Breaking Ties (6 page)

He stopped, turned back, and we both looked down to the hand I’d placed on his arm when he’d tried to turn away. His expression softened, but only for a moment, and then he looked up from his arm and met my stare.

“Dad,” I said, taking the serious tone I’d hope to avoid. But he hadn’t given me any other choice. Joking and teasing wouldn’t cut it. Not now. I had to put on my big girl panties and get serious with him. I had to fight for what I wanted. I had to make him understand how important this was. “You know how long I’ve waited for my chance with Gabe. You know how much this means to me.”

He still didn’t say anything, and the silence was haunting.

“I’m sorry, okay?” I said, pulling my hand away and letting it fall back to my side. “I’m sorry that I assumed you were going to let me go, and I’m sorry that you didn’t understand that I was joking.
Of course
I respect your authority, and
yes
, I want you to want this for me.”

Just like I wanted Fletcher’s parents to want a college education for him. It didn’t seem so difficult to understand. Sometimes they knew what was right, and sometimes they didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard for our parents to accept that sometimes we just
know
what’s right for ourselves.

“Dad, I wasn’t trying to go around you. If I didn’t want your approval, I wouldn’t have even told you about the date in the first place.”

There was another moment of silence, and I knew that he wasn’t going to say a word. If I wanted to keep the conversation moving, I was all on my own. He wasn’t giving me anything, so I took a deep breath and tried one last time.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into Bailey. I don’t know what you said to her or what she said to you, but I know, in a very general sense, I know what’s going on.” My father gave me a long, hard look. “She’s acting out, and you’re being moody. I’ve only ever seen you guys act this way when Mom—”

“We’re not talking about your mother.”

“But I
want
to talk about it,” I said. “Why is she calling? What does she want? Why is it that, even after we’ve been gone for so long, she’s still finding a way to ruin my life?”

“No one’s ruining your life.”

“She’s somehow getting to Bailey, and in turn, getting to you. And you’re taking your frustration out on me. You and I both know that I didn’t
really
do anything wrong, and yet I’m still standing here apologizing to you. I’m trying to make this right.”

I thought about Bailey, the way she’d snapped when she saw that call from Mom flash across her screen. I remembered the hurt and anger in Dad’s eyes after he was fresh off the argument with my sister. I was angry that I was taking the brunt of it, but I still hurt for them. I hurt for them because I didn’t know how to help them.

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it was the last time I would say those words on this subject. A girl had her limits to how many times she could apologize for something, when she didn’t know what she was apologizing for. “When someone starts messing with my family, then they’re messing with me. Whatever it is that’s been said or done, I have a right to know. Because let’s face it, you slammed the brakes on my date with Gabe only minutes after you gave me permission to go. You know something you’re not saying, and I know it has something to do with Mom. If she’s back in our lives, no matter for how long or short a time, I have a right to know what’s going on.”

He didn’t say anything to that, just shook his head and turned away. He walked away from me like that was somehow a good stopping point for our one-sided discussion.

I watched him as he made his way down the hallway, turning into his room before he disappeared. Unlike Bailey, he didn’t slam the door behind him once he was in the comfort of his own space. It clicked quietly behind him, and there wasn’t another sound from that end of the house. He was turning in for the night. He wasn’t going to change his mind.

“
So now what
?” I yelled, feeling like I’d completely exhausted every chance I had of getting his permission.

I looked to the floor.

It was Friday night. My date with Gabe was scheduled to kick off before sunrise tomorrow. And since I’d already promised Gabe I would be there, it had become my responsibility to do one of two things: convince Dad that he was overreacting and beg him to let me go, or sneak out of the house tomorrow morning before he had time to notice I was gone. Of course, I guess there
was
a third option: Georgia’s option. I could cancel, but that wasn’t going to happen. The only way I wasn’t going on that date tomorrow was if I woke up dead.

I deserved that moment with Gabe. I knew it, and Dad knew it. The whole world knew it.

All I wanted was to
finally
be happy, and tomorrow was
going
to be our first, real date. But how was I supposed to be happy and enjoy any of that, when getting my way came with the guilt of disobeying my father?

