I glared. He stopped laughing then and studied my face. “Did you fuck it up?”
“No!” I said.
“You did, didn’t you?” he asked. “You fucked it up.”
“Stop saying that.” I rose to my feet, checking to see how steady I was. My heart rate felt fine, I didn’t feel any tingling in my hands or feet, and my leg seemed to hold. “It’s complicated.”
I walked over to the treadmill. I knew if I was jogging on it, he couldn’t expect me to talk to him. I stepped up and hit the start button.
“What’s complicated?” He moved in front of the treadmill so I had to look at him while I walked. “You like her, she likes you—although God only knows why—and now you’re a thing.”
“We’re not a thing,” I said. “And even if we were, I don’t do long-term things, so we’d be ending in a few weeks anyway.”
“Are you terminally stupid?” he asked. “I mean, is it like a chronic condition for you?”
I ignored him and turned the machine up, breaking into a light jog. Jackson wasn’t dissuaded and just yelled at me over the treadmill’s steady hum.
“Is this why you pushed your sister away?”
Ignore him, I told myself.
“You made her cry, you know.”
I didn’t know. I slapped the stop button on the machine and hopped off it. I moved to stand in front of him. I normally hated looking up at him but I did it now.
“What are you talking about?”
“Lexi,” he said. His voice was full of disapproval. “The morning after you came home with that”—he pointed to my forehead—“she was here, but you told her that you didn’t need her to watch over you. Do you have any idea how much that hurt her? I saw her in the driveway when she left. She was crying.”
My stomach twisted. The thought of Lexi crying about me made my gut twist. Why was protecting the people I loved from the burden of caring about me making me feel like total shit?
Worried that I might succumb to another panic attack, I took a seat and hung my head.
“Annabelle called her to keep an eye on me after I cracked my head,” I said. “She shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Lexi’s your sister.”
I glanced up at him. “She hasn’t been in my life in almost twenty years. We’re not close. I hardly even know her anymore.”
Jackson shook his head. “Bullshit. I’ve seen you two together. Even a deaf, dumb, and blind man would pick up on the fact that you’re siblings. You’re so much alike. You have the same long-legged walk. You both talk with your hands. You actually enjoy arguing. Weirdos. And you have the same way of tipping your chin out when you’re mad.”
“Whatever,” I said. I didn’t want to know any of these things. “Annabelle had no right to call Lexi without asking me.”
“Maybe not,” Jackson said. “But who else do you have?”
I sat up straight and stared at him. “You.”
“Sure, until you get pissed off enough to fire me.”
“Which is becoming more likely every second,” I said. “Even then, I’ll still have Lupita and Juan.” Even I could hear the note of desperation in my voice, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t completely alone like I had been in my teens.
“They will be retiring soon to spend their time with their grandbabies, my brother,” he said.
No more Lupita? I hated the very idea that she might retire on me. Still, I wasn’t going to play this game. Annabelle had been wrong, and Jackson was not going to sway me on this point.
“I’ll hire replacements,” I said. “For all of you.”
“So you’ll have staff tending to your needs for a paycheck,” Jackson said. He wrapped his enormous arms around his middle and shivered. “That just gives me the warm fuzzies. How about you?”
“Your point?” I asked. I really was going to fire him.
“That Annabelle was right to call the only available member of your family to come check on you when you were injured,” he said. “That’s what family is for, and you owe Annabelle an apology.”
I gaped at him. “I owe her an apology? How about she owes me an apology for crossing boundaries she had no right to cross?”
“Was she your girlfriend?” he asked.
I hated that he used the past tense. “Something like that.” Shit, we hadn’t even been together long enough to determine if we were boyfriend and girlfriend, which seemed an awfully lightweight way to describe my feelings for her. For the first time in my life, I’d fallen hard.
“Then let’s litmus test this,” Jackson said. “If Annabelle had gotten hurt, cracked her head or broken her arm, and her—let’s say brother just to keep the genders matched—her brother was here in town, and you knew him, would you have called him?”
I opened my mouth to say, “No, absolutely not,” but Jackson held up his hand, stopping me. “Slow your roll, really picture it. Annabelle, lying in her bed, broken, hurt, rejecting a visit to the hospital when she has a history of medical issues.”
I could see it, and it gutted me. I hated the mere idea of her being injured.
“Now her brother is in town. You know him because you’ve been working with him,” he said. “You know that Annabelle is keeping her brother at arm’s length, because they’ve been estranged by life circumstances, but you also know that your relationship with Annabelle is temporary and ending soon. Who can you call that you know will take care of her when things are over between you?”
“Her brother,” I said. And just like that, I understood exactly why Annabelle had done what she did. She cared. She cared about me, and she didn’t want me to be alone.
“Damn it,” I said.
Jackson sat down beside me. He fished a card out of his shorts pocket, and he handed it to me. I recognized it as the card Dr. Henry had given to me when he referred me to Dr. Franks.
“It’s not too late to fix things, but you’re going to need some professional help,” Jackson said. “Call him.”
The fierce teenager who had struck out on his own, refusing any help from anyone, was still inside me. I could feel him rejecting the doctor, Jackson, Annabelle, and Lexi. He didn’t want to have anyone in his life whom he might care about. He didn’t want to be vulnerable. He didn’t want to get hurt. And he most definitely didn’t want to be abandoned again.