FIN WENT TO pick up some groceries while Tyler went to pick up Kylie from her school. It was already almost 6:00 when the charter buses rolled down the street, finally back from their field trip. As he watched Kylie jump off the bus, chatting back over her shoulder to Anthony, he was glad that he got these few minutes alone with her. It had been strange to say goodbye to Fin, even just for an hour or two, after the intense togetherness they’d experienced for the last few days.
But now, watching Kylie’s red hair bob among her classmates as she searched the block for Tyler, he was grateful to be picking her up alone.
Because this wasn’t anything nearly as simple as a hierarchy. There was no comparing Kylie or Fin and their roles in his life. He hoped that Kylie would never ask him to. He knew that he would have to balance time between them. Time for Kylie. Time for Fin. Time for all three of them. Time for just the two of them.
He waved at Kylie—a small one so as not to embarrass her—and as he watched her make her way toward him, he realized that for the first time since he’d become her guardian, he wasn’t utterly terrified of messing up. He was certain that someday she’d be able to write an entire memoir on all the mistakes he’d made and was going to make, a whole library even. But he wasn’t scared of them. They were inevitable. Natural.
He thought of his journey with Fin, filled with mistakes on either side. But that was how they’d gotten here, to today, where she was headed to pick up groceries for the three of them. Where he was allowed to whisper in her ear before they fell asleep. Where they felt a true connection together. The mistakes were part of that connection.
“What’s that look on your face?” Kylie asked as she approached him. He reached for the extra overnight bag she had over her shoulder and she handed it off without a second thought.
“What look?”
“I dunno. You tell me,” she said as she eyed him skeptically. “You look kind of...dopey.”
Well, he’d been thinking of Fin so it wouldn’t surprise him in the least if he looked like the biggest dope in New York City. Part of his heart hadn’t stopped whirring like helicopter blades in seventy-two hours. If he didn’t concentrate on Kylie, he might lift off from the ground by his spinning tail, hearts in his pupils like a Looney Tunes character.
“Don’t I always look dopey?” he quipped. “How was the trip?”
Her curiosity over the look on his face immediately tempered as she shrugged. “I dunno. Good.”
They walked twenty more feet before Tyler realized that was really all she planned on saying about it. “Come on, you’ve gotta be kidding me. I’ve been waiting for two days to hear about this thing.” He bumped her with his shoulder. “Gimme the deets.”
She smiled, frowned and then glanced around them quickly. “There are no deets. And don’t say deets!”
He laughed. “At least tell me if you took Fin’s advice.” He also took a glance around to make sure that none of her classmates were in hearing distance as they jogged down the stairs toward the train. “Did you make at least one friend?”
She glared at him like she was attempting to turn him into a sewer rat with simply the power of her ire, her teeth gritting together. “Yes.”
“Great!” He modulated his glee immediately, knowing it wasn’t welcome ’round these parts. At least not when it came to rooting for her to make friends. Nothing was more annoying than that, he was certain, but still, he had a tough time wiping the silly smile off his face. He searched for a topic change. “Fin’s gonna come over for dinner. She’s picking up groceries right now.” He glanced at his phone. “She should be getting there about the same time as we are.”
“Mmm,” Kylie said listlessly, looking at her own phone. She obviously wasn’t listening to a thing he’d just said.
“Hello?” he said loudly, turning a few heads on the train and intending to embarrass her a little bit. “Anyone out there? Dear diary? Can you hear me?”
“Shh!” She shushed him with an elbow to his ribs. “I was listening before. Fin’s coming over for dinner. Let me just answer this text and then I’ll put my phone away.”
Oh. She was answering a text. He surreptitiously attempted to glance at her phone. Not spying exactly. He just wanted to know if she was texting with this Anthony kid. And if she was, he wanted to know if any pictures of any kind were being sent. He’d read the headlines. He knew what kinds of things kids were using the internet for. And the last thing he wanted was a googlable picture of Kylie—
Thank the good Lord. He sagged backward. She was in a group text with two people. One of whom was named Luna and the other was Aceda. Those were girl’s names. And she was in a group chat. Most likely nothing seedy would happen in a group chat. Right?
