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“I do know that. You’re my main dude. I appreciate you.”
“Take care of yourself, Row,” he says and hangs up.
Jules slinks across the hot tub to sit next to me.
I put my arm around her shoulder and hold her close. “Have you talked to Rose or Shannon?”
“No.”
“You should get on that. If Merrick was worried, they will be, too.”
“We’re terrible friends, aren’t we? Terrible friends, terrible daughters. I’m a terrible cousin.”
“Maybe. But a lot of that is what we were made to be. We can try to be better at one of those things. We choose our friends, and they choose us.”
“You’ve got some Yoda pearls of wisdom.”
“Try, I do, young Padawan.”
“I’ll call them tomorrow.”
“Good.”
She snuggles into my shoulder. I play with the wisps of hair coming loose from her messy bun. “I’m drained,” she says through a yawn.
“Same.”
“Hey, you know what? Tonight will be the first night we sleep together without having sex.”
“That actually sounds nice, but, uh, let’s not make a habit of it. Cool?”
She laughs against my skin, then looks up at me and goes, “That’s the most fuckboy thing you’ve ever said to me.”
That’s because I’m not one with her. I couldn’t be if I’d tried. Sex is important, and ours is fire, but I’ve been all in on her from the start.
SEVENTEEN
JULES
Rose is crying. I catch her right after she gets home from Gino’s wake. They weren’t besties or anything, but they were definitely friends. And she’s delicate, unused to violence and loss. Outside of her dog getting hit by a car when we were twelve, she’s never really lost anyone or anything she loves. Both sets of her grandparents are still with us. She’s had a sheltered life. Her parents are teachers; her older sister is a teacher. She’s going to be a teacher. What a thing to have run in your family: The calmness of the American status quo. I envy her. I think that’s the main reason why I bothered with college. I didn’t have to go. I won’t have to work after graduation if I don’t want to. My dad’s wealth is dirty but well-hidden, and I could siphon off of him until he dies, then when he goes it’ll be mine. But going to college was a choice I was allowed to make, and it gave me a semblance of normalcy I never had.
“How can you not be furious at Rowan? I’m mad at her,” Rose wonders.
As much as I’ve tried to deny it, part of me is somewhat angry with her. I hear its foul hissing in the recesses of my brain. But it’s very quiet, drowned out by my anger over our circumstances, over the choices that we weren’t given, over the total lack of control we’ve had over our own lives up to this point. Kill or be killed is for ancient times, when the Neanderthals had to slaughter saber-toothed tigers to avoid becoming their lunch. That way of living is unnecessary now. Some men missed the memo.
“I can’t explain it to you. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Like how you didn’t understand when I told you getting with Rowan was a bad idea?”
“I understood. I ignored you.” Her allure was too intense not to.
“Yes, you did. Whatever… Your parents were at the funeral home, but I didn’t see Teague.”
He’s hanging on by a thread in a hospital bed. “He’s indisposed.”
“What does that mean?”
It’s a good thing she doesn’t know. It means no one besides my mom does. I don’t want to tell Rose; I don’t want her involved. And I don’t want her to hate Rowan. She’s already tiptoeing at the threshold.
