Page 36 of Malaise
“You know if Dad’s going to be home tonight?” Carver asks Tanya.
She shakes her head as we leave the bathroom, worry clear in her eyes.
Cassie’s idle warning about Carver’s father and the rumours from the Stallion race through my head. It didn’t even occur to me until now that I might have just agreed to crash in the same house as a sexual predator. My face must display my apprehension, given the eye-roll I get from Carver.
“It’s not true—he didn’t do it.”
“Do what?” I ask, a little too high-pitched.
Tanya chuckles and walks on ahead down the hallway.
“Assault the woman,” Carver says. “I’m not saying Dad is a saint—”
“Because he’s not!” Tanya calls out from the room she’d turned in to.
“—but he didn’t do what they said. The woman was pissed he won the bar tab they had on offer for the darts competition that night, and she cried wolf.” Carver chuckles and shakes his head. “What he did do was beat her husband up so bad the guy needed a tooth removed from his lower lip. One thing you don’t do with my old man is start a fist fight unless you know what you’re doing.” His face falls on the last sentence, his eyes dark and glazed as we come to a stop outside Tanya’s door.
“Will these do?” she asks, holding up a pair of shredded jeans and an oversized T-shirt with a pretty Day of the Dead-style zombie woman on the front.
“Anything will do.” I walk in the room to take them from her. “Thanks.”
“I’ll give you two some privacy so you can get changed.” Carver gives me a warm smile as he pulls the door shut and leaves me alone with Tanya.
She watches the door for a second before turning on me and tugging me over to her bed. “Sit.”
“Okay?” Not sure how I can get changed while I’m seated, but whatever.
“That,” she says, pointing toward the door, “is what I’ve been trying to get out of him for years.”
“Privacy?” I ask, confused.
She flicks her long hair over her shoulder and huffs out a breath. “No, silly. To be courteous, caring, and all that shiz.”
I stare at the door also, as though I can still see Carver standing there, and shrug. “Well, what’s he like usually?”
“Closed off, uninterested, and hiding out in the garage or anywhere but here.”
I screw my mouth up on one side and look over at her as she nods as though affirming what she’s just said. He’s never been anything but helpful toward me, there when I’ve called, and never expected a thing in return. On one hand I can’t imagine what she’s saying being true, but on the other I’ve seen it. It was there in his eyes when the frustration started to break through at the truck stop: a simmering anger that he seems to keep in check at all costs.
“Tell me about him when he was my age,” I ask. “You said he was impulsive too. What changed him?”
She shakes her head with a smile. “Uh-uh. You’re asking him that. I’m done saying my piece.” Tanya flops down beside me and sighs. “All I want is for you to understand that something’s changing in Brett, and whatever it is you do to him, keep it up. Please.”
I scoff, running my hands up and down my damp thighs. “I’ve got no idea what I do, Tanya. Honestly.”
“Then don’t go changing. Because whatever that thing he finds interesting about you is, it’s worth holding on to.”
***
“We got off light,” Carver announces as Tanya and I walk into where he’s seated in the lounge.
He’s shucked his jacket, and a worn and stretched tank barely covers his bulky upper body. I grab the hem of the T-shirt Tanya loaned me and fidget with it at my hips to try and distract from all that muscle I was too drunk to take note of at the bonfire. Definitely a full-grown man. The fact I’m the youngest in the room feels way more of an issue than ever before.
“Why’s that?” Tanya asks of his statement as she drops over the arm of a chair to sit in it sideways.
“Old man’s just sent a message to say he won’t be home tonight.”
“Thank fuck for that. Makes things easier,” Tanya replies.