Slow Twitch - Реинхардт Лиз (бесплатные серии книг .txt) 📗

I did. I would. I had to.

My head was swimming. I wished Jake was with me. I didn’t want to call him, but I wanted to know what happened between him and his father.

Jake had been worried that he’d changed this summer, but any changes he’d made were just for the better, as far as I was concerned. He was more confident, more sure of himself. I fell asleep thinking about Jake and woke up to my mom brushing my bangs back.

“Brenna?” I could see her smile through the blur of sleep in my eyes. “Sweetheart, are you awake?”

“Yes,” I said groggily. “Is it late?”

“Not very, honey.” She twisted a length of my hair around her finger and let it fall in a long coil. “They asked if I could do a late summer session. One of the professors broke her leg. Do you remember Angela with the freckles?”

“Oh, that sucks.” I yawned and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. “Poor Angela. That’s great for you, though, Mom.”

“I kind of hate this.” My mom twisted her hands, her voice a little wobbly. “We just got back and things were so hard for you. I feel like we hardly saw each other, and this will eat the rest of our summer up.”

I rubbed her hand in mine, looked into her great blue-grey eyes and at her the lips she was chewing with worry and felt so good. It felt good knowing that she was doing something she loved again. “You need to do this. I’m fine. Jake isn’t going back to Zinga’s for a while. Devon wanted to hang out. Kelsie will be around. All good friends. I’ll have fun and be careful. I promise. Okay?”

“You’re growing up so fast.” She bit her lips together. “I’m really proud of you.”

“Thank you.” I petted her cheek with my hand. “I’m proud of you, pursuing your doctoral degree. Seriously, I’m so happy for you.”

She kissed me hard and then she was gone, back to her job, and I was alone. Well, not completely alone.

I was just out of the shower when I heard the crunch of tires on the driveway.

Jake!

I ran out, barefoot, damp-haired, and jumped into his arms.

“Hey, you.” His smile was slow and warm just before he kissed me. “It was weird that I didn’t get to wake up and see you first thing.”

“I know. I thought about you last night. Is it all cool? With your step-father?” I tucked his overlong hair behind his ears.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “You know, some people are just always there for you. He’s one of them, so I’m lucky like that. I was actually wondering if you wanted to take a little road trip?”

“Sure.” Me and Jake, alone in the truck, windows down, sun out, the last of summer ours to enjoy…it sounded perfect. “Where do you want to go?”

“How does Lodi sound?” Jake grinned.

  Chapter Eight

Saxon

“Operation Convince Cadence I’m Not An Asshole” wasn’t exactly going the way I had hoped when I started my mission.

I guess what I’d envisioned was Cadence spending time with me, my natural charm wearing away her ironclad defenses, and her deciding to dump her lump of a boyfriend and fall into my arms instead.

But the truth was, Cadence wasn’t really much of a romantic, and it wound up that I kind of was one. Because all of my jokes and wooing and gifts and gestures didn’t change a few solid facts.

1) I was a ‘crackhead’. Granted, most people stopped calling me that once I proved my chops as a waiter, then subbed a day or two at the grill, where men were made. But, there was no forgetting that I was here because I couldn’t control a drug addiction and rehab hadn’t exactly worked for me.

2) I had no vehicle. In Sussex County, where the roads were impossibly long, windy, and still dirt, that would have been a tragedy. Here it might have been less of one, except for the fact that I knew no one and went nowhere other than Aunt Helene’s house, the restaurant, food stores, home improvement stores, and stores that sold silly old lady shit like knitting needles and doilies and porcelain cherubs.

3) I wasn’t a rotten, hardworking college schmuck. Nope. I was a lazy, entitled, drug-addled semi-genius. Or at least I was before my ass landed in Lodi and started the Saxon Reformation. I wasn’t sure what I was now. Except crazy about this batshit girl. Who looked at the facts and made decisions.

Like to not date me because I didn’t hold up against the facts of Meathead, her like-interest. Because it was no love-interest.

I could tell he bored the hell out of her. I could tell he was basically a nice douche bag, and he knew there was a real reason he should like Cadence. He just couldn’t riddle what the hell that reason might be.

But I did know every reason why she was beyond amazing. I knew that she was deceptively brilliant. I knew that she was aggressively hard-working. That she had a thick shell and a soft interior that hardly anyone got to see. And I knew that if I was ever lucky enough to get a glimpse, it would be worth all of the hardship and waiting. Because she was good and kind and funny, and probably damn sexy if someone could just unknot the kinks she’d worked herself into.

Luckily, I was always a champion at deceptive mirages. So I knew that Cadence and the Goon weren’t as twitterpated as they were pretending. And I made whatever moves I could to take advantage of that fact.

But my real strike of brilliance was mostly an accident. It was one of those weird, rare nights off that I almost never had. Aunt Helene had been picked up by some of her old crone friends to get wild at the local Bingo hall. Before she left, she grabbed my arms hard and told me that I should get out and have some fun. I smiled and kissed her hard because she was so fucking cool I can hardly stand her, then I pushed her out the door and into the arms of late night Bingo. And I went to work putting up shelving until the goddamn drill lost power. I had forgotten to plug the extra battery pack in. I was shit out of luck.

The night was nice, kind of cool, kind of breezy. I sat on Aunt Helene’s front porch and found my pack of cigs. I lit up, but it didn’t feel the same. I only smoked it by half, then stubbed it out and decided to go on a little walk-about. I wanted to see the neighborhood. I wanted to move my legs. It was hard to believe I’d spent so much time back home cooped up in a house or a car, lounging. Now that my body had been working, I felt like I needed to keep it going.

I walked up the street, waving to the vaguely familiar neighbors I passed here and there. I walked back down and looked discreetly into a few lit windows, catching tiny glimpses of normal and not-so-normal families eating, arguing, watching television. I was avoiding one house on the block that I could bet was empty anyway. But I was drawn to it. And if I was right, and it was empty, what was the harm?

But fate was my lady.

The lights were on. Pammy’s car was gone and so was Tony’s. It was a long shot. I could get an earful of a pretty pissed Rosalie Erikson. But I just might get an eyeful of sexy Cadence Erikson. I decided to take the chance.

I was going to lean on the doorbell when I remembered that it was late and if Sullie was home, he’d be sleeping. This might sound very stalker-esque, but in the moment it felt pretty fucking Dark Knight; I climbed the fire escape on the side of their building.

It had been a set of apartments once, but Tony bought them out and finally renovated it into one big house with some weird apartment hang-ons. Like a fire escape. We didn’t have apartments in good old Sussex, so I was kind of jacked to jump up on one and scale it like I’d seen in the movies.

It was just as cool as I’d imagined.

I got to the lit window and peeked in quietly. Sullie was crying in the middle of a girl’s room. I couldn’t tell if it was Cadence’s or Pammy’s (or both of theirs if they shared), but he was pissed. I was so focused on him, I hardly noticed Cadence skid in. She was a knock out, even in bumming-around clothes with panic on her face.