He kept his eyes on his brother till he turned to leave. Once Julian was out of earshot, Emmett faced me with a grin.
“Look, I just wanted to say… in case he ever pisses you off, because Lord knows he pisses me off a lot… my brother’s a really good man. The best I know. And when he cares about someone, he’ll stop at nothing to make sure that person is happy, and safe, and completely taken care of for the rest of their life,” Emmett said earnestly, completely serious for once. “There’s really only a few people he regards that highly outside his family – Lukas being one of them, and I guess you being the other.”
“Sure you’re not trying to butter me up right now, Emmett?” I teased to disguise the fact that my heart was fluttering.
“Yeah, I’m not smart enough to blow smoke up people’s asses,” Emmett snorted, making me laugh. “What you see is what you get. And honestly, I was just telling you that because sometimes Julian… he can hurt people without realizing,” he said, making my smile falter just a little. “He doesn’t mean to – he’s just so focused on something else, usually work. And if he somehow hurts your feelings during this trip because say, he’s really busy, or distracted, or just plain being himself – just know that it’s worth it to stick around with him. Even if you don’t know what the hell he’s thinking half the time, and you can’t stand that he doesn’t say much. He’s still a good man who’s going to take care of you. I mean he’s definitely the best guy I know. I’m still kind of hoping to be him when I grow up,” Emmett smirked, putting the smile back on my lips.
“Thank you, Emmett. I appreciate it,” I said, giving him a hug.
“Alright. Go talk to my mom now,” he said. “And sorry ahead of time if she brings up grandkids!” he called after me.
28
SARA
The last time I was out of the country was when I was eighteen.
It wasn’t quite summer yet. I had dropped out of school, and I already had a new college lined up to transfer to in the fall.
But that wasn’t for another five or six months, and I hated every minute of being home in my shitty little town.
My father had a thriving law firm about ten minutes away now, so there was no chance of us moving. I was stuck at home in the place that the misery first started, and worse, many of my classmates from high school still lived there. They knew I was back, they knew what I’d done, and it delighted them. They left printouts of the article covering my arrest at our door. They taunted my mother if they saw her at the gas station or grocery store.
I myself didn’t leave the house.
I was terrified.
So eventually, Mom started taking us on mini road trips. She worked part-time at the local library, but she quit the job in order to be home with me every day. And if I had the energy, or found myself in a good enough mood, she’d take me driving to explore the other parts of Texas.
“There’s more than where we live,” she said behind the wheel of her old Camry, wearing sunglasses too big and boxy for her face. “Daddy taught me that,” she added, beaming as much as she could for someone as reserved as she was.
“Yeah, he taught you that by bringing you to London and then forcing you to live here,” I had griped.
“Yes, but now I have a car. I have these big roads. I can go anywhere I want.”
“You never do.”
“What am I doing now?”
“What, it took me getting in trouble for you to start exploring? That’s sad.” My surly teenaged pessimism was a force to be reckoned with.
“Maybe that’s sad,” Mom conceded. “But sometimes it takes a tragedy for us to get moving. To find the strength to look for better things.”
“So I’m a tragedy now?”
Again, the pessimism.
I was definitely not in a particularly charming or likable phase of my life. After the bullying in high school, then the entirely different kind in college, I felt like the world was against me. Sometimes, I felt like even my mom was against me. I could see and feel how much she loved me with every fiber of her being, but sometimes I would catch her gazing at me with almost a fearful look. Like she didn’t quite know who I was, or who I’d grown up to be.
I spent a lot of time in my room just watching movies and TV. Mom offered to sit with me, but she was awful at sitting still, and she always lectured me on my taste in sappy romantic movies.
But the road trips helped us.
They started small, with little half-hour drives to Dallas. Then they got longer. I’d take my Una Magazines with me for those rides. For the three-and-a-half h
our journey to Austin, my dad joined us, and he sang the whole way. My magazines were of particular comfort for me that time as my mother and I switched back and forth between being amused and enraged by him.
In Austin, we went to the botanical garden, and despite my dad’s protests for his weak knees, we hiked Mount Bonnell. At the top, I met two women in their mid-twenties who offered to take a picture of us in front of the view. They wound up inviting the three of us to watch their roller derby bout that night, which we did. Dad loved it. Mom not so much. But she did appreciate that one of the girls spotted me in the stands, and dropped by to say hello.