She slipped her phone in her pocket and narrowed her eyes at him. “Seriously, what’s wrong with you?”
“Other than the fact that I definitely didn’t put enough deodorant on this morning, I’m fine.” He was a sweaty wreck, but he’d make it to the other side of this subway ride.
They were quiet until they were walking the few blocks back to the house, aboveground, the streetlights already buzzed on, most of the town houses and storefronts they passed looking buttoned up for the night even though it was only 6:30. This was how it was in February. Come May, there’d be people on every other street corner chatting and playing music until ten p.m. at least. Every winter Brooklyn was a well-mannered seventy-five-year-old. Every summer, she was a teenager again, bucking curfew and wagging her tongue at the adults.
Speaking of teenagers, Tyler glanced down at the one who was walking next to him. “You’re not...like...sexting, are you?”
Kylie stopped altogether, turned on her heel and started speed walking in the other direction.
“Hey!” Tyler jogged after her. “Where are you going?”
“I’m taking a different route home. We are not having this conversation.”
He took her by the shoulder and turned her back around. “Come on. You know I have to ask, right?”
“I already know about the birds and the bees.”
“Yeah, but these days the birds have high-speed internet access, and the bees like to convince you they’ll only think you’re cool if you send naked pics.”
“Oh, Jesus. Kill me, Lord. Just end this mortal misery.” She raised her face and palms to the sky, looking so sincere Tyler had to laugh.
“Stop that.” He slapped her palms back down to her sides. “Bad karma.”
“Karma? Jeez. Fin is really getting to you.”
Tyler’s mouth clapped shut. She had no idea.
“You’re blushing,” Kylie was kind enough to point out with her pointer finger an inch from his cheek. “Tyler, this leads me to one question and one question only. Have you been sexting?”
“No,” he snapped. “I have not.” Which was an oversight that he was quickly going to be rectifying. “And don’t change the subject.”
She sighed. “What do you want me to tell you? I watch Netflix, go on BuzzFeed, read manga and now I have like three friends who text me. I don’t even have a Snapchat, Ty. You lucked into the one teenager on earth who uses her phone like a grandma.”
“Grandma Nora used a rotary phone until the day she died, so she actually had you beat there.”
“Oh. Right.” Kylie looked momentarily perplexed. “I forgot how old you are. You actually knew her.”
Tyler cleared his throat as they waved at the doorman and got on the elevator, thankfully without an audience. “Well. Yeah. I’m glad to hear that you’re not using the internet for...sex stuff.”
Part of him wished the elevator cords would snap and just end this horror.
They stepped off onto his floor. “Ky...”
She stopped, her eyes on his feet, not on his face.
He cleared his throat again. “I hope you’ll talk to me if you ever have questions about this stuff. I mean, I’ll wear a ski mask, you’ll wear a ski mask, we’ll never have to look at each other’s faces, I swear.”
Thankfully, she laughed. “Tyler, I promise I’ll talk to someone, okay? Just...maybe not my older brother.”
The elevator dinged behind them as Tyler unlocked the door.
“Whoa,” Fin said, her arms full of groceries. “Hell of a vibe in this hallway.”
“It’s his fault,” Kylie said, pointing her thumb at Tyler. “Hi, Fin.”
Kylie ducked into the apartment and Tyler raced back toward Fin, taking the groceries and making sure the coast was clear before he kissed her cheek.
For some reason he didn’t understand, that made her blush. “What?”
“Nothing,” she whispered. “I just think it’s sweet that you go for the cheek kiss even after we...” She glanced toward the open living room door. “Never mind.”
