Page 33 of Sublimate
He shrugged. “If we could find your mom, would she be able to help at all?”
Cadence kept asking me the same thing. “I just can’t believe that a mother…” she would repeat under her breath. It was hard to understand that my mom and I had no contact, that she had lost everything that would have proven my existence, and that I’d been on my own for so long. There was a very stark difference between my life and Cadence’s, since she was totally organized and legal with everything, she still lived with her own mom at the age of twenty-eight, and they had a home that had been in their family for generations. But as hard as it was to understand, she wasn’t mean about it.
Nolan wasn’t, either. “No, my mom wouldn’t help with this,” I answered. “She never liked to respond to calls or emails if they was about something important. When I was in school, my teachers used to send paper copies of stuff home with me. I got really good at forging her signature on them.”
He nodded again. “I was great at hacking into my parents’ email accounts and redirecting their calls,” he said. “My mom was furious because of attorney-client privilege issues, and my dad is an investment manager. His clients wouldn’t have liked it, if they had known.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Didn’t I mention that I was an asshat?” He continued talking about the tricks he’d pulled as a kid and teenager. He had been much more sophisticated than I had with my faked signatures, but neither of us had ever gotten into real trouble over anything.
“Maybe I should have,” he said when I voiced that truth. “If I had gotten in trouble, serious trouble, I might have stopped acting like that.”
“It’s lucky for the police that you didn’t move onto worse stuff,” I mentioned. “Because you would have made a great criminal.”
“There’s still time,” he said.
“So, your friend Beau had bad taste in women, I have bad taste in men. What about you?”
“I’m straight.”
“I mean, is that why your relationship didn’t work out? Your engagement?” I prompted. I loved that word so much! “No, sorry. I told you before that I wouldn’t bring her up.” I had even crossed my heart.
“That’s ok.” But he sounded slightly angry, as if it really wasn’t. “She ended the engagement because she saw that a future with me was unsustainable.”
I had no idea what that word meant but I guessed something bad. “Why?”
“Because I was a drunk with no ambitions. Not even criminal ones,” he answered. “That’s why.”
“It was good outcome for her but sad for you,” I said, and then held still. My words were of the type to make someone mad, and he’d just shown me that this was a touchy subject.
“You’re right. It was the best possible outcome for her. She’s married to someone else and they’re expecting their first baby,” he said. “Beau’s ex-wife, my cousin Celestine, keeps me informed. She’s angry that I’m still his friend so she likes to try to rub salt in my wounds. Unfortunately for her, I’m always glad to hear that my former fiancée is doing well.”
He sure didn’t sound glad and I wanted to get away from this. “I’ll race you back to the house,” I said. “You ready?”
“What?”
But I had already taken off, my feet pounding on the sidewalk. I heard him say my name and then I heard his footsteps getting louder. I had always been fast, but his damn legs were so much longer! I apologized in my head to Beau for that bit of bad language.
When Nolan caught up to me, which took only a few seconds, we both slowed and jogged the rest of the way to his house. And both of us were totally winded and beat when we got there. “I don’t remember breathing like this after I ran,” he panted.
“I used to love running in PE,” I said, but I was gasping worse than he was. “I’m not sure why. What happened?”
“How long ago did you take a gym class?”
“Seven years?” I hazarded. “I dropped out after eighth grade.”
“What?”
“Didn’t I tell you that? Yeah, I dropped out when I moved in with my boyfriend.”
“You said that you were fifteen when that happened,” he said.
“You’re really good with details! I guess I must have been fourteen, because it was the summer after eighth grade and I didn’t go back to school after that.” I hadn’t been attending regularly for years and when I’d actually made it there, I hadn’t had a clue what was going on.
“And how old was your boyfriend?”
“He was…” I had to think. “When we first met, he was twenty-four. No, five. I remember having a birthday party for him at the end of that summer and he turned twenty-six. How old were you when you had your first real relationship?”
