He had saw me sitting in the booth. And he had hung up the phone. Now he was looking at me. What should I do? Nothing. I would do nothing. Except maybe sit there like a retard and hope that he wasn't thinking that I was one. I was helpless. But what he said next surprised the hell out of me. But I have to say, that what he said next, would make me wonder why in the hell he hadn't said it sooner.
"That was my cousin. He thinks he owns me,but I try to escape from him most of the time. Just to show him that im my own person, ya know?"
Mute silence. Not a word. It's not that I didn't want to talk to him, its just that he was actually talking to me. I mean, what else was I supposed to do? It's not like he even talked to me. It's been three years and, to be honest, I don't even know if he knew that I was alive and in the same room as him for most of those three years.
"Yeah. I get what you're saying." "But why in the hell are you talking to me, of all people?"
" I don't know. There's just alway's been something about you. And up until now, the past couple of weeks, I haven't been able to wrap my head around what that could be."
"And what would that be? Huh? Because the last time I checked, you hated me, you didn't care how I was feeling, and you definitely didn't look my way, and you sure as crap didn't talk to me. About anything. Not even a 'Are you OK?' when I felt like a piece of crap. Please explain what's so different about me when for the past three years that you may or may not have known that I was a living person, you've been dating other girls right in front of my face, and making me jealous as hell of them."
I know that was harsh, but worked. His face fell. Then he just leaned back in the booth, piped up, and started at the beginning.
"Remember 7th grade? When you walked through that door on the first day, I have to admit it, you kinda made my heart stop. Just for a couple of seconds. But I didn't know you yet. I didn't know anything about you. Plus, the extra factor was that I didn't know what kind of person you were."
I wasn't buying it. I would find out that I could later.
"So I decided to keep an eye on you. You know, 'observe at a distance,' and there was no interference on my part. I just watched. You were quite the interesting person. You were kinda shy and lost the first day. But then you met Hannah. And somehow you became that person that cared about how others felt. If they felt bad or upset, you'd be the person that always knew what was going on. And you'd always be the one who'd try to make everything straight between them. I liked that about you. You always figured out a way to piss the people that pissed off your people."
True. I did piss the people off. Especially when they thought they were all that and they were prisses who didn't give a crap how others felt. Which ties in to what he was going to say later.
"Then you met and took a liking to Alex. Yeah, I could see that at times you got mad at her for something that you didn't like, but she was still your friend. And then came Marci, which I have to say, surprised me. She was great for you to be hanging around, but I didn't think that you guys would let her into your group/ lineup. But then you started hanging out around Kaitlyn, which surprised me even more. She didn't seem like the type that you hang around. You really need to give me that full story sometime."
Yeah. Marci was great to hang around and everything and Kaitlyn was a Bosch connection so we were kind of like sisters. Especially when my dad went to Germany for work and Kaitlyn had already lived there before, it kinda made us closer in our friendship. Adam had already took a sip of his drink and was already starting to talk again.
"The year passed. We hardly talked to each other that year and I felt bad about not talking to you, but I didn't want to spoil the whole thing about me liking you and you wanting to go out with me and me asking you out on a date. But then our parents took off right before The End and now im sitting here telling you the story of why I never stood up and talked to you and told you how I felt about you and why I have been wasting all this time when I could have been going out with you."
All of a sudden we heard the biggest, loudest fit of laughter that anybody's heard since before The End we automatically jumped up to go see what was going on and when we got there, a tall guy was sitting at the table and he was telling everybody stories of different things, i'm guessing about his life. I look at Alex. She looks at me and shrugs her shoulders. I smile, and then she notices that Adam is still standing beside me. She slightly nods her head toward the kitchen signaling that I should come with her to the kitchen for more drinks and cups. I nod and start walking that way. The last thing I hear her say before I got into the back was "Could you guys excuse us?"
When Alex gets in the back, she goes:
"I already know what you are going to say, and before you say it, I want you to know that that is Brett, and i've known him for a while now. So din't even say that I am jeapordizing any missions because I didn't just bring Adam here with his friends so he could just talk to you and make thing straight. I brought them here because all of our teams need help. I brought them here on a business deal. They help us out on strength missions and we will try to help them piece back together thier team and provide shelter and food. Did you know that Adam and his crew have been living in the woods for the past 2 weeks living off of nothing but Ritz crackers and a thermos full of water?
That I didn't know. What I did know was that all of them looked like hell when they walked through that door earlier today. Beaten, scratched up, kicked, bruissed, broken. And something else that only applied to Adam: emotional hurt and guilt.