I’d already broken enough rules of my own. I didn’t want to start breaking Dad’s rules, too.

But I had to.

I knew I had to do it.

Chapter Six

I couldn’t sleep. I guess sleep would’ve found me much easier had I been more like my mother and born without a conscience. But I’d inherited Dad’s will to please, and that left me tossing and turning all night, struggling with guilt.

If the bright light of my cell phone hadn’t caught my eye at five-thirty a.m., I might’ve talked myself out of going. As soon as I saw Gabe’s name flash across the screen, I jerked my phone off the bedside table and opened the incoming text.

Good morning, sleepyhead. I’m waiting for you outside. Take your time.

I read the message once, then twice, and then a third time before responding:

I thought we were meeting at the park?

I sensed he’d anticipated that exact response, because no sooner than I sent the message, another text came through:

Five minutes there, five minutes back. That’s ten extra minutes I get to spend with you. Any arguments?

I smiled as I pictured him sitting out there, that goofy smile of his stretched across that morning-bird face.

Not one. I’ll be out in a minute
.

How did one even dress for a freakishly early morning date? I could easily sneak out in my pajamas. That seemed suitable enough for watching the sunrise. But, in spite of the fact that I’d spilled my guts to Gabe more than once or twice, I didn’t think we were quite at a stage in our relationship where he needed to see me with bedhead and frumpy pj’s.

A quick change of clothes and a tooth-brushing later, I tiptoed into the dark of morning. Gabe was there, waiting for me in the driveway just as promised. He was propped against the side of his car, a travel coffee mug in hand and a smile plastered on his face. What struck me was that he didn’t have a single line under his eyes—no sign of sleeplessness or extreme fatigue. Somehow, if at all possible, he looked as beautiful as ever standing there illuminated under the streetlight.

I kinda hated him for that. But only for a second.

“Well, aren’t you Mr. Chipper this morning,” I said, trying to force a smile through a yawn.

“Sleep well?”

I shrugged because I didn’t want to kick off our date with lies.

“Well, the morning’s ours!” he said loudly, and his voice carried down the street. I turned back immediately to watch the house, waiting for a light to come on. But there was no movement inside. No one heard him.

“That was kinda loud, wasn’t it?” he asked, almost whispering.

“Just a tad. Are we ready to go?”

“I am if you are.”

I looked back to the house once again. This was the moment. I could get in that car and go, Dad’s rules be damned, or I could politely back out and explain to Gabe why I couldn’t go. Truthfully, if I had to back out, Gabe would totally understand. He would be so polite and sincere, and that made it even harder to consider the possibility of blowing him off.

Okay. It was nearing six. Knowing that I had about two and a half hours to make it back before anyone would suspect a thing, I started to feel comfortable with the idea of leaving. Dad hadn’t been pulling himself out of bed too early these days, but getting back anytime after nine o’clock was pushing it for a Saturday morning. If I could get home, in my pajamas, and back into bed by eight thirty, there was no way he would even know I’d left.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

And then we were in his car and cruising down the road, but not before making a stop at Maurine’s Diner.

“Hungry?”

“I thought cold pizza was on the menu?”

“I’ve already dragged you out of bed at an ungodly hour of the morning,” he said, taking a friendly stab at me. I knew there was nothing ungodly about it for him. He enjoyed the tease, and I didn’t mind it so much myself. “The least I could do is buy you a decent breakfast.”

“Not trying to rain on your parade or anything, Gabe, but I’m not sure I’d slap Maurine’s with such a kind label.”

“Okay, if not decent, then … the least I could do is buy you breakfast at your favorite, sleazy diner?”

“It’s not sleazy,” I said, and we both smiled. “It’s familiar.”

Gabe got out of the car and rounded the front, helping me with my door.

“I didn’t even realize that they were open this early,” I said, double-checking the operation hours hanging in the window. Sure enough, 5-10, everyday.

“Well, now you know.”

I loved that, with Gabe, I was learning new things all the time—things about myself, about him, about stuff I already thought I knew everything about. He made even the smallest things so special.

