Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute(62)

His shoulder moves under my cheek as he huffs, a smile in his voice. “Nice. You’re being pedantic. I was worried about you for a second.”

I laugh and cry and snort and generally make a mess of myself. I can’t believe I’m sobbing on his shoulder in the middle of Nottingham. “Shoot me now.” I lift my head, clumsily wipe my cheeks with both hands, avoiding his gaze—

“Hey. Stop.” Brad puts a gentle hand on my jaw, pushes my chin up until our eyes meet. His are warm and soft and focused as he produces a tissue from God-knows-where and dabs carefully around my face.

I sniff loudly and sit there being cleaned up like a child. “This is the worst.”

“You’re welcome.” He gives me another tissue. “Blow.”

I do as I am told.

“Put that in here.” He has yet another, clean tissue—clearly he stays prepared, and why am I surprised?—spread open in his hand. I pop mine on top of it, and he wraps the whole thing up in a little parcel and puts it in his pocket. Then he pulls hand sanitizer out from his other pocket and squirts a healthy amount into my palm, and two colossal realizations hit me at once, which is deeply unfair, because lightning’s not supposed to strike twice.

           I love Bradley Graeme. As in, would give him a kidney, would wash his socks, would turn into a supervillain if he died. I love him so much I almost want to say it out loud, a dangerous and horrifying prospect I am not remotely equipped to deal with right now. Luckily, I have something else to distract me.



      Giselle was right.





“What if everything about me is just a reaction to him?” I whisper. The band has moved on to “Despacito.” I am convinced they’re doing this on purpose.

Brad puts a hand on my knee and squeezes. “Are you listening to me?”

I blink. “Yes?”

“Your dad is just something that happened to you,” he says. “Like that time you were sick and you ate a tub of Phish Food and all your vomit tasted like chocolate ice cream, so you don’t eat it anymore.”

I grimace. “Brad. Ew.”

“What? It’s an example. Your entire personality is not because of Phish Food,” Brad says seriously, “and it’s not because of your dad, either.”

He makes it sound so simple, but believing it is much harder. “That’s just ice cream. This is—” My whole life plan. “My Steps to Success board says—”

“Change it.”

“But that’s not the point! The point is, how many things have I done or wanted to do just to…to show someone who is never going to care and never going to change? How pathetic does that make me?” It feels like everything is slightly twisted, like my vision doesn’t align with the angle of the world around me. I thought I was someone strong. I might be the opposite.

“You know what you said to me before?” Brad asks, his voice low, his eyes pinned to mine. “You said it’s not fair. Because you, Celine, are the kind of person who cares about fairness. You’re the kind of person who wants justice, and that’s not him—that’s the opposite of him. It’s all you. So you’ve been doing the most to balance the scales. So what? That doesn’t make you pathetic. It makes you yourself. You just needed to figure out on your own that…that fairness is about you being happy, not him being punished.”

A stubborn part of me wants to insist that he’s wrong, that I’m still fucked up and this is the end of the world, but the thing is, he’s making sense. And I like sense. I can follow his logic step-by-step and I think he’s right.

I want things to be just. I want things to be good. I want harm to be made up for—the same things Katharine Breakspeare fights for when she takes on these human rights cases. That’s what I care about. That’s who I am. And maybe I’ve let that shape my choices in a way that does me no good, but choices can change. I have control over that. I have control over myself.

My dad doesn’t.

Except that’s not true, because I feel the weight of everything he’s done—everything he hasn’t done—on my back. And I don’t know if it’s ever going away.

But you can try to push it off, surely?

I swallow the last lump of tears. “You were right, before. I do avoid my feelings. But I’m going to…try. To do better.” To let them drive my choices, instead of letting my dad rule over me. “And I…feel like I don’t want to see him at the ball.”

Brad nods slowly.

“But I can’t just…not go. Can I? Wouldn’t that be giving him too much power?”

Brad’s response is careful. “I don’t want him to ruin this for you. Either by upsetting you when you’re there, or by taking it away from you altogether. I think maybe…you should talk to your mum.”

My stomach thuds down into the concrete bench. “Right.” Mum doesn’t know anything about this because I’ve very specifically kept it from her, and suddenly that feels less like protection and more like the betrayal my sister said it was. We don’t sneak around behind Mum’s back. She’s never done anything to deserve it. But I did it anyway, and now I’m meant to reveal all and, what, ask for her help? I got myself into this mess.