Page 45 of The Write Stuff

Huxley nodded in understanding. Actually, if anybody could understand spending as much time on the road as we did as kids, it was him.

“It’s different, but my mother was big on giving me whatever I wanted, too,” he acknowledged. “We didn’t have a lot of money when I was really small, but once she started making money, she showed her love by spending it on me. It made me … less than a nice person.”

I shook my head. “You were always a good person.”

“No, I wasn’t.” He wrapped his fingers around my wrist and stared down at where we’d connected. “You don’t have to make excuses for me, Wylie. I know I was a jerk back then.”

“You were fine,” I protested.

He gave me a weary look. “Don’t you ever get tired of standing up for the kid who was so obnoxious to you that he made you cry?”

“I don’t remember that,” I said automatically. It was a lie, of course. I remembered crying. There was no need to dwell on it now, though. He’d been a kid. Teenagers were notoriously thoughtless.

“You don’t remember when you tried to perfect your own recipe for non-alcoholic Romulan Ale, and I told you to stop being an idiot?” he challenged. “Because let me tell you something, I remember that day, and I’ve been mad at myself since it happened.”

“You’ve been mad at yourself for 19 years?” I couldn’t wrap my head around that.

“Yup. For the record, you did nothing wrong that day. I was just upset because my mother and Mick were fighting and they’d kept me up all night and …” He seemed to realize what he’d said and looked conflicted on how to continue. He’d brought up the M-word. I still wasn’t ready to talk about the Mick situation.

“She said not everybody wants to be me,” I blurted.

That was enough to draw his attention back to me. “Who said not everybody wants to be you?”

I took a deep breath. “Lucy,” I explained. “I told her she needed to get a job and she only had two weeks to start contributing or I was going to kick her out.”

He nodded encouragingly. “Good job. I’ll serve as your bouncer when it’s time to kick her out if you want. I still owe her for that Kit Kat.”

I almost laughed again. I had to give him credit. He was still holding one heckuva grudge about that Kit Kat. It was almost glorious how petty he was being. Then I remembered the other part of my conversation with Lucy, and my smile disappeared.

“I told her that it wasn’t her fault that she’d ended up this way because Mom and I had enabled her to become this person,” I said in a soft voice. “I said that she wasn’t really living her life, and it was time she started.

“She came back with some stuff about me being too serious and never living my life,” I continued. “She said nobody wants to be me.”

Huxley’s expression darkened. “Excuse me?”

“She said that nobody wants to be me, and just because I live life a certain way, that doesn’t mean she wants to live life the same way. Then she added that nobody wants to be me.” I was venturing into babbling territory, and I couldn’t stop myself. “And she’s right. Nobody wants to be me. I wasn’t trying to force her to be me, though. I just wanted her to be accountable for one thing in her life. I didn’t think that was too much to ask.”

I expected him to be soft and placating when he responded. Instead, he gripped my wrist tighter, and I jerked up my eyes to search his fierce face. There was nothing soft about him.

“You listen to me,” he said on a half-growl. “You have always been your own person.”

“You mean a geek.”

“Yeah, but that word doesn’t have the connotation you seem to be assigning it,” he countered. “You have always gone your own way. I was too afraid of what other people would think back then. I wanted to be cool so badly. You were always cool. You just didn’t realize it.”

“Oh, come on,” I scoffed. “You never thought I was cool.”

“At the time, I didn’t realize you were cool,” he conceded. “Now, though, all I see when I look at you is cool.”

“Like the Fonz?” It was a stupid thing to say. It just slipped out.

He smirked. “I can’t believe you just used the Fonz and ‘cool’ in the same sentence. How do you even know who he is? He was long before our time.”

“I met him at a convention once. He was so sweet. He let me try on his leather jacket.”

“I met him at a convention too, and he was pretty great.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I met Worf?” Why I was changing the subject was beyond me, but I wanted to talk about anything but Lucy’s biting words.