Before I could open the diner door, Gabe moved in and opened it for me, his free hand landing gently on the small of my back as I walked past him and into the building.

I shivered under his touch, the way it felt to have his hand on my back, burning through the thin layer of cloth and right onto my skin. I shivered again, and he smiled.

He’d done that on purpose. I knew it. There was something so purposeful about everything he was doing that morning, and it made me nervous to learn what was next.

We made our way to the back end of the diner, to one of my favorite corner booths, and only then did he remove his hand and take a seat across from me.

“So how much time do we have?” I asked after we placed our order with the only waitress on-site. “When’s this thing go down?”

“What thing?”

“The sun,” I said. “I guess, what I mean is, when’s it come up?”

“6:53 on the dot,” he said, turning his attention to the dark window next to us. “We still have some time.”

“I can’t believe people get up to see this every morning.”

“You’ve never watched the sunrise?”

“Never.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” I said. “And why do you seem so surprised? Not everyone is a morning person. Some of us need our beauty rest.”

“Okay,” he smirked and watched me. “You prefer nightlife. I’ll remember that for our second date.”

“First date’s barely begun and we’re already making plans for a second?” I asked. “You’re confident.”

“Only optimistic,” he said, and his smile grew wider as the waitress returned with his coffee. He didn’t waste a moment to cradle it in his hand, somehow looking a little more relaxed as soon as he had that cup of caffeine to hold on to.

“Okay,” he spoke up a few drinks later. “Tell me something.”

“Anything.”

“What don’t I know about you?”

Oh. Where to begin? There was a lot. Things that he might’ve known a little about—like Mom, the fact that my parents were divorced, I used to live in California, and that my relationship with Bailey changed as quickly and dramatically as the seasons in Sugar Creek. He knew I didn’t have many friends, and the ones I
did
have weren’t long-time friends. I could feed him some very basic details, but knowing Gabe, he’d find a way to pry for more.

So I started talking, hoping something would stick.

“Okay, so I know it’s cliché, but what you see is what you get,” I said. “I don’t have anything to hide or filter. I require structure and stability; it’s kinda crucial for my sanity. I pretty much always follow the rules.”

“Yeah, no surprise there,” he winked.

“
But—”

“But?” he asked, quirking a brow. “There’s more. Intrigue.”

“I
did
get suspended from school when I was in the sixth grade.”

His eyes flashed the quickest hint of excitement.

“Mandy Parker, what did you do?”

“Bailey and I swapped places for a day,” I said, grinning at how stupid we were to think we could actually get away with it.

“And?”

“She had a huge science exam she had to pass, or our parents weren’t going to let her go to a theater camp in the summer. She wasn’t doing well in the class, and she had to bring her grade up to at least a C if she wanted to enjoy camp with her buddies. So the night before the test, she studied straight through the night. She managed to get one hour of sleep but woke up the next morning and couldn’t function to save her life. And we all knew that if she missed the test, it was an automatic failure. Our schedules were drastically different, and I didn’t have any tests of my own that day, so I sent her to school as me, and I went to school as her. And I took her test.”

“And the school found out?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“But you’re identical,” he said. “I have a hard time believing you couldn’t pull that off.”

“I got an A,” I said. “And that raised a red flag. They called us both to the office and drilled us for an hour. Believe it or not, it was Bailey who cracked under pressure. Her sleeplessness had gotten to her. She wanted to go home, so she didn’t even care. She ratted on me, and we were both suspended for a week. Bailey failed the test and almost had to repeat the class. Needless to say, she didn’t get to go to that summer camp. It was a mess.”

“You little rule-breaker, you,” he said, smiling.

“Your turn.”

“Oh, I got suspended from school a lot.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Oh, yes, I did,” he said, crossing an X over his heart. “Never for cheating on tests, though.”

“Then?”

“I was a habitual hooky player. I skipped—sometimes certain classes, sometimes full days. It was a remarkable talent of mine, skipping.”

I loved that he was so proud of himself for that.

“You hated school that much?”

“No,” he shook his head. “School wasn’t so bad.”

