Page 9 of Changing Lanes
Looking over my white nightmare as we pull away, he asks, “When are you going to stop driving that already? You need to get a car. A reliable car. One that you didn’t buy off the internet from a fifteen-year-old child.”
“First of all,” I say, counting by putting my middle finger up instead of my pointer finger, “he was sixteen.”
He releases a deep chuckle, lighting up his entire face along with mine. Jesse is such a stoic person that when you get him to crack, even if for a moment, it’s addictive. You’ll do anything to get him laughing again and when he finally does, it feels like winning the best kind of competition there is. I keep a mental tally every time I get him to break character.
He doesn’t even realize the power he holds in his smile either. Most pretty people don’t. Well, the good ones anyway. And Jesse, he’s the best. But I can’t tell him that. Sibling rivalry is alive and well in the Christensen family and I can’t have him realizing how much in the lead he actually is over the rest of us. Plus, we haven’t spoken lately, and I can’t just vomit how much I love and miss and need him. I tried already and he just retreated even more from me, from us.
“Second,” I put up my other middle finger, “he knew more about bikes than me. How was I supposed to know the thing had problems up the tailpipe?”
The snort he lets loose warms my chest straight through. It’s close enough to a laugh I mark it down as a win, immediately looking forward to my next one.
“And third,” I drop both hands to my lap, “you drive a car, you ride a bike. We all have our faults. She’s mine.”
“She?”
“Oh yeah, she’s definitely a she. She’s beautiful and moody and the baddest bitch on the block.”
“She’s a piece o’.”
“What’s that?”
“A piece o’ shit!” His loud laugh is so unexpected that while it fills me with pride, it also grates on my nerves that it’s at my expense. I do not mark it as a win.
We grab drinks from the drive-thru of a little coffee stand called Latte Da. I’ve never heard of it but Jesse swears by their specials, specifically one they call the mocha-swirl latte but no longer serve for some reason. I stick to my tea drink before I direct him toward my new place at Creekwood Apartments.
Tysen, the quintessential middle child, was the brother I had help me move in the other day. He and my new roommate, Marc, both lifted the heavier items, whereas big, bad Beckett stayed behind his closed bedroom door, most likely pouting. He seems like a pouter. A very tall, very sexy pouter. I watched with wide eyes as Tysen and Marc did that bro handshake thing upon first meeting. Marc is a tough nut to crack but my brothers are expert ball-busters and Ty had him laughing about something within minutes. Ty has a higher laugh count in the Jesse department than me but he also gets decked when his idiocy reaches intolerable levels, so who’s the real winner?
“Tell me about these guys you live with.”
“No.”
His head snaps to mine after he parks, asking, “Why not?”
“Because I don’t need you to go all big brother on them, essentially making me look like an incompetent little girl who needs J-bone’s constant protection.”
“Don’t call me that. That’s the dumbest nickname I’ve ever heard.”
I shrug my shoulders, keeping my comments to myself. We had four teenage boys in the same house at the same time, not to mention the insane amount of other teenage boys those four accumulated. We’ve all heard, and said, worse. Much worse.
“Regardless, I was barely able to get Mom in the door at Sunbrook, and in order to keep her there, I need money. Lots of it.”
“What was wrong with where she was before? It was fine and didn’t cost a fortune.”
“It wasn’t fine.” At all. “You’d know that if you visited more often.”
It’s a low blow but it’s true. Jesse filled the paternal role more than the others and took Mom’s rapid decline the hardest. He’s still recovering. Or self-punishing, I’m not sure. He’s a fucking mess and rarely sees our mom anymore. Which is probably for the best, considering, but I still wish he’d try. With her and with me. By cutting her off, he cut me off too, and that hurts just as bad, if not worse.
“You’re telling me this was the best solution you could come up with? Shacking up with two strange guys? Did you find them online or something? It all sounds suspect as fuck.”
Shacking up? What a chauvinistic shit. Believe it or not, men and women can not only be friends but also cohabitate and not shack up. I spent my life around men, like a continuous conveyor belt of guys, and I never hooked up with any of my brothers’ friends. Not even on my sixteenth birthday when a bunch of us were sleeping outside on a trampoline and I convinced one of Tysen’s friends into being my first kiss. Or at my junior prom when I snuck Nick’s BFF into the bathroom with me after pretending someone spilled punch on my dress and needed someone else to clean it up—with their mouth.
Actually, he might have a point. A tiny, inconsequential point that nobody, especially none of my brothers, needs to know about.
“Seriously? I cut my rent in thirds by moving in here. Probably even more because my first place was expensive.”
He moves to follow me over to the stairs leading up to my second-floor unit.
“What are you doing?” I ask, packing on a healthy dose of attitude. He doesn’t bother with seeing me for how long then insists on doing what exactly? A clean sweep of an already clean apartment? Intimidating my roommates?
