He leans forward, elbows on knees, and drops his head into his hands. It’s then I notice his muscles are still quivering from the adrenaline rush pumping through his veins from everything that’s happened.
As calm as he looks and sounds, he’s really shaken up. The events of my afternoon now seem trivial in comparison.
I stare down at the ground, not touching him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone off on you the way I did when you walked through the door. I know you wouldn’t cheat on me. Especially not with her.”
He doesn’t look at me. “No, you shouldn’t have pounced on me that way. And definitely not over her.” He sits up. “Are you going to tell me what happened with you today? Don’t tell me nothing. I can feel it when shit’s going down with you.”
I shrug. “Nothing as dramatic as your evening. It’s just…well, I saw my dad today. At my house. Alan’s back.”
His eyes widen and grow serious. “Fuck, are you OK?”
Now I want to cry. How the hell can he worry about me after the crap he’s been through?
I shrug. “Sure, why wouldn’t I be? He said I looked good. Ask me how I like my new home. And that was it. My mom wanted me out of the house and I came here. Pretty fucking uneventful.”
He pulls me into him and kisses me on the head. “It’s more than that and you know it.”
I battle back fresh tears. “It’s OK. Same shit. New day. Nothing to get worked up about.”
“Then why are you worked up?”
I lift my chin. “I’m not.”
“Bullshit.” He stands and pulls off his shirt. “I’ve got to pop into the shower. It was a pigsty there. I’ll just be a couple minutes. When I’m done, I expect you to tell me everything you’re not telling me.”
I roll my eyes. “There’s nothing to talk about. That was it. Really. Nothing else happened. It’s all peachy in my world.”
His mouth forms a tight line, but he doesn’t argue with me. He goes into the bathroom. The water turns on. I hear the shower doors open and close.
I listen to him, my head at the foot of the bed and my feet kicking over and over against the pillows. Maybe I should leave and really spend the night at Zoe’s. Dumping more crap on Bobby doesn’t seem right tonight, but it’s definitely there, a whole lot of shit, simmering inside me and wanting to come out.
I know it and so does he.
Fucking Caroline.
I’m anxious, worried, totally a mess post-seeing my dad, and she’s like a fucking arctic wall preventing me from working through what I’m feeling with my best friend.
Crap, I can’t believe I actually threatened to break up with him.
I don’t want to be like Caroline.
Drama Queen from hell.
I’m not like her.
The fridge door makes a squeak and I find Bobby, a towel wrapped around his hips, pulling out another bottle. He stretches out on the bed beside me, sitting with his back against the headboard, and twists off the top of the beer.
“You going to tell me the rest of what happened today?” he asks.
“I told you everything.”
He take a long swallow and just sits there, watching and waiting. I struggle not to look at him. It’s hard because the crazy-girl nonsense is a sure tell I’m not doing OK. And Bobby really does care. It makes it painful not to share with him, but the junk inside me is just too raw right now.
He picks up my ankle and studies my Vans. “I like your shoes. You’ve not worn them before. Where did you get them?”
Neutral topic.
Waiting and not pushing me mode.
I turn to face him. “You mean with all the spying you did of me on the Internet before we started dating you didn’t find my website? My shoe art? My videos? Kaley’s Kustom Kicks. All Ks. I used to sell them.”
I open the laptop, type in my URL, and turn the screen to face him.
“You do realize you named your website KKK?” he asks, amused.
“Of course. All things bad eventually become good with a little push. I wanted to remove KKK as a negative in American nomenclature.”
“Ambitious, aren’t you?” He’s fighting back a grin.
“No, entrepreneurial.”
He takes another sip of his beer. “Did you ever sell any?”
“I used to. A lot. But I jacked up the prices to get fewer orders because it takes quite a bit of time to paint the shoes, and I stopped the shoe art when we moved here.”
“The shoes are amazing. Why’d you stop doing it?”
I slap closed the laptop and turn on the bed.
“I guess I didn’t need it anymore. It was just something I started to keep my mind off other things the months after Jesse’s funeral. We moved twice, first to my grandpa Jack’s and then here. It was really hard watching my mom take apart our life in Santa Barbara, how quickly she got over my stepdad’s death and then knowing why once it became obvious she was pregnant. I needed something to work on, and doing the shoe art helped.”
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling, hating that something girlie and fragile slipped into my voice just then.
“It used to be a profitable website,” I add. “I’d get white Vans for twenty bucks at an outlet and sold them for 750 plus shipping. I have something like 240,000 hits on my Kaley’s Kustom Kicks website and videos even though I haven’t posted on that site for a long time. I used to try to post a new video each week of me painting shoes.”
“Capitalist,” Bobby teases, a smile in his eyes.
I shrug. “What’s wrong with being a capitalist? What’s wrong with knowing how to make your own money?”
“Nothing.”
I give him a serious stare. “You didn’t apply for college. I thought you were going to apply to USC so we could go to college together. I don’t know why you didn’t. You can’t just surf and live off your dad forever.”
“I don’t plan to live off my dad forever. But you can live off your dad forever. Alan is worth over a billion dollars,” he mocks, blowing past my comment about not applying for USC and adroitly easing into the topic of my dad.
I sit up, pushing the hair from my face. “The money won’t do me any more good than Alan ever has. I might be his daughter, but he’s never going to admit it. You should have seen the way he looked at me today. He can see it. It rattled the shit out of him. He knows I’m his daughter and won’t say a word. And even if he did decide to come clean, I wouldn’t depend on him for anything, ever. Alan can go fuck himself. It really doesn’t matter if my dad someday acknowledges me because I won’t ever forgive him. I realized that today when I saw him stare at me and then say nothing. I’ll never forgive him for that or let him be a part of my life. I’d rather die than ask him for anything. And he can leave and never come back for all I care. I’ve had enough. I hate him. I just want him gone, Bobby. I don’t want him part of my life.”
That prompts Bobby to shift back into quiet and serious. Oh crap. I don’t know what he’s thinking but I know I’m not going to like it.
“You’re not done with him, Kaley. Not by a long shot. You do know, don’t you, that you relentlessly compete with Alan?” he asks quietly in his all-knowing way. “He isn’t even aware. But you do it anyway. It must really piss you off. You are not even close to being over this.”
I give him a mocking look. “You think I’m competing with Alan Manzone? With what? My websites? My films? My shoe art? With my capitalism? That’s really a stupid theory, Bobby. You must have spent days thinking up that one.”
He shakes his head. “No, you compete with him with your attitude. All the ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ It’s not who you are. Don’t waste your time trying to be him just to get back at him. It won’t work. And the person you are is amazing.”
That comment hurts me, even though I know he intends to be constructive and not mean. I roll over on his stomach. “Is my hypersexuality, as you so kindly phrased it this afternoon, me trying to get back at my dad as well?”
Bobby gives me a lazy smile. “Maybe. Jury is still out on that one, but we’re not discussing that here.”