Trouble (Dogwood Lane #3)(62)

Matt hands me a bottle, top already off. “Drink before you talk. Let’s get a head start on the situation here.”

I eye him over the rim of the bottle as I do as I’m told. The liquid is cold and shocking, but I don’t taste it. I don’t feel it pool in my stomach like I usually do. I don’t feel anything other than the overwhelming sensation that everything is wrong.

We stand in Matt’s kitchen, the one he decorated with old farm utensils. It’s an odd motif, and I’ve told him this a hundred times.

“Do you ever think about taking that old hook and throwing it at the wall?” I ask. “Could be a good stress reliever.”

“First, I think it would break. It’s from the 1800s. Second, I don’t like hanging drywall that much.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I say.

“For drywalling tips?”

“No. For your logic. You’re good at that shit.”

Matt chuckles under his breath. “What did you do now?”

“Nothing,” I say with as much emphasis on the word as I can place. “Believe it or not, I didn’t do anything. Not anything wrong, anyway. I did everything right. For the first motherfucking time in my life, I did it all right, Matt.”

He drops into a chair. Unlike my chairs at home, it doesn’t squeak. I’m too amped up to sit, so I just pace across the kitchen instead.

“Okay,” Matt says. “I’m ready. What are we dealing with here?”

“What do you think?”

“Penn, no offense, but you could be talking about virtually anything right now. I’m scared to even guess.”

I whirl around and look at him. Surely he knows what I’m talking about. I don’t get mad like this. I’ve never stormed inside his house and rambled like a lunatic. My heart never feels like it’s going to burst out of my chest, either, and in the case there’s a freak exception, it’s never, ever about a woman.

Ever.

“Oh,” Matt says. “Avery.”

“I did everything right,” I promise. “I tried not to say anything stupid. I didn’t chase after her. I was polite, Matt. Polite. Me. I was polite.” My empty bottle goes into the trash. “I was thoughtful, I thought.”

He doesn’t say anything. It’s like he wants me to word vomit everything before he reacts, like maybe I’m going to let some offense slip and make his job easy.

There’s no offense. He’ll see.

“We talked about things,” I say. “You know, we discussed things that go beyond the weather. I thought we . . .” My insides bunch up and I don’t know what I think. Or thought. Or should think.

This is all a mess.

Any humor in Matt’s eyes evaporates as he sees the pain I can’t hide in mine. He leans up and places his bottle in the middle of the table. I don’t know if he’s offering it to me or he’s just getting it out of the way, but I take it. He doesn’t say a germophobic word about it.

“May I ask what happened?” he asks.

“Do you know how I told you when I first met her that I thought I knew her?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“But neither of us knew an Avery Perry, so we just assumed I was mixing her up with someone else.”

“Right. And I told you not to mention that—”

“—so she wouldn’t think I was a dick! This is your fault, Matt!”

He hangs his head. I think the son of a bitch is laughing, but I can’t be sure.

I hold my forehead in my hands. My temples throb, probably from trying to process so much information in a short period of time.

“This is not my fault,” he says. “Whatever in the hell happened to set you off like a hillbilly firecracker is not my fault.”

“If I would’ve told her I knew her, then this would be a different story.”

“So you do know her?” he asks.

I yank out a chair across from him. But I don’t sit. Instead, I drape my arms over the back of it and look at my friend.

My world is imploding. A night that meant so much to me so long ago is now relevant—no, entwined—with a girl I just met that I probably really like if I let myself think about it. And I was starting to let myself think about it, I think.

“Do you remember the day my dad got arrested?” I ask.

A shadow falls on Matt’s face as he nods. “Yes.”

I close my eyes as I remember the rage in my dad’s eyes. The way he held my mom like she was a rag doll. How she screamed at me to leave him alone, but I knew that if I did, not only would the cycle of abuse continue but also one of us would end up dead. And it wouldn’t be him.

He gripped my throat. Spit in my face. Explained, in detail, what a disappointment I was to the Etling name. As I listened to his venom and felt the pain of his hits, both verbal and physical, I knew I had to do something. And when he finally let me go with a promise to continue our discussion later, after he had one with my mother, he locked me out of the house.

In my truck a few minutes later from a couple of streets away, I called the police and told them where they’d find a domestic dispute and enough cocaine to lock my dad up for the rest of his life.

“I thought he was going to kill me that night,” I say. “There was something different about him. It was evil. Just inhuman, honestly.” I take a huge swallow of air. “I’m the one that called on him.”