He laughed and hauled everything inside. As he made dinner, he kept an ear perked toward Kylie’s room, where she and Fin were chatting easily about her trip. Kylie regaled Fin with the horrors of the sexting conversation she’d just had with Tyler. But Tyler didn’t mind. Mistakes are part of it, he reminded himself, holding Fin in his heart like a talisman.
Forty-five minutes later, the three of them sat down to broccoli chicken casserole, beers for Fin and Tyler, bread on the table. He let them continue their conversation without adding much. It was nice to hear Kylie chatter away, something she did more freely with Fin than she did with Ty. The disparity didn’t bother him. He hoped that this wasn’t any more a hierarchy for her than it was for him. It wasn’t about comparisons. It was about having a balanced diet of people in her life. And he and Fin balanced one another.
The conversation lulled, dinner was pretty much over and Fin’s socked foot nudged at Tyler under the table.
“Uh, Ky.” Tyler pushed his plate aside. He’d always hated the stomach-dropping introductions to hard topics. The I have something to tell yous. There’s something we should talk abouts. The we have to talks. So, he simply didn’t use one. He jumped right in. “Fin and I are together now. Romantically.”
He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting Kylie’s reaction to be. But he’d kind of assumed there’d be a reaction. Her face didn’t change a whit; her eyes went from Ty to Fin and then to the table. “Okay.”
The longest three seconds of Tyler’s life passed. “Um. Nothing is going to change, really. We might see Fin a little more than usual. But for the most part, it’ll all be the same.”
“Right.”
“If you have any questions?”
“It’s not exactly rocket science. I know what it means for two people to be together. I’m gonna finish my homework and check in with Mary about my schedule for the rest of the week. Thanks for dinner.”
She rose up, leaving Fin and Ty in her dust. She cleared her plate and was gone. There was nothing left on the table to even show she’d been sitting there. It was like Tyler and Fin had been alone at the meal. All he could feel was the gaping cavity where she’d just been.
“Shit.” He dragged a hand over his face.
“Yeah. Shit.” Fin stared down the hallway, her hand finding its way into Tyler’s.
“Was that as bad as I think it was?”
“I haven’t seen her this closed off since Thanksgiving.”
“I don’t get it,” Tyler mumbled, picking up Fin’s hand and pressing it flat against his cheek, barely registering that he was seeking the feeling he got when their energies mixed. “I kind of thought she’d be excited. She’s made comments here and there about us getting together.”
“To me too. But I’m sure the reality of it is way different than the dream of it.”
“I’m gonna try again.”
“You want me to—”
“No.” He shook his head with certainty. “I think it needs to just be me and her.”
Tyler stood up, took a deep breath and strode to Kylie’s closed door. “Ky?” he called, knocking twice and swinging her door open.
He froze, all the blood leaving his face when he saw her sitting halfway on her bed, clutching something in her hand.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, his voice hoarse. It was a ridiculous question considering he’d already easily identified the thing in her hand as an obscenely large wad of cash. His eyes wide, his throat closing, he tried a different question. “Where the hell did you get that?”
“I—” Her mouth opened but no words came out. The money was halfway shoved back into the little fabric envelope, like her body was rejecting the idea of having it out in the wide open.
On some sort of autopilot, he strode forward, holding out his hand.
He didn’t even have to tell her to hand it over. With a look half terrified and half irate, she slid it gingerly into his grip.
“You can’t just come into my room,” she said, but her vehemence was undermined by the childish wobble of emotion in her voice. She was still frozen on the edge of the bed, like she didn’t want to move and make herself even more visible.
Tyler felt the blood pinprick down out of his arms and legs as he ruffled through the cash. “There has to be—Jesus—three thousand dollars here. Kylie...”
“I didn’t steal it.”
“Well, I know that Mary isn’t paying you in cash, so you better explain, fast, what the hell you’re doing with thousands of dollars hidden in your room.”
“Mom gave it to me.”
