Chapter 18

Kendall

“I dunno if many girls have talked about softening carrots in this kitchen before.”

Gage’s gruff voice spoke those words continuously inside my head, until I was forced to dig through my boxes and find my portable speaker and turn some music on just to drown it out. When my head was bopping along to the beat rather than listening to my brother’s best friend talk about his past conquests, I was able to tackle the boxes.

Essentials only.

Toiletries were produced and placed in the adjoining bathroom, something that made me feel a little uneasy. It was all gleaming chrome and subtle tile, and my ratty makeup palettes looked too dusty to fit in here, so I shoved them into the drawers and closed them up. Clothes were unpacked and placed in the wardrobe, as well as a bag of dirty clothes re-discovered. I needed to work out what they had in the way of laundry facilities here. I’d bought some laundry powder, but… I glanced at the door and shook my head. Nope, I wasn’t going out there, not yet. So instead, I went on a little wander down memory lane.

I didn’t need to pull my photo albums out and stack them on the shelves provided. I definitely didn’t need to flick through them. Finding the rest of my shoes and my other work uniforms was far more pressing, but instead I looked at this. Sun bleached snapshots of my family, each one of us kids grinning fiercely because Mum had told us to say cheese for the tenth time. Over and over the photos were shot to her satisfaction, but I couldn’t help but smile at them now.

Skinny little Finn, all arms and legs, though I was unfortunately the complete opposite. I’d ‘taken after your mother’ Dad always said, but the way he hugged Mum close made it clear he didn’t mind her curves at all. Finn and I had been forced together for the photo, the subtle way we leaned away from each other making that clear, but as I stared, I saw them too.

Gage, Connor, and Van were close friends with my brother because we all grew up on the same street. Connor in the big, fancy place up the end, the rest of us in typical three bedroom, one bathroom places with a yard and a Hills hoist clothes line at the back. Staring at the photo, I could almost hear the hum of lawnmowers going on a Sunday afternoon, the bees hovering drowsily over flower beds as we played in the sprinklers. It’d killed me every day of my childhood that the families up our street had no daughters my own age, but Finn… He’d had a built-in friendship group from the moment he was born.

Fritz and sauce sandwiches on white bread, full of salt and preservatives, but we’d thought it the greatest of culinary delights. Plastic tubes of sweet frozen treats. Zooper Doopers were always brought out on particularly hot days, when we panted under fans that spun far too slowly. Mum thrust them into our sticky hands and told us to eat them outside. Then, hyped up on sugar, we’d climb up the big tree at the back of the house, getting higher and higher so the sluggish breeze would finally start blowing on our sweating skin. I’d looked over the roofs of all the houses down the street and felt like queen of all I surveyed.

Right before the boys started jumping up and down on the branches, threatening to send me falling down to the ground.

But it wasn’t always bad. As I flicked through the images, seeing birthday parties and footy games, my bakery displays at the local show, and awards I’d won at school proudly displayed, I was surprised to realise that. The guys were annoying, so fucking annoying, but Finn had come through in the end. I didn’t need a photo to remind me of that, staring at the empty page at the end of the album, creating photographs in my mind.

“You…!” I screamed, launching myself at him when he dared to step foot in the kitchen. He surveyed the mess, the cakes I’d sent smashing to the floor along with the plates, then my reddened face. “You did this. You fucking couldn’t let me have this one thing?”

Mum had given up trying to console me, going to find the dustpan and broom to clean up the mess I’d made.

“What thing?” It was his wide-eyed stare that convinced me. If he’d meant to prank me, he would’ve been wearing a triumphant smirk by now. “What thing, Ken?” His hands landed on my arms, but I shook them off. “What the hell happened?”

I’d stared at him far too closely, needing something more than his words to convince me he wasn’t guilty of switching the sugar for salt. He lied and he lied and he lied, often barefaced to Mum and Dad, making me look bad for even accusing him, but when I saw the pulse jumping in his neck, I started to wonder.

“The sugar in the container was swapped for salt,” I ground out.

“Salt…?” He frowned, then dropped down, inspecting the smashed cakes like a detective might a crime scene. I winced when he grabbed a piece of cake and tasted a few crumbs, his look of disgust close enough to my prospective employers that I started crying again. “Ken… fuck, Ken…”

In that moment, he was for the first time, finally, my brother. His arms went around me, and I was treated to a nose full of teenage-boy stink and this. Him holding me close, rubbing my back in awkward circles, right before Mum appeared.

