I almost fall off the fuckin’ ladder. Because the notification chime tells me it’s Adam.
I fish my phone from my pocket and stare at the screen.
His text says: Is it safe?
What do you mean?
You know what I mean.
I think about this for a moment, not really sure how to answer.
Adam must get antsy because he texts me again. Does she remember, McKay?
No. She doesn’t remember.
Then I can’t come.
I press call, because I need to have a conversation with this dude and I don’t want to waste time typing.
He picks up on the first ring this time. “What?”
“You have to come. We can’t do any of this without you, Adam.”
He sighs. And I can just picture him running his fingers through his hair in frustration. “What are you guys doing right now?”
“I’m putting the pavilion back together and Indie and Donovan are starting dinner. Where are you? Are you close? Far? Can you make it for dinner?”
“I don’t know. Let me think. I’ll get back to you soon.”
The call drops and I just stare at the screen for a moment, conflicted. I want to call him back and set him straight. But there’s no way to justify Indie’s behavior over the past few years. I didn’t tell him that Indie came back to me asking to help her hunt him down, but he has to know she blames him for whatever is going on up in her head.
She always blames him.
If she had seen Adam yesterday, she would’ve… well. I mean, I have to be honest with myself here. She probably would’ve killed him. She would’ve tried, at least.
Can Indie kill us? I mean, you know. Hand to hand type shit. Anyone can pull a trigger, I guess. But if it came down to some kind of fist fight. Some kind of mixed martial arts type shit… would she win?
Yeah. She would.
Not because she’s better at it than we are, but because I would not be able to finish her. I would pull my punches I would let her win, or, at the very least, I would let her walk away.
And somehow I don’t think I’d get that kind of reciprocal consideration from Indie. Because if she was going to kill us, it would not be her doing it.
Today though? Would she kill Adam tonight if he decides to show up? I just don’t know. I have no fuckin’ clue what’s running through that girl’s head.
Sex. Obviously.
Which I can’t pretend I don’t enjoy.
It would be a sick thing to admit I have loved Indie this way since I first laid eyes on her when she was ten. It’s wrong. On every level. And it’s not even true. I mean, I did love her immediately, but I wasn’t thinking of her sexually until well after she was eighteen.
Still. It’s fucked up. We all know it’s fucked up.
And part of the reason she lost her mind was because of us.
And what we all did on her twentieth birthday was the trigger. That was the day when Nathan came home from school and saw us. All of us. Together. Right over there. On that swing I made Indie when she was just a little girl.
That act of passion shattered our lives into tiny little pieces.
And after that day was over… we knew there was no way to ever put it back together.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - INDIE
Maggie was the most perfect baby alive. So small and sweet. And she smelled like… like a spring rain on a sunny day.
The pregnancy was hard. I’m not gonna lie. After the whole truth was out and I moved in with Nathan, everything seemed OK. Like this was all gonna work out just fine. Living over at Nate’s wasn’t much different as far as I could tell. Only my view now was of Old Home and not the brown-brick house. His grandfather had passed a few weeks earlier, but his grandfather had been sick for as long as I could remember. So that wasn’t much different, either.
To be honest, the real difference was McKay. Because he wasn’t there to make dinner for me. Which sounds ridiculous, but I did not know how to cook. And Nathan kinda expected to be fed.
Which was also weird, because Nate was the one who did all the cooking too.
I don’t know. Something changed between us after I moved in. I didn’t read a lot of romance books, just that one about the boy next door. But I figured it couldn’t hurt to find a few more to study. I just needed some pointers about this romance thing, that was all.
But all the romance novels for sale in the river town were old and out of date. People were still using telephones in them, for fuck’s sake. So I’m not sure I did myself any favors by reading those for tips.
Nathan liked to go into New Orleans for dinner or shopping. But this was weird for me. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been all over the fuckin’ world. I’m no stranger to cities. But always on a job, never really just for fun.
When I was younger McKay took me to the zoo once. It was fine. But it reminded me of the island where Adam bought me. And that made me think of snakes and there were enough snakes in my backyard, thank you. I didn’t need the zoo to remind me of that.
And he took me to the Space Center in Huntsville once. We stayed for a few days. I liked that more than the zoo. At least there were no cages.
And then we did have plans to go to Disney World for my twelfth birthday, but something came up and we didn’t go. Then the next year, when McKay brought it up again, I said I felt too old to see Disney World for the first time. He tried to change my mind. Said it was for all ages. He even sweetened the pot and said he would make Donovan and Adam come with us, but I still said no.
But other than that, we didn’t get out much. I enjoyed the river trips Nathan and I took up to the river town. And the ice cream, of course. But I didn’t like the town where he went to school very much. I always felt like people looked at me weird.
And of course, all of Nathan’s friends lived there and he played football for his school. So those first few months we were living together as a couple, he always wanted to go there and meet up with his friends on the weekends. So I ended up just staying home with McKay and Adam when he did that.
We weren’t having sex, either. Not that I cared. Our relationship wasn’t about sex. But we used to kiss a lot. And hold hands. We didn’t do that anymore after I moved in, either.
And then, by the time Maggie was born, I was ready to go home to my own bed in my own room. The little brown-brick house was fine, I guess. But it was small, and old, and to be honest, it smelled a little bit like Nate’s dead grandfather.
I don’t know. I could not get that smell out of my nose. McKay told me that smells get funny when you’re pregnant. But it was the same after Maggie was born.
So I just moved home.
A few weeks later Nathan broke up with me.
Or maybe that’s not quite the right word. Was he really my boyfriend? No. We were friends. Friends who used to like to kiss and hold hands and who had sex exactly one time, but other than that… even my old raggedy romance books told me that was not a boyfriend.
And that hurt. And it hurt even more when he said he didn’t want the baby and me to go to college with him. Because he said, “You don’t fit in, Indie. You live in another world from the rest of us.”
Which I could not exactly argue about. Because I did live in another world. But it wasn’t my fault that I was Company. Even though, by this time, there was no Company. That made very little sense to me. There was no more Company, but I was still Company. There was no way to not be Company.