“Oh wow,” Felicity said. “She’s a knockout.”
“Tell me about it,” I replied.
“Oh my god,” Felicity whined, then she pinched my cheek. “Look at you. Your expression got all soft and sweet. I didn’t think you were capable.”
“Shut up,” I grumbled, but a small smile came to my face anyway. “You see her. How could I not?”
“I hope I get to meet this girl someday. I gotta give her my mom once-over. How does your real mom feel about her?” Felicity asked.
“Adores her. You would too. I know it sounds cheesy and cliche, but she’s perfect.” Felicity put her hands to her mouth and I closed the computer. “Alright, we’re done with that.” I missed Cherri too much to continue having that conversation anyway.
“Do you feel better at least?” Felicity asked. She walked from behind me and went and sat down on the couch, with Concrete following her in search of head scratches.
“I wish I could call Nathan,” I said honestly. “The last time we spoke, Connor’s goons grabbed me, and he probably thinks I’m dead.” I looked at Felicity. “Nathan’s careful. He has to be using an untraceable phone at this point. I won’t share any information. Just call him from your phone and tell him I’m okay.”
“It’s not a good idea, D,” Felicity said. “Even if one person immediately knows that we contacted them, if Connor has people watching them, which he no doubt does, if they change pace at all in a way that would suggest you’re okay, they could snatch him, and then they’re just a call log away from knowing where you are.”
“We’ll tell him to del—”
“You know as well as I do that anything is recoverable on a phone,” Felicity said. “Unless you have a hyper hacker at your fingertips.”
A friendly face immediately came to mind. Technically, Nathan did have a hyper hacker at his fingertips, but whether or not the two of them were even speaking to one another was a mystery to me. If he was working with Sicily, he’d probably already advised against answering unknown numbers, so it probably wasn’t going to work to call from Felicity’s phone regardless once I thought about it.
“Yeah,” I settled for.
“I’m sorry,” Felicity said, and her voice had true anguish in it. “Hopefully we’ll be done with all this nastiness soon and you can get back to your family.”
“Well, even if I can go back to Cherri and Nathan, I still won’t have Venom. That sucks,” I said. “I wish there was a way to get him out too.” Felicity went eerily quiet at that. She took a deep breath in, opened her mouth like she was going to say something, and then stopped short. “What?” I asked.
“Well… There is a way… technically, but…” She looked at me sadly.
“But what?”
“You… love Venom, right? Like a dad?” Felicity asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good, then hopefully what I’m about to tell you won’t change your opinion of him.”
I shook my head. “After everything he’s done for me and my shit-for-brains sperm donor, that’d be pretty fucking difficult.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” She lifted the remote from the couch and turned off the television which had been droning in the background. “Venom would kill me if he knew I was telling you this, but I think you deserve to know. You and his paths did not cross by chance.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“There’s a lot that you don’t know about how you and Venom found one another, and I have a funny feeling you aren’t going to like this story.”
6
Cherri
Once Brayden agreed to tell us what he knew, he asked for a few minutes to speak with Kyle alone. That was nearly an hour ago and Nathan and I were still standing far enough back to not be invasive, waiting for any sign of our ride being ready to go.
It was the first time I'd been alone with Nathan since his attack in the bathroom, and that must have been what was on his mind as well, because he was keeping his distance. For as awful as that was and as much as I wasn't about to give Nathan a total pass for raping me, I didn’t really blame him for what happened. His father was as sociopathic as they come, and I knew firsthand the pressure he was under. Deon told me that Nathan had been under that level of stress since they were kids. He barely handled it as a teenager; how on earth he managed to survive up to that point was beyond me.
“Are you uncomfortable?” Nathan asked finally, breaking the silence between us. “Around me, I mean.”
“I won't lie, it’s a little weird, but I'm not afraid, if that's what you mean,” I replied.
He tipped his head back and forth. “In a strange way, that's better than I thought.” He turned to look at me properly. “Would it make you really uncomfortable to be alone with me for an hour or so?”
“You mean an additional one?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Yeah. By design.”
“Um, I think that would be okay.”
His eyes widened, but then softened. “Cool. Let's give these two some space and I can explain a little bit.”
“That'd be good.”
Nathan lifted a hand and called out towards Kyle and Brayden, “Hey, we're gonna Uber back. Just come along when you're ready.”
Kyle stood up and shook his head. “No, sorry, here we come.”
“Seriously,” I interjected. “It's fine. Take your time.”
Kyle looked at Brayden, then us, then Brayden, then us, then quickly shuffled over. He dragged his keys out of his pocket and handed them towards Nathan. “Take my truck at least.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “You good?”
“Yeah, I'm good." I set a hand on his arm. "Go. What's a few more hours?”
“Thanks, Cherri,” Kyle said, then with one look back at Nathan, he ran off to return to Brayden, where the two easily fell back into conversation. At one point they smiled at each other, and my heart leapt.
“Okay, let's go fast, because I need to understand,” I said.
Nathan and I turned our backs to Kyle and Brayden and made our way back to the parking lot of the park. We climbed into Kyle’s car, this time with Nathan in the driver’s seat and me in the passenger’s, and then Nathan started up the car.
“Question. Why did you say we’d be alone for an hour? Your house is only like fifteen minutes from here,” I asked.
Nathan looped his hand over the back of the passenger’s seat in order to back up. “Yeah. I was hoping we could just cruise and talk for a bit? I won’t put us in the disgustingly awkward situation of sitting in a room face to face or anything. This way the road can be a nice buffer.”
“Oh. Sure.”
Nathan pulled out of the parking lot, but instead of turning right, which was how we would get to the highway to head back to his house, he turned left. I recognized it as the direction one could go to take the backstreets towards North Postings. It was how I got home every day when I was still living with Ciara. The backstreets into North Postings instead of the highway were about a 20 minute trip, and then taking the highway from North to South Postings would be about 30 minutes, bringing us close to that hour.