forgot it on my desk at work. I was in a rush to leave to get to your house before it got too windy and I didn’t grab it.”
Jesus Christ.
My gut clenched at the thought of Hadley driving around in the motherfucking pouring rain without her cell, all because she was trying to get to me.
“New plan. We stop by the library before we come home so you can get your phone.”
Hadley’s eyes flew to mine and they widened. “That’s it?”
“What do you mean, that’s it?”
“No lecture?”
“Babe, after the way I acted I got no room to lecture you about anything. Though I will say I’m pissed you were out in a storm with no phone, but that’s on me. If I hadn’t pulled away, you wouldn’t have felt the need to rush to my house. But please, please, keep your phone with you.”
She nodded and gave her promise. “I’ll buy one of those ugly phone cases that clips onto your belt and wear my phone from now on.”
“You wear classy skirts to work, baby, that’s not gonna work.”
“Oh, right.” Her nose scrunched, then she continued. “I’ll just keep it in my purse from now on.”
“Good plan.”
“I love you, Brady,” she whispered, and warmth hit my chest.
Sweet Jesus.
“Love you, too.”
“What’s in the box?” Hadley gently asked.
I was kneeling, picking up the transcript of my father’s testimony I’d tossed on the floor. I’d long since stopped keeping it in order. I could read the documents forward, backward, from the middle to the end, or in any order, and still not make sense of why a father would operate a vehicle, a boat, or any mode of transportation while drunk. I’d never understood how a man allowed his brain to get so polluted with alcohol he’d put his children in danger.
I’d sat in the courtroom during his trial and read the transcripts and I still couldn’t fathom it.
I glanced up from the papers I’d collected and looked at Hadley. She was on her knees in front of my coffee table sorting through pictures. So far, she hadn’t commented but I knew what she saw. My childhood wasn’t pretty. My sister and I weren’t cared for. To her, we probably looked like two ratty, street kids. And we basically were.
“Nicole loved Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Total obsession. Every Friday night she was in front of the TV watching and my ass was next to her. When she was seven and I was nine, it was torture being forced to watch. When I was eleven and Melissa Joan Hart started wearing crop tops and plaid schoolgirl skirts, I didn’t mind so much.”
“You were perving out on Melissa Joan Hart?” Hadley scrunched her nose and she looked damn adorable doing it.
“Babe, as I said, I was eleven. I was perving out on the JCPenney’s catalog bra section.”
“Right.” She chuckled.
“There was a time when us poor teenage boys didn’t have the internet. We had to make do with what we could find. And every now and again, you could see a nipple poking under the material of a bra and it was an instant hard-on.”
“You poor thing. No Pornhub, however did you survive?”
“Melissa Joan Hart and her plaid skirts. Alicia Silverstone in a tight latex bat suit. Jennifer Love Hugetits in pretty much any movie she was in. And my all-time favorite, Reese Witherspoon in Cruel Intentions—full-frontal nudity and at the time the hottest sex I’d ever seen. I rewound and paused that movie so many times I ruined the VHS tape.”
“VHS?” Hadley laughed. Full-on, outright, belly-laughed.
And the unthinkable happened—I joined her.
Surrounded by all the ugly, all of the painful memories, the reminders that my sister was gone, I joined Hadley and laughed.
I didn’t give one shit, she was laughing at me. That I was seven years older than her and she’d probably never owned a VHS tape, or that I’d admitted to jerking off.
What I did give a shit about was, it felt great.
I felt freer, lighter, and for once, optimistic about the future.
“Did you…did you just… seriously call her Jennifer Love Hugetits?” she sputtered.
“Babe. Seriously. They’re huge. And if you think there’s a man my age that hasn’t perved out over her rack, you are wrong.”
“No. I believe you. I’ve just never heard her called that. I also had no idea you were a boob man.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, you seem to like hers.”
“Um, yeah, they’re hard to miss. But I can take or leave big tits.”
“Then what’s your thing?”
“Legs. And before you ask, by and