SIX DAYS (12 page)

“What are we doing tonight?” I asked Kasey, once he was inside the car with me.

He smiled, a playful edge to it. “I have a proper date planned for you.” That made me smile, too.

“What exactly does a proper date consist of?”

“You’ll see,” he grinned. “You look amazing by the way.” The way he was looking at me made my insides warm enough to melt. I put my hand on his face; he leaned in to kiss me. I understood what Hazel meant when she said lust was an extremely strong emotion. It was taking all the strength I had to keep from climbing on top of Kasey right there in the driveway.

“Are your parents still out of town?” I asked softly in between kisses, not believing I was being so forward.

“There’s no sex on a proper date,” he whispered against my mouth.

“But, what if I want there to be?” I murmured back. He released a hard breath and kissed me again, which made me think he’d changed his mind. That he was going to ditch our date plans and take me home with him.

I was wrong.

“No,” he said softly. A mischievous smile formed on his lips as he watched me struggle to regain my composure. “Tonight we’re only going to talk.” I tried not to look disappointed. Getting to know Kasey better would be nice.

Kasey drove us out of town a little ways. I watched in the side view mirror as the city lights slipped from my view. I didn’t ask where we were going. I wasn’t even the slightest bit curious. The only thing I needed to know was that I was going to be with Kasey, the rest didn’t matter.

When he stopped the car, I had no idea where we were. It was pitch black, except for what I could see in the glare of the headlights in front of me, which was nothing, really.
Just grass.

Kasey asked me to give him a minute before getting out of the car. I heard the trunk open and close and nothing else until he opened my door. Kasey held his hand out for me and walked us to the back of his car. What was waiting for me took my breath.

“I wanted to be with you in a place where we wouldn’t be interrupted.”

“It’s all so beautiful,” I beamed.

There were a dozen candle lanterns sprinkled along the ground surrounding a small round table with two chairs covered in white linens with three votive candles in crystal holders in the center. There were two shiny red plates, two crystal champagne flutes, and actual silverware. A picnic basket and a bottle of champagne chilling in an urn sat on a blanket next to the table.

Derrick hadn’t ever done anything like that for me. Thinking back, he’d never done anything romantic for me at all, and he’d had plenty of time and opportunities to.

Kasey helped me into my chair, reached into the picnic basket, pulled out a small battery powered radio, and clicked on a quiet station. He sat a single plate of pasta and two forks between us, opened the champagne, and poured us both a glass. Then sat down beside me and smiled. “I want to know everything about you,” he said.

Kasey questioned me for an hour and a half. He wanted to know about my favorite things, colors, flowers, movies, music. He asked where I wanted to go to college and what I wanted to study. I wasn’t sure about that anymore. When we first moved, I swore I was going back home so I could go to college with my friends and Derrick, but I didn’t think I wanted to go back to that life anymore. It felt so backwards and far away.

We talked about Nico. How I felt about my parents divorcing and what my life was like before we moved. Kasey laughed when I told him my old friends were nothing like the people he was used to and would have bored him to tears. We talked about my name—how I wound up Rhiannon Luella. Which we both laughed about. He knew my parents were Fleetwood Mac fans because of Rhiannon. Luella, I explained, was the name of the nurse in the delivery room the night I was born. We agreed that the two names went together about as well as peanut butter and mayonnaise.

I guess I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised when Kasey asked me to tell him about Derrick. I took a deep breath and let it slowly ooze out as I gathered my thoughts on how to respond.

“Derrick and I met at a baseball game at school; we started dating shortly after that. I’m sure Hazel already told you he was my only serious boyfriend.” I could tell by Kasey’s smile that she had.
I knew it
. Nothing was a secret.

“We’d been together a few weeks shy of a year when I told him I was moving. Then he dumped me. And that’s all, I guess.”

“That’s not all,” he said softly.

“No, that really is all of it,” I snickered.

“You loved him,” Kasey stated as if it was a fact he was positive about.

I looked at Kasey’s face, at how the candlelight radiated shadows across his skin. I knew I felt things for him that I shouldn’t have. It was too soon, but I couldn’t help it, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Just thinking about it made my heart beat faster. Every inch of me knew what I was about to say was the truth.

“I thought I loved Derrick.”

“Why did you say
thought
?”

“Because I’m not sure love is what that was anymore.”

“What’s making you doubt it?”

How could I tell a boy I’d known four days that he was making me question everything about my relationship with Derrick, who I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with—before he rid of me, that is.

Kasey stared into my eyes and smiled at me, which made the truth come floating from my mouth. “Because he never made me feel the way you do.”

The second I realized what I’d said, I shook my head and
began babbling incoherently, trying to take back my words in hopes that Kasey wouldn’t think I was batshit crazy. It was ridiculous for me to be talking about feelings so early.

Kasey placed a couple fingers over my mouth, which made me stop talking. “C’mon, I want to show you something,” he said.

I walked silently beside him until he stopped. It was pitch black, and we were far away from the car, so when he let go of my hand and left me standing alone, it freaked me out.

Then I was suddenly blinded by a bright light shining in my face, but just as quickly it was gone and I felt Kasey back at my side.

“Sorry about the spotlight. That thing is hard to control.” He took my hand again and when I moved to look at him, I realized where we were standing—in the middle of a runway. The spotlight highlighted the reflective markers along the asphalt trail as far as I could see.

Kasey explained that the airstrip belonged to his family, and then took me to the hangar to see their airplanes. There were two. One with two seats, the other had ten.