Tyler instantly felt sick, his heartbeat banging all the way down to his toes, pumping nausea and adrenaline to the four corners of his earth.
Her mother gave it to her? When? Had Kylie had it the whole time? Brought it from Columbus? Or, God, had Lorraine been contacting her secretly? Mailing her money...for what? To run away?
“She left it for me, I mean,” Kylie said, her shoulders caving. The only thing keeping Tyler’s heart from squeezing down into a raisin at that moment was the fact that Kylie looked perfectly miserable. Like there was a chance, a chance, that she understood just how screwed up this whole thing was.
“When she left earlier this year,” Tyler said slowly, scrabbling for clarification. “She left you a bunch of cash.”
“Spending money. So that I could order food. That’s what...” Kylie folded forward and looked even more miserable. “That’s what she always did. When she’d leave for a weekend or something, I’d come home and there’d be two hundred bucks on the counter and I’d know I was on my own for a bit.”
“This is not two hundred bucks.”
“It was six thousand when she first left. So, I knew she was going to be gone for a long time. I was careful with it. I didn’t order in. I got cheap stuff from the grocery store so I wouldn’t run through the money.”
“Because you had no idea how long she was going to be gone for.” His voice sounded strange to his own ears.
He thought of the sheer quantity of Easy Mac and cereal that had been at that house. He thought of Kylie’s nest of blankets in the upstairs bathroom where she’d been locking herself in, terrified to sleep alone in the house. He thought of her getting ready for school every day. By herself. Making her own lunch. Catching the bus. Coming home and turning on every light in the house. Eating shitty processed food and counting cash. Rationing.
Even now, Tyler could look back and see how she’d been rationing everything since he’d met her. Money. Her energy. Even her affection. He’d naively thought that it would just take time to get her out of her shell. Like a turtle who needed to get comfortable with the temperature of the water. But now he saw the money clenched in his hand was a harsh physical symbol of reality, that it had all been so much more complicated than that.
She wasn’t ever going to give more than she thought she could. Because this kid had been taught to protect herself at every single turn. Because there’d been no one there to protect her.
“Kylie,” he asked gently, sagging backward to sit on the edge of her desk. “Why were you counting it just now?”
She eyed him, like she knew a trap when she saw one. “...I wanted to know how much was there.”
“Why would you need to know how much cash you had when I’m the one who pays for everything for you? Why now?” He knew the answer but he needed her to say it out loud.
She glared at the floor, her face red, her breaths coming fast and then faster. He wished she’d move, pace around, throw her hands in the air. But she just sat there.
“I was hoping this would happen, Ty. I wanted you to get with Fin. I saw how much you liked her right away. And her, you. It wasn’t as obvious, but I thought, maybe she likes him. And pretty soon, that became pretty freaking obvious too. I showed her the videos of you dancing because I knew she’d like them. I talked you up because I knew she was stubborn and didn’t like to see the softer side of you. I basically pushed you two together. And I always knew what would happen next. Okay? So. Congrats. Congrats to you two, congrats to me. It doesn’t have to be some big reveal. I get it.”
“Kylie, the money. Why were you counting the money?”
Still frozen, she spoke in a low, composed voice that was so much worse than yelling.
“I just wanted to make sure I knew how much freaking money I have to my name before you sent me back.”
He thought maybe his brain had just cracked in two, cleaved cleanly down the middle by his irrational sister.
“Hold on. Just stop talking. Everybody stop talking!” Tyler yelled, although it was just the two of them and he was the only one talking. “Send you back? Send you back where? To what? You think that just because Fin and I are together now, that I won’t want to be your guardian anymore?”
She shrugged, her angry chin pointed at the floor, her arms finally coming unstuck from her sides and crossing over her chest. “No one wants their kid sister around when they’re starting the life they really want. You’re gonna want to get married, Ty. Have kids. I’ll be in the way—”
“I don’t want kids!” Tyler shouted. “I—You’re—I’m not fucking sending you away, Kylie. And not as a matter of principle. But because you live here. You live here. This is where you live. With me. In this condo. I want you to stay here.”
