“I’m not going down this road with you,” I tell him. “Not again.”
“But I should be supporting my daughter. I should be contributing.”
“You should be doing a lot of things.”
“Yeah, so, let me.”
I shake my head. “What happens when I quit my job and you decide to stop contributing?”
He laughs at that question. He laughs, like I’m being funny, the sound getting under my skin. Ugh. I go to stand up, to walk away, but he stops me, pulling me back onto the couch. “Look, I get it. I’ve let you down, but just give it some thought.”
“There’s nothing to think about. I don’t need you. I never did.”
As soon as those words come from my lips, I almost choke on the flood of regret that flows through me. It might be true. I might mean it. I might not need him. But there’s cruelty in every word of that, and that’s not who I am. No matter what happened to us, I never wanted to be just another person who did things to hurt him.
“I’m sorry,” I say, putting my head down as I rest my elbows on my knees. “I don’t know why I said that. I’m all over the place right now. My emotions are a mess.”
Before he has the chance to respond, there’s a knock on the apartment door. I force myself to my feet to see who it is, brow furrowing when I look through the peephole and see Bethany. Weird. Jonathan mumbles something about saying goodnight to Maddie as he gets up, disappearing down the hallway.
Sighing, I unlock the door when there's another knock. Bethany tenses, her wide-eyes meeting mine when I open it.
“Kennedy?” Her voice is laced with confusion. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” I say, brow furrowing as I glance around. She’s with some friends, the girl who picked her up from work and a guy, maybe mid-twenties. “Did you need something?”
“Oh, uh, no,” Bethany says, forcing a smile as her cheeks flush. “Sorry. We just thought, I mean… we were looking for someone else. Must’ve gotten the wrong apartment.”
She elbows the guy beside her pretty hard, making him wince as he mutters under his breath, “I swear, this is where he was.”
Those words make my stomach drop.
“Who are you looking for?” I ask. “Maybe I can help you find him.”
“It’s nobody,” Bethany says. “It’s stupid, forget about it.”
She bolts away from the apartment, dragging her friends along, berating the guy as they walk. I make out a bit of their conversation as they flee, hearing that dreaded name.
Johnny Cunning.
Carefully, I close the door, making sure to lock it again, and turn off the TV in the living room before making my way down the hall. Jonathan stalls when I stop in front of him.
“You, uh… you might wanna consider staying,” I tell him.
He raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Yep.” I step toward him, flush against him, and rise up on my tiptoes as I whisper, “I think you’ve been made.”
I head to my bedroom, and he hesitates before following, stopping in the doorway. “What are you talking about?”
“The knock on the door,” I tell him as I strip, getting out of this uniform. “Seems they were looking for a certain someone they heard might be around here somewhere.”
“Fuck.”
“I didn’t tell them anything,” I say, tossing my clothes in the hamper. “It was the cashier from the store—you know, the one that went home sick tonight—and her friends. Guess someone thought they spotted you and word got back to her at work that you were in town for some reason.”
I turn to him, expecting a reaction, maybe an explanation, but he doesn’t even look at my face. No, his eyes are drifting, scanning my body, as I stand in front of him in plain white cotton, a simple bra and underwear.
I wave my hand in the direction of his face. “Are you even listening to me?”
He meets my gaze, eyebrows raised. “What?”
I shake my head, walking over to the closet to pull out a t-shirt, putting it on. When I turn back to him, he’s not looking at me again. No, this time his attention is on the top of the dresser right beside him, on the old notebook sitting there.
After a moment, he attempts to focus. “So I’ve been made, huh?”
“Seems so.”
“Pity,” he says, strolling over and sitting down on the edge of my bed. “I was enjoying anonymity.”
“Yeah, well, real world, remember? You had to know it wouldn’t last.”
“Yeah,” he mumbles, though he doesn’t seem to like that fact, his attention now on the drawings covering his cast. He traces the colorful lines with his fingertips.
Grabbing a black permanent marker from the drawer in my bedside stand, I push Jonathan back onto the mattress before climbing onto his lap, straddling him. I yank the cap off the marker with my teeth. Pinning him down, I find a spot on the cast that still has some white and carefully write the words, ‘love doesn’t know titles.’