lazy, even if I did feel it was an exaggeration. Just because I didn’t plan every second of my life, it didn’t make me lazy.

“Why doesn’t your brother go to our school?”

She sat on the barstool and faced me. I grabbed some things out of the fridge after deciding a ham sandwich with cheese would get rid of my hunger pangs and not fill me up too much to stop me from sleeping. I could never sleep on a full stomach; all that food just sitting in my stomach always bugged me.

“He has dyslexia. Do you know what that is?”

She nodded. “Isn’t that when they get the letters mixed up, and they put them back to front.”

“Yeah, that and he has problems reading. He can read a page, and by the time he gets to the next page he’s forgotten what he read on the other page. He has a short-term memory deficit, so he needs support, and as for math, he has whatever it’s called, same kinda problem.”

She folded her arms. “Sounds rough.”

“Not really, he just needs support to learn. He’s a lot smarter than us, that’s for sure, just don’t treat him differently. He hates when people say, you poor thing, you have dyslexia, etc. Just winds him up the wrong way.”

She smiled. “Okay, I won’t say anything. He was a litte shy at dinner as we sat down with your mom and brothers in the house earlier. He didn’t really say much. Then again, dinner was a little quiet.”

“Yeah, mom’s worried about you. I spoke to her earlier when I told her that I was coming home late,” I replied, thinking that this was the first time we’d really spoken properly since she’d been living here. It had been a crazy summer. Both Trent and I had been working like crazy, trying to earn as much as possiblebefore we’re back to school. I loved watching the way her brain worked. There was more to the eye than met the beholder. I felt it in the way we were connecting.

“You’re really direct.”

“Does it bother you?” She held my gaze as she put her hands on my shoulder as if she was challenging me.

---