We were looking at the smaller one when he told me that all of the men in his family could fly a plane and that he was learning. 

“This! You’re learning to fly this tiny little plane?” I gasped. The thought of him being so far off the ground in something so small and delicate frightened me.

He laughed. “No, not yet. I decided to start with a helicopter.”

That didn’t make me feel any better. “A helicopter,” I repeated.

“Yeah,” he laughed.

“Is it scary?” It sounded terrifying to me, but I was afraid of heights.

“No, it’s, um…it’s actually very freeing. It’ll be even more so when I can fly on my own. I still have to have an instructor pilot with me for nine more hours.”

“Promise me that you’re careful,” slipped out of my mouth, sounding more desperate than I would have liked, but the thought of something happening to Kasey caused a sharp ache to drag through me, which reflected in my tone.

“I promise.”

Kasey stared at me for a moment, and then shook his head. “What?” I asked, thinking he’d officially decided that I was a crazy clinger and he had to get rid of me as soon as possible.

He didn’t answer, just took his keys from his pocket, and pulled me toward the only door in the hangar. The room we entered had a desk and a few chairs scattered around. It looked like a classroom. About the time I realized that, the lights went out.

Kasey put his hands on my waist and guided me backward until we were against the desk, and then kissed me. His hands pushed up my dress, sliding impatiently up my thighs.

“I thought there was to be no sex on my proper date,” I said, smiling so hard that I was glad it was too dark for him to see. 

“You’re making me break my own rules,” he moaned and put his mouth back on mine.

When I got home, my mother was sitting on the coffee table in our formal living room dressed in a gold floor-length silk robe clutching one of the monogrammed whiskey tumblers our decorator had purchased in her hand. The room would have been completely dark if it wasn’t for the soft light radiating from a single lamp in the corner, making my mother
resemble a 1930’s movie star or something.

She didn’t acknowledge me, didn’t ask if my father had ever called—which he hadn’t, or where I’d been, who I’d been with, or why I’d decided that coming home at 2 a.m. was okay when my curfew was midnight. She looked empty, like she’d completely checked out. It frightened me.

“Is everything okay?” I asked, and sat down next to her.

“I’m just…” Her brown eyes, which my father had always said mine matched perfectly, were encircled with smeared makeup, and filled with tears. “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell happened. How everything went so wrong.” She looked at me, and I saw my mother, the way she used to be, instead of the black
card wielding nightmare she’d become over the last couple months, and I felt bad for her. I always knew she was hurting, but this was the first time she’d shown it. My parents were together over two decades and had a child and, as far as I knew, my father hadn’t given her a reason for leaving that didn’t involve Nico. My father leaving wasn’t my mother’s fault. It was his.

“Have you talked to him today?” she asked.

“He never called back.”

She frowned, as if she knew he never intended to call me back—something I’d also suspected. She put the glass to her mouth and threw back the remaining brown liquid.

“Coward,” she spit. “I know he’s your father, Ryen, which is no fault of yours, but that man is one hell of a coward. I told him he should be the one to tell you. But no, he’s got me cleaning up his mess again.” She’d been the one to tell me about my father’s secret life, which he and I still hadn’t had a conversation about, but his cheating, lying, and such weren’t exactly subjects I wanted to discuss with him.

“What’s going on? What was he supposed to tell me?”

“Nico’s pregnant,” my mother breathed and got up to refill her glass.

“What!”

“She’s three months along.” Three months! That meant Nico was pregnant before he told my mother about her.

I felt nauseous. I mean, seriously. What the hell was he thinking?

“It was an accident, right?”

“You’ll have to ask him, but I don’t think so. Not that it matters now anyway.” The sadness in her weepy tone mangled the words, but not nearly enough to make them mean something else.

My mother knew my father was sleeping with Nico. Obviously. But finding out that she was pregnant confirmed that he’d been having unprotected sex with her—before he’d left my mother. He’d broken her trust by cheating and lying, but screwing your mistress bareback was disrespectful and potentially dangerous to say the very least.

I couldn’t breathe. Finding out that my father was even more of a disgusting pig than I’d initially thought felt like getting punched hard in the lungs.

“He asked me to meet with a mediator to hurry our divorce along because he and Nico want to get married as soon as possible. She doesn’t want to be pregnant and unmarried,” my mother whimpered. “But she had no problem screwing someone else’s husband to become pregnant.”

I still couldn’t believe that my forty-two year old father had so irresponsibly knocked up a girl barely three years older than me. There were actual siblings with that amount of age difference. Nico could be my sister for crying out loud, but will be considered a mother to me after my father marries her. My thoughts churned in violent circles, mimicking my stomach. Emotions flooded my brain and my body couldn’t decide whether to puke, or cry, or scream. All of which I was on the edge of.

My mother threw back another shot of whiskey, folded in on herself, and went to the floor crying. I couldn’t have hated my father more than I did in that moment for what he was doing to her. I helped my mother up and hugged her tight. She was right; my father was a coward, and an asshole for deconstructing our lives and not being man enough to take responsibility for it, or to help clean up the fucking mess he’d made. I thought if I never had to see him again, I’d be happy.

Once I got my mother into bed, I called Hazel.

“So, how was your date?” she answered.

“Amazing,” I said flatly.

“Then why do you sound like you’ve got a mind-bending wedgie?”

“My dad impregnated the infant and wants to marry her so the little bastard won’t be a bastard when it’s born,” I groaned.

“Shit,” she moaned.

“Yeah.
Shit,” I confirmed

“How’s your mom?”