Page 118 of Flare

I cry and I cry and I cry.

All of it.

It’s just all of it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

BROCK

I don’t reply to my mother right away.

I may want to turn my back on my father?

How much do I still not know?

I want to ask her, but I don’t want to ask her with just as much intensity. So much is already going on. Do I really want to know more?

“I’d like to ask you something,” Mom says.

“I can’t. I can’t promise anything about my feelings for Dad.”

“No, I’m not asking about that. I want to talk to you about Rory Pike.”

Rory? Who I kicked out of my house earlier? I’ve cooled off, and I feel like shit about that. I need to call her. “Sure. What do you want to know?”

“She’s a lovely young woman.”

“She is.”

Of course we just had a doozy of a fight.

But I don’t really want to get into that.

“Her family’s been through a lot,” Mom says. “And she just broke up with someone. So…”

“What’s the question, Mom?”

“I guess I want to know if you and she are both in the same place.”

“You want to know if she’s on the rebound,” I say.

“Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t. But women are different from men, Brock.”

“Yeah, Mom, I know. I used to play post office.”

“You know very well what I mean.”

I sigh. “I asked her to marry me, okay? So that should tell you where I stand, at least.”

My mom drops her mouth open. “I’ve never known you to be serious about any woman.”

“I never was. Not until Rory. And I didn’t mean to be. But we got—”

“We?You mean she returns your feelings?”

“Yeah. She does.” Warmth surges through me at the thought, and for a moment, the argument we had no longer exists.

Except that it does.