“I was drawing since you and Dad were fighting,” Sophie said. Apparently, the girl didn’t hold any punches, even with family. It reminded her of Kaden.
“We weren’t fighting.” Kaden caught Abby’s eye as she turned around to face him, then shifted his gaze back to his sister.
“Yeah, yeah. You weren’t fighting, and she wasn’t listening.”
Abby blanched. She opened her mouth to speak—to say what? Defend herself? Admit she heard them? Kaden glared at Sophie and said, “Well, he’s ready now, so go. At least one of us has a chance to be on time today.”
“Fine.” Sophie dropped the chalk on the cracked cement walkway beside a rather crude rendition of a person and what appeared to be an animal and stomped off in the direction of the house.
Unable to erase her smile, Abby said, “She’s something.”
“Yeah, a handful.” Kaden grabbed the strap of his bookbag and slung it over his shoulder asking, “You ready?”
With a nod, she turned and led the way back to the car. Once inside the small interior of the Bug, she turned to him.
“I’m sorr—” They spoke at the same time, then laughed.
“Go ahead,” Abby said. “You first.”
“The stuff my dad said...sorry about that, if you heard any of it.”
Not wanting to make the situation more awkward than it already was, Abby started the car and pulled away. “I didn’t hear much.”
“He just...” Kaden drug a hand over his face and stared out his window as they passed through his neighborhood. “I don’t know how to explain.”
“You don’t have to.”
She watched him from the
corner of her eye, as tension rolled off the stiff set of his back and the tense set of his jaw. The serious side of him threw her off balance—maybe more than all the teasing and flirting.
“He’s so obsessed with me focusing on nothing but school. I get good grades, but it’s like that’s not enough. He doesn’t want me doing anything that’ll shift my focus. I tried to get a real job last year, and he legit flipped a lid. That’s why I do all those odd jobs. I can manage those without him knowing.”
“Him not wanting you to work doesn’t sound so bad,” Abby offered.
Kaden shook his head. “Besides the fact I need money for college next year, it’s more than that. Every time in the past I’ve ever tried to hang out with friends outside of school, he makes it into this big thing, so that I don’t even want to anymore because it’s just not worth the effort and the hassle. It’s like, I’ve had straight As, I’m taking AP classes, and even college prep courses, but nothing is enough for him to loosen his hold. Not to mention he’s paranoid. If I do go out, the people I’m with have to practically pass a background check.”
His words hung in the silence, heavy and thick. Abby wanted to say something, to lighten his mood, preferring the carefree Kaden to this sullen version of him. But words failed her. What could she say? She was terrible at handling her own emotions, let alone someone else’s.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, hating the generic words even as they left her mouth.
“Don’t be. I’m making him sound like a jerk, and he’s really not.” Kaden ran his fingers through his unruly blond locks. “He means well. The reason he doesn’t want me working and having a social life isn’t because he wants to control me.”
“Then why?”
“He’s scared. Of a lot of things. He met my mom when they were teenagers. They got married just after high school and had a baby. He never went to college, and he worked a bunch of crap jobs until he got a decent one, but I’m sure it was still hard. Then Mom got sick, the bills piled up, she died, and here we are. I think he’s afraid I’ll make the same mistakes, so he has this vision of me doing everything exactly right instead. College first, followed by a high-paying job, then getting my own place. Once I have those bases covered, then I can find a girl and get married and have the whole big-house-white-picket-fence-cliché. You know, everything in the right order. But it’s more than that, too. I think he just wants to save me from pain and disappointment. But life’s not like that, you know? It’s messy. And the painful parts make all the good ones that much better because of it.”
Abby glanced at him from the corner of her eye, rattled by both her desire to know more about him and the things he said that struck a chord. She spent a lot of energy avoiding how she felt, while Kaden seemed to so easily express what was going on in his head.
While Abby ran in the other direction of her feelings, Kaden dived in head-first.
After a beat of silence, he reached out and touched her arm. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to unload. It’s just frustrating.”
“No. I asked. I’m just not good with this kind of stuff.”
“What stuff? Life stuff?”
“Like feelings and stuff. Emotions...” She trailed off and wrinkled her nose like she smelled something bad. Even this small admission made her pulse twitch.