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Jake gets up in a huff and opens the huge brown envelope. He only needs to glance at it for his face to fall.
“What is it?” I ask.
I see the anger creeping up on his beautiful traits and my heart picks up.
Jake doesn’t reply to me though, he turns to his sister as she licks the paper of her joint to make it stick.
“Have you read all of it?” he asks her.
She simply nods and puts the joint between her lips.
“And so?” Jake insists.
I know Jake is smart. I’m pretty sure his IQ would qualify him as a genius. I mean, if elitist Stoneview Prep offered him to skip a year, he has to be. But if his twin is around, he always relies on her for brain usage. It’s like he knows she’ll understand quicker, analyze quicker, conclude quicker and he doesn’t even bother wasting his time or energy if her computer-comparable brain is already working on it.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” she mumbles with the joint between her lips as she hops off the bar and taps her jeans pockets to look for her lighter.
“You want the good news first,” Chris suggests next to me and Jake nods, encouraging her to go on.
“Good news is we’re over sixteen and wherever we’re being offered to go, we have to sign on it. If we don’t want to go anywhere and the Murrays are happy to keep us, we don’t have to. This is what this paper is, a suggestion with a dotted line. As long as we don’t put any ink on it, it has no power in the eyes of the social system or in court.”
I’m completely lost as to what she’s talking about, but I really don’t like it. I get up to join Jake and he easily lets me grab the paperwork from him. My heart drops in my stomach when I read the offer to change guardians and households.
But that’s not the worst, the name under the new guardian and the address of the new household I both know too well. I have to squeeze my eyes closed and look again before the name ‘Nathan Brian White’ doesn’t burn into them anymore.
Holy shit.
He’s requesting to be their legal guardian.
“What’s the bad news then,” Jake demands in a voice of steel that makes me shiver but clearly has no effect on his sister.
“Well…” she goes behind the kitchen counter and opens drawers, still in search of a lighter. “First of all, he’s got a fucking great lawyer behind him.”
I look at the lawyer’s name at the bottom of the cover letter. Attorney Gloria Garcia-Diaz.
“Diaz as in Camila Diaz?” I ask. I already know the answer, but I can’t believe it.
Jake’s eyes widen and he grabs the letter from my hands.
“Fuck,” he huffs. “That’s her mom. She’s a court shark.”
“And she hates your guts,” Rose adds, finally taking a lighter out of a drawer.
“Yeah, thanks, I know that,” he growls.
Jake puts the letter on top of the rest of the paperwork on the kitchen bar and Rose comes back around. She puts down her lighter and joint next to the pieces of paper and puts her coat on, grabbing it from the back of a highchair.
“What else?” Jake insists.
Rose shrugs. “It’s Nate we’re talking about. He doesn’t shy away from pressuring someone into doing what he wants. Especially us. Cam’s mom is the least of our worries in this situation.”
“The fucker doesn’t scare me, Ozy. Why is it impossible for you to stick that into your brain?” He runs a hand through his hair, messing it up more than it already was, and I look back at Rose as she chuckles mockingly at her twin.
“And you’re such a brave boy, Jake. But I think we both know being scared or not won’t stop him from doing whatever the fuck he wants. And if you think he won’t go to the extent of threatening the people you love,” her eyes flick to me and my heart flutters at the thought of her knowing Jake is in love with me, “then I’m sorry to say all that braveness made you a little bit naïve.” She grabs the joint to put it in her mouth, then the lighter, and heads outside.
Jake turns to me, grabs my shoulders, and pulls me to him as if being in his arms would protect me from the rest of the world.
“I’m not scared of him,” I whisper, my cheek against his chest, my ear against the crazy heartbeat wrecking his body.