But then he trailed off, and his eyes were drawn out the window again. There was a faint glimpse of sadness lingering in his expression, and it looked all too familiar. It was a look I’d seen before, captured in a yearbook photo from his sophomore year of high school. I’d even caught a glimpse of that very look the night of Fletcher’s show, the night we wound up fighting in the high school parking lot. It was deep, deep sadness, rooted somewhere in his past. I couldn’t help but assume that there was something that kept him away from those classes back then, a reason he chose not to show up … something that hurt him, something that still haunted him to this very day. He wouldn’t have skipped for nothing.

“So, if school wasn’t so bad, then what? Why skip?”

“I wanted to be with my mom,” he said, bringing his focus back into the diner. He said it so quickly, so assuredly, that I already knew he’d prepared himself to say those words as soon as I asked. No slip of the tongue there. Something in the way he looked at me told me that this was his way of trying, of giving me a little more than what he’d been able to offer before. He was comfortable enough to tell me now, to confront a part of himself that he’d tried too hard to run away from.

“We admitted Mom to Evergreen when I was a sophomore. That’s about the time the skipping started.”

“Okay?” I asked, leaning forward in my seat.

“Rewind a bit,” he said, focusing on his coffee again. “My dad was in the military. He died of friendly fire in the line of duty when I was two weeks shy of sixteen.”

My heart suddenly felt heavier. It seemed crazy to even think it, but I hadn’t realized Gabe’s dad had ever been part of the picture. He’d never spoken of him, never mentioned anything about his other parent. All along, I just pictured his life without a father, but that hadn’t been the case at all. He’d lost him.

“Gabe,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Dad was the love of her life.” I granted him a smile with that, and he swallowed hard before he continued. “When she lost him, it was the end of her world.”

He kept alternating his hands between the table and his lap, constantly fidgeting his fingers, never settling in one spot. Still, he kept his eyes fixed on me as he talked, focusing on the promise that I wouldn’t judge him for anything he said to me.

I’d made him that promise. It was his heart that I loved,
him
that I was after. Nothing he could tell me about his past would ever compromise my feelings for him.

“We managed a month together after losing Dad, but that was it. We
managed
,
” he said. “Mom couldn’t pull herself out of bed to do even the smallest things. I cooked her meals. I fed her. I made sure she was clean and taken care of.”

He shook his head and focused off to the side for a moment, but his eyes quickly came back to me.

“Money was never an issue for us,” he scoffed. “It feels so pretentious to say something like that, but it’s true. Mom had family money, so we had the resources to make it work. But the actual act of paying our bills was a problem. She wouldn’t focus the time or energy to do it, and I was sixteen. I didn’t have the ability or know-how to keep our household running all on my own. And when I couldn’t handle the pressure and stress anymore, I called in reinforcements. I asked for help.”

“From Lashell?”

“And her husband,” he said, and for the first time since this change of subject, there was a smile on his face. The mere mention of the Dunhams, and Gabe was happy again. “They never had children, but Shelly and William always loved me like their own, and when I needed them, they came to my rescue.”

I rested my forearms on the table, watching him even closer. “And how did you know them?”

“Mom and Shelly were childhood friends, before Shelly’s parents moved her out here to Sugar Creek in middle school. But they stayed in touch over the years. It was one of those friendships that was built to last.”

“So what happened?” I asked, feeling comfortable enough to pose another question, to dig a little deeper. “After you asked for help?”

“We did everything we could.
Everything
. Mom was manageable on days when Shelly or William came around, but she couldn’t be left alone with me. Just one look at me, and she saw Dad. She sobbed every time I walked into her room. She began blaming me for leaving her. She’d scream; she’d throw things. Little by little, she’d convinced herself that I was him. I don’t know if it was the hair or the eyes. I don’t know, but she thought I was him.”

He looked down to the folded hands in his lap, and for one full minute, he didn’t make a move or a sound. He just sat there. I didn’t want him to feel alone, like I wasn’t fully committed to hearing everything he was putting out there, so I pulled myself out of the booth, and I slid in next to him. I took his hands and gave them a gentle squeeze.