“Oh, stop it!” She put her hands over her ears, and it was then that he saw how bright her eyes were, like she’d accidentally rubbed hot sauce into them. “Don’t insult me. I know exactly how excited you weren’t to drag me back to Brooklyn. I know exactly how much you didn’t want your sister taking up your home office. I heard you in Columbus, Ty. ‘Please let Lorraine come back. Please let Lorraine come back.’ You didn’t want me then. And I’m just supposed to believe that you magically want me now?”
Tyler blanched, realizing that she’d heard his pleas to a higher power. His highly personal mantra for that horrible time in his life, in Kylie’s life. “Yes!” he roared. “You’re supposed to believe it. Because it’s true!” She was as still as an ice statue, but he paced from one side of her room to the other. “Yes, I wanted your mother to come back. No, I wasn’t prepared to be your guardian. No, I didn’t want your entire life to get turned on its head. But you know how long I felt that way? About one freaking week. And then you know what my new mantra became? ‘Please let me get custody of her. Let me take her back to Brooklyn.’ You know how many times I said that to myself? Probably about a thousand times a day. Dammit!” He tilted his head to the ceiling and shouted a question at the universe. “Why the hell couldn’t she have heard that part?”
“You didn’t want me,” she said stubbornly. “You told me so yourself.”
He sagged backward onto the desk again. “What? When the hell did I tell you that?”
“You told me, point-blank, that you’re as much at the whim of the judge as I am. You only did this because you had to.”
He remembered her confusing reaction to his statement. That she’d blanched, winced back like he’d slapped her. He hadn’t understood it at the time because it had never even occurred to him that she’d take it so far from the way he’d meant it.
“Kylie, that is not what I meant. I didn’t mean that the only reason I was taking you was because the courts were making me. The judge didn’t hold a gun to my head. He simply said, ‘Look, Tyler, it’s you or the foster system.’ And I said me. It’s me. It’ll be me and her. That’s what I meant.”
She said nothing.
He had no idea if now was the time to be quiet or keep talking, but because he was Tyler, he kept talking. “I admit I was freaking terrified at the beginning. My feelings about having you here have evolved. Are you going to punish me for that? I want you here. I want the two of us to live here together. We make a good family.”
“No!” She sprang up, moving for the first time since he’d come into her room. She didn’t look as furious as she had a second ago. Worse, she looked overwhelmed, desperate, wild. “Don’t say that. You said that before. You said that I was a good family member. And I don’t get it.” She covered her wild expression with both hands. “I don’t fucking get it.”
He knew she was crying behind those hands and he moved toward her. “What don’t you get?” he asked softly.
“I don’t get the pattern. But I’ve never understood the pattern, and I’ll drive myself insane if I try. I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”
“Kylie.” He moved toward her and took her by the shoulders. Her hands stayed firmly over her face. “What don’t you get?” He repeated the question.
“You say I’m a good family member?” Her hands finally dropped, and shiny tears had trailed down her cheeks, her lips pulled down at the sides almost like an infant’s would. Her hair was wispy at the temples but brushed back over her shoulders, making her look both young and mature at once. She gasped for air over her jumping breaths. “You say that I care about your life and your friends and eat dinner with you. You think that makes me worth keeping around? Makes me good family? Well, you think I didn’t do any of that for her? You think I didn’t try my ass off to be good for her? Kind to her? Easy to be around? I did everything. Everything! And still! All she leaves me is a note and that.”
Kylie pointed toward the wad of cash on her desk. She shook free of Tyler’s hands and strode over to the money, carefully rolling it back into the neat wad it had been in before Tyler had ruffled through it. She stared at the money in her hand.
Tyler watched helplessly as tears dripped from her chin and onto the front of her zipped sweatshirt.
