I walked away in a daze, wondering what the fuck had just happened. Any other father I knew would have given me the touch-her-and-I’ll-kill-you speech. Put the fear of God into me, and sent me on my way wondering how he’d kill me when the time came.
Casper had just mind-fucked me instead.
It was both completely fucked up and impressive as hell.
“Hey, you good?” Tommy asked as I tripped over a creeper in the middle of the garage.
“I—” Looking around at all the guys working, I wondered how I should answer him. “Yeah, man,” I said finally. “All good.”
“What did Casper want?” he asked nosily, following me to the bay I was working in. “He warnin’ you off Lily?”
“Why the fuck does everyone think it’s their business?” I asked, rounding on him. “I wanna get with Lily, what’s it to you?”
Tommy’s eyes widened in surprise, but he didn’t back down. “She’s my baby cousin, so I’ve got an opinion,” he said seriously. “And if you don’t want everyone else up in your shit, you’ll stop yellin’.”
I huffed in frustration and clenched my fists to keep from shoving him out of my face.
“You think I’d ever do anythin’ to hurt her?” I asked.
“Not on purpose.”
“Then back the fuck off.”
“You’re a dick,” Tommy said, throwing his hands in the air. “I wasn’t givin’ you shit, idiot. I was just wondering what the fuck that meeting in Casper’s office was about and if I should start lookin’ for places to hide your body.”
He stalked off and I turned back to the Focus I needed to finish up, my mind reeling. I wasn’t sure how everyone knew that shit had changed with Lily, but they did. It was like I had a neon sign above my head telling everyone that I was about to start World War Three in the clubhouse.
I’d promised Lily that there wouldn’t be any other women, but I hadn’t made any promises about her and I getting together. I still didn’t see how that would work. Important or not, she was still young. She was going off to college in six months, who knew where, and I’d be left in Eugene. Whenever I said that in my head, I wanted to punch something. It made me sound like a pussy, or that I hoped she would stay in town, when that wasn’t the case. I wanted her to go off to school. She needed that experience, and a mind like hers didn’t deserve to go to waste at some random community college.
I was an adult. I had my shit figured out and I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I was happy with the choices I’d made and I was happy with where I was at. Lily wasn’t there yet. She was still in high school, for fuck’s sake. She had all these opportunities spread out in front of her, just waiting for her to choose them.
Did I want to be with her? Yeah.
Did I think being with her now would be fair to her? No.
I finished up on the car, grateful that I could change the oil without paying much attention. I needed to talk to Lily and see where her head was at.
Chapter 12
Lily
If I thought that my parents had forgiven and forgotten how I’d been acting, I’d been sadly mistaken. Even after I’d gone shooting with my dad and we’d talked everything out, I’d still been on my mom’s shit list.
I couldn’t blame her, really. She’d put up with my sister’s shit for so long, she’d finally snapped when she’d had to start dealing with mine. It wasn’t that my mom was an asshole, far from it, but she didn’t have much patience for people that were being jerks. If I needed her, she’d be there in an instant. If I fucked up, she’d help me clean it up. But if I treated my family like garbage, there wasn’t anywhere that I could hide from her.
I’d spent the week grounded from my phone and doing manual labor around the house. I wasn’t sure why, after months, they’d decided to punish me, but I didn’t complain. I was finding that pulling weeds and scrubbing baseboards was oddly therapeutic. Working out frustrations was actually a thing, and I was doing it. It didn’t matter how small the tasks were, finishing one gave me the sense of control I needed.
It also helped that I knew that wherever Leo was, he wasn’t hanging out with his girlfriend. Maybe she was his ex-girlfriend already. I wasn’t sure. I’d never broken up with someone before, so I wasn’t super clear on how that all worked.
I was grounded from pretty much everything, but there was one person that my parents would never forbid me from seeing.
Rose had come over every day of my punishment. My mom’s only rule for her was that she couldn’t help me with what I was doing that day. When I pulled weeds, she sat in a lawn chair. When I cleaned baseboards, she laid on the couch or sprawled out on the floor near me. The day I had to clean out the garage, she sat on the bumper of my mom’s car and watched. Unfortunately for me, the garage was a catchall for shit that needed to be sold or donated since my dad had a shop on the property where he did all of his tinkering, so I had to sort through years of old clothes and broken toys.