“Finn…”

Dad would’ve just laughed and then yelled at me for making a fuss, but Mum… She could be relied on to take my side. Her grave tone made clear he was about to cop it, and a vicious part of my heart rejoiced in that. Let him hurt. Let him bleed, it murmured, vowing revenge.

“You couldn’t stop those stupid bloody pranks, not even when Kendall was trying to impress those people?”

“Mum, I didn’t—”

“So how did the sugar turn to salt then? The jar is clearly labelled, so there’s no way it was accidentally mixed up. Finn—”

But before Mum could deliver her judgement, her phone rang.

“Hello? Look, love, things didn’t go well. No. No, and we’ll talk about it when you get home…”

She walked out of the kitchen, leaving the broom behind. Part of me felt impelled to reach for it, to clean up everything before Dad got home, but I shoved that impulse to one side. Fuck that, and fuck them.

Fuck him.

I shoved Finn away from me, and for once, he looked shocked by that, and I couldn’t tell why. Was it because he found himself comforting me for once, or was it because I dared to push him away?

“I don’t want to see you or your fucking mates ever again. I don’t give a shit if you are my brother, I don’t want—”

“Makes sense.” The fact he was agreeing with me, eyes downcast, his tone getting quieter, not louder, had me going still.

“What?”

“It makes sense, Kendall.” His eyes met mine then, and I saw a mix of things in them that I couldn’t seem to decode. Fear, anger, but also… Regret. “I let them in the house. I let them do this to you.”

What I felt then for my brother’s best friends was just as complex as his emotions now. They were big, strong, the golden boys of school, so when I started noticing guys that way, how could I stop myself from looking at them? They roamed around our place with all the arrogance, all the grace of big cats, completely unaware of how cruel they were.

Nor how beautiful.

Half the reason why I started reading romances was because when I was out staying at my grandmother’s place, I’d delved into her boxes of Mills and Boons and found tales of cruel men who were turned gentle by the power of love. I’d eaten them up voraciously, trying to read between the lines to work out what the secret was. What did I need to do/see/say to turn the guys from my tormentors to my…?

Lovers felt like too big a word for it when I was eighteen, but… that, that was what I wanted. My experiences with it had been furtive little make-out sessions with boys from school, neither of us able to put words to what we were doing because we were struggling to even do it. To dare to touch, to kiss, to make ourselves vulnerable to strip bare and fuck.

“They’re always hurting you,” he said. “Always coming up with ideas for new ways to embarrass you, and I admit, most of the time I think it”s pretty funny, but this…” He grabbed the broom handle decisively, scooping up the ruins of my dreams and tossing it into the bin, each splatter of icing and cake making me shudder. “Do you have a friend you could stay with?”

I did. At his urging, I’d run down the hall, packed up all of my most important stuff into a suitcase, just like I had when I was a little girl. But this time, I wouldn’t get halfway down the street, announcing to everyone that I was running away from home. Instead, I’d actually go, never spending another night in my childhood bedroom.

And I didn’t. I blinked, this room slowly bleeding back. I stayed at my friend’s place just long enough to get a job at a bakery a couple of suburbs over. Not in the back making bread, but out the front, serving customers and making coffee. The woman who owned the place seemed to think that because I was young and a girl, I’d bring guys into the shop, and I did. I got full-time hours, then enough to cover the rent of a single bedroom in a share house with other young women. Only women at that point, I couldn’t bear the thought of living with guys.

“Hey…” Van appeared at the door, looking like an apparition from my past, not the guy I was currently sharing my house with. He had an old footy jersey on, the fabric half gone to holes, one I thought he was wearing when he still played with my brother. “Gage said you didn’t want to have any of the pasta, but…”

Those long, sensitive fingers picked at the nail on one hand. Girls had written poems about how beautiful his hands were, or wrote on the girls’ toilets walls how good he was at fingering them, but right now, they didn’t seem to know what to do.

“Gage always makes too fucking much Bolognese, and then we’re left eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, until I’d just about murder a burger. Anything but damn pasta.”

I snorted despite myself at his heartfelt plea, and that had him smiling. Golden and bright, just like the sun, it was hard to see the darkness in it.

“Look, come and have a bowl with us. At least there’d be some intelligent conversation for once.”

My head moved, shaking back and forth, the word no ready to trip off my lips, but instead I said, “Sure.”

“Oh, thank fuck…” He moved into the bedroom, steering me out the door before I could think twice. “You like garlic bread, right? Like if we’re gonna stink tomorrow, we may as well do it together…”

“Yeah.” I shoved my phone in my pocket. “I like garlic bread.”