“I can’t figure out what it is that I did that made her leave, Ty.” She was whispering now, like there was no more voice left inside of her. She wiped her tears with the back of her wrist, still talking to the money and not facing Tyler. “I mean, I know, I know. I’ve been to the therapy. It’s not my fault. Blah blah blah. But logically, Tyler, I had to have done something that put her over the edge.”
“Kylie, no.”
She cut him off. “She wasn’t a good mother. I get it. She’s not patient with me. She doesn’t like whenever I made things hard. It makes her so mad. But I knew that if I just went to bed when she told me to and ate what she put on the table and didn’t complain or ask for too much then she was gonna at least keep being there. At the very least. And I don’t get it. What was it? I don’t understand what I did that was the last straw.”
“Do you know what arbitrary means?”
She glared at him. “Yes.”
“It basically means something that doesn’t correlate with anything else, right? It’s almost random.”
“You’re saying she randomly chose to leave me?”
“No. I’m saying the reasons she chose to leave were not ones you could have predicted. If she was going to leave, she was going to leave and there was nothing that you could have done.”
“Because I’m a kid?” She finally tossed the money back down and faced him. He took her place on the edge of the bed, feeling the adrenaline from their fight course through his system like a drug. His legs felt jittery; his heart pounded in his throat.
“Because nobody can control anyone else,” he said quietly. “Because you can’t make someone do anything. Ky, if Dad taught me anything, if my mother taught me anything, shit, if you taught me anything, it’s exactly that. You can’t control someone. There’s nothing you could have done to keep her there if she didn’t want to stay. Not cleaning the house every day. Not getting good grades. Not winning the freaking lottery.”
Her face collapsed like a kicked-in tin can. She took a shuddering breath and scraped her eyes on the inside of her elbow, making the fabric of her sleeve dark with her tears.
“Don’t tell me that it’s all random, Tyler. Don’t tell me that there’s nothing I can do but wait for people to just leave. I have to be able to do something about it.”
She reached over and shoved the money to the ground, spiking it like a football. The rubber band that had been holding it snapped and half-curled bills spiraled across the floor. “Shit!”
She slid down the side of the desk, folded up and sank her forehead to her knees.
The guardian in him wasn’t sure if he should stay away or not. But the human in him, the brother in him, was crawling across the floor, arranging himself next to her so that their shoulders pressed together.
“Kylie,” he said, pushing his weight into her. “I love you. I don’t say that enough. I just want you to know that in this moment, when we’re screaming at each other and everything is terrible, I love you.”
She didn’t move from her tortoised-up position, her face hidden.
“And I didn’t mean to make you feel powerless. I’m just trying to make it clear to you that you are not the reason your mother is looney tunes. And I’m not saying that to you in some school-therapist sort of way. I’m saying that to you as a logical person who has looked at the situation and made a judgment. I know what shitty parents look like. I had two of them before Dad died. And now I have one. Just like you. Maybe I’m not supposed to say that to you about your mom. That she’s shitty. But I don’t know what I am supposed to say either. So, I might as well tell you the truth.” He sighed and realized that her position actually looked pretty good. He rested his own forehead on his knees and talked to the ground, finally saying everything he’d been thinking for months.
“Leaving you the way she did makes her a shitty parent. And you know what? I hope to God she goes to therapy and parenting classes and rehab and turns her life around and can be a good mom to you. Because you deserve that. You deserve a good mother. But I cannot sit here and listen to you thinking that your mother could have been better if you’d been better. Because that’s just not the way it works. Please. If you can’t believe me yet, can you please just trust me that at some point, you will agree with me? Just trust me. I promise. Please trust me.”
“I can’t trust you, Tyler,” she whispered, dropping the bottom out of his heart.
“What?”
“I can’t trust you because you won’t tell me. Why won’t you just tell me?”
“Tell you what?” He’d have told her anything she asked at that point. If he’d had a diary, he’d have read it to her front to back.
