Never Fall in Love with the Fisher Boys

22- Sounds Good

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

A blush rose on my cheeks as I shook my head at my laptop. “No, Mom, I don’t.”

“Then why are you acting so shy?” She wondered with raised eyebrows on my screen. “I think that you like somebody.”

“I might,” I responded vaguely. “But I don’t want to mess up our friendship or complicate things right now. I just want to take things extraordinarily slow. Carter’s really amazing and I don’t want this to end up like…” Will. I didn’t tell my mom about what happened at the beginning with Will though, so I don’t finish my sentence. Instead, I just let the silence wash over our conversation.

“I think that what happened to Lea is holding you back,” My mom told me after a long silence. “Because you think that anybody that you get close to is going to disappear.”

“That’s not what I think,” I sighed heavily, not wanting to talk about Lea. I never wanted to talk about Lea and yet, she always loved to bring it up. Lea was my best friend until I was thirteen, when she died in a car accident with her mom. Her mom survived but Lea died in the hospital. The therapist that I used to talk to had told my mom that the experience of losing my best friend would haunt me, that I needed to talk about it or it would weigh me down, so every chance she got, she’d mention it. It was awful. I mean, the whole thing was tragic enough, I didn’t need to be reminded of it all of the time.

“Well, then what are you afraid of?” She countered.

I started to think and for a moment, I was ready to answer but then I clamped my mouth shut again. The reason that I was hesitant about dating was supported with a plethora of reasons. The number one reason would be the fact that most of the men that I’d ever met were disgusting. My hesitancy to date was directly related to the amount of pedophilic boyfriends that my mom plowed through during my teen years. However, I didn’t say that because it’d upset her. She had always refused to believe any of the things I told her about how they had snuck into my room at night, after she’d passed out.

“I’m not afraid,” I finally responded with a shrug. “I just want to take it slow.”

“Is he cute?”

“He’s beautiful,” I confirmed with a nod, not really wanting to talk about Carter and my confused feelings toward him right at the moment. “Anyway, I have something else really important to talk to you about.”

“Okay, darling, what is that?” She asked me, looking away from the screen to finish painting her nails. That was the original reason that she’d Skype called me- she couldn’t decide what color of polish to paint her nails and Gerard was just useless with cosmetic advice. Shocking. 

“Why didn’t you tell me that Tom knows my dad?” I threw the question at her before I could swallow it again. I’d been trying to bring it up through our whole conversation but I’d always chicken out and she’d change the conversation to something else, leaving the question stuck in my throat. I mentally applauded myself for finally getting the courage to say it.

She looked back up at the screen, her face frozen in complete horror. “Oh, sweetie. You weren’t supposed to find out about that.”

“How did you think that I wouldn’t find out about that?” I asked her incredulously, feeling more and more aggravated by the second at the whole thing. “And how could you not tell me yourself?”

“Because I didn’t want you to get your hopes up,” She explained. “He left us so long ago and I know that he’s an incredibly arrogant man who only cares about himself and his career. He doesn’t deserve you in his life.”