2
HE EASES ME OFF HIS LAP, NUDGING me back until I’m stretched out on the rug. He joins me clumsily, adjusting to keep his weight from crushing me. His mouth finds mine again, heat and spice and fervor, and I return his kiss with passion I didn’t know I possessed.
Kissing Max doesn’t feel strange or forced or immoral.
It feels indulgent, satisfying, thrilling.
Until, through my fog of euphoria, I sense a shift of the air, and register the click of an opening of a door.
My dad’s voice fills the room. “Jillian? Max?! What the hell is going on in here?”
Despite my shock, I emerge too slowly from my lusty daze.
Max and I are breathing like we just finished a set of wind sprints. He’s stretched out on top of me. My fists grip the waistband of his sweats. My camisole is twisted up around my ribs—he has a hand beneath it!
From his place in my doorway, my father is witness to every dirty detail.
I wait for Max to apologize, to roll off me, to fling himself out the window, but drunken stupor must’ve robbed him of logic, because he drops his sweaty forehead to my neck and breathes a long, low, “Fuck.”
I shove him, simultaneously straightening my top and scrambling to get up off the floor.
“Dad…” But that’s all I’ve got. There’s no way to justify the literal tangle he’s caught me in.
Max hauls himself up to stand beside me—not too close. He’s squirming, tugging at his pirate vest, pushing a hand through his wild hair. He looks like a snared animal, alarmed and fretful and desperate to flee, which is pretty congruent with how I’m feeling.
My dad pounds a fist against the doorjamb. “What in God’s name is he doing here?”
Max and I share a glance. Limited options churn behind his puffy eyes—door or window, door or window? It’s glaringly apparent when he comes to terms with the fact that there’s nowhere to run.
“Um, visiting?”
My dad scuffs a toe on the carpet, posture inclined, stare lethal, like a bull preparing to charge. I notice his sleepwear: candy corn sprinkled over flannel pants, a googly-eyed jack-o’-lantern grinning gaily from his T-shirt. Meredith’s aggressively themed purchases, sported because Dad relinquished his Man Card four years ago, the day he said, “I do.”
Hysterical laughter fizzes in my throat. I have no idea what’s wrong with me; this is so not funny.
Dad takes a step forward.
Max matches it with a step back, as if there’s a force field keeping the two of them from getting too close. “Jake, I can explain.”
My dad flaunts a deadly smile. “Really? Oh, this should be rich. What possible explanation could you have for sneaking into my house in the middle of the night? What was that thud I heard? Did you trip? Did you fall on top of my daughter?”
Max has the sense to bite his tongue, but I can’t say I’m thrilled when he glances at me, passing the baton.
“Dad, calm down.”
“I will not calm down!”
“But it’s okay—”
“I can’t imagine anything less okay!”
“We were just talking.”
It’s a blatant lie that summons flames from deep within him. “Talking my ass! You were not talking. You were … you were—”
Meredith materializes behind him. She’s sporting the feminine version of his Halloween pajamas, but the jack-o’-lantern on her top is stretched over her newly rounded belly. Her face crinkles with confusion. “Jake?” she says, touching his arm.
“I’ll handle this,” he snaps, whipping around. Then, in a tone marginally softer, “You should be in bed.”
She rests a hand on her stomach. My half sister is growing inside, draining the life from my stepmother. At six months pregnant, Meredith still throws up daily, and she’s only just finished a long stint of bed rest. Still, doctor’s orders dictate she take it easy, and she complies because even after dozens of cutting-edge, astronomically expensive fertility treatments, it took her years to conceive this baby, who’s due in February.
She sighs, glancing from Max to me. She must deduce some version of what my dad walked in on, because she arches her professionally shaped brows, bidding the silent question: How dare we disrupt her baby-cultivating sleep?
She gives my dad’s arm a squeeze, swivels on her toes, and shuffles down the hall.
Damn it. As crazy as Meredith’s capable of making me, her presence was a welcome—if short-lived—diversion. Now Dad’s attention is channeled back at Max and me, and his anger hasn’t abated.
“Holden, you’re lucky I don’t keep a gun in this house, because if I did…” He pauses, his lawyer’s brain considering the threat he’s about to discharge. He must think better of it—possible future legal repercussions or Max’s challenging home life, I’m not sure—because he pulls in a breath and comes away with a fraction of composure. “I want you out of here. Now.”
“Yes, sir.” Max’s voice drags when he adds, “I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t—”
“Save it!” Dad barks.
As Max moves to exit my bedroom, I feel a pang of envy, watching his relatively painless escape. There’s no way I’ll be getting off so easy.
But Dad extends a hand, blocking the doorway before Max can disappear into the hall. “Make no mistake,” he says, dripping venom. “You’re not welcome in my house again unless you’re accompanied by an adult, and you are never allowed in Jillian’s room. Have I made myself clear?”
Max gives a curt nod. “Yes, sir.” And, in a move that can only be described as humiliating, he ducks under my dad’s arm and passes swiftly down the hall. I startle when the front door slams.
Dad returns his attention to me, but it seems his ire has followed Max across the street. His shoulders plummet and his face droops and I feel awful.
“Jillian,” he says. “I’m so disappointed in you.”
In seventeen years, I’ve never given him occasion to utter such a statement. Tears well in my eyes because, God, this sucks. I’d rather suffer the angry shouts he launched at Max than this quiet but deep-seated displeasure.
“I really am sorry.”
He heaves a sigh. “Max Holden? Tell me you didn’t invite him here.”
“I didn’t. He knocked on the window. He’s having a really hard time.”
Creases line my dad’s face. The Holdens and the Eldridges have been a unit since he and I moved in across the street a decade ago. Joint holiday celebrations, backyard cookouts, riverside strolls, family vacations—we used to do everything together. I recall the Super Bowl bash Marcy hosted a few years back. By halftime, Dad and Bill were several beers in, joking about how Max and I would probably end up married, which was perfect, Bill surmised, because we’d breed football prodigies with a talent for baking. Dad cracked up—he was a happy member of Team Max back then.
“Max is not your responsibility,” he says now. “That kid’s on the fast track to self-destruction. He was drunk, wasn’t he?”