“Tell me what your last straw is.”
“My last...” He groaned and banged his head backward a few times onto the desk behind him. “Fucking Lorraine,” he griped with so much vehemence that Kylie’s head popped up, blurry, red eyes and all.
“What?”
“Kylie, someday you’re going to realize that what I’m about to say isn’t a lie. Okay? Just, someday you’ll believe me about this. But I don’t have a last straw. Not when it comes to you. I mean, my temper has a last straw. I might yell at you. As evidenced by the nine-part opera that just played out in here. But please, kid, believe me. When it comes to loving you? Being there for you? Putting a roof over your head and food on your plate? I’m not measured in straws. Therefore, you’re never gonna find the last one. There is no last one. I’m measured in, I don’t know, whatever happened during the big bang. Some sort of material that is actually expanding. You’re never going to reach the end of it.” He sagged forward onto his knees again. “I’m not making sense, am I? My head is spinning.”
Whether he was making sense or not, Kylie didn’t answer. After a few minutes, he felt her lean back onto the desk, unfolding just a bit.
After a long, quiet minute, more characterized by dazed exhaustion than by discomfort, Tyler bumped their shoulders together. “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘hurt people hurt people’?”
“No,” she said after a minute, pulling herself out of whatever reverie had sucked her under and rolling her head so that she looked at Tyler.
“It means that people who are hurt end up hurting other people. And, I mean, I don’t think it’s right a hundred percent of the time, but pretty much, if you’re ever wondering why one person hurts another, it can almost always be answered by the fact that they’re in pain of some kind. And that’s not an excuse. Plenty of parents are in pain and they don’t leave their kids. But it helped me a lot when I was trying to understand my own mom. And Dad, for that matter. I’m not trying to make excuses for Lorraine, but I’m just trying to humanize her a little bit. She is a person. With problems. And a life. And a whole past filled with who-knows-what. If she were a happy person, with no pain and no problems, she probably wouldn’t have left you, kid. It’s as simple as that. That’s why it’s not your fault.”
She was quiet for another long stretch. “Maybe say that last part to me again in like six months, all right? My brain is dead.”
Six months.
It was the most rewarding thing she possibly could have said to him. It was a small acknowledgment that they would still be together in six months. That they might still be having conversations as meaningful as this one.
“You got it.”
There was another stretch of silence, and Tyler wondered if it was time to get up, give her some space. He stared at the mosaic of curled bills on the floor.
Fin knocked on the doorway, and the two of them rolled their heads to look at her.
The expression on her face told Tyler that she’d heard everything; he just hoped that was okay with Kylie.
“Drink this.” She strode forward with two coffee mugs in her hands and shoved one at each of them. “I had to make it from the stuff in Tyler’s cabinet, so it won’t be as potent or flavorful as if I’d made it from my own herbs. But trust me. You both need it.”
Tyler and Kylie exchanged eye contact, peered at the steaming, reddish liquid and then simultaneously sipped from the mugs.
“Ohmygod.”
“Shit, Fin!” Tyler yelped, coughing against the noxious flavor that threatened to resurrect the casserole he’d eaten for dinner. “What is that?”
“It’s a trauma elixir. It helps level your adrenaline back out and calm you down. It’s terrible, I know. But drink it.”
She put her hands on her hips and gave them both a stern look. Tyler squinted at Fin, looking fiercely beautiful in the doorway, and attempted to communicate via brainwaves: There better be a blowjob for this somewhere down the line.
She quirked an eyebrow at him in such a knowing way that he wondered if she actually had heard his thoughts.
Tyler took a deep breath, cheers-ed Kylie and swallowed the contents of the mug down in three great gulps. Kylie followed his lead, gasping and sagging to the side.
“Remind me to save our next fight for after Fin goes home,” she panted, shoving the mug away from her.
He laughed. “And please remind me to sign you up for the debate team, because, kid, I think you’ve got the chops for it.”