Billy stared at me for a stretch, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully, then he shrugged. “It’s in the past. As momma used to say, ‘Best to leave farts and the past behind you.’”
I chuckled at that. It was one of her more scandalous sayings.
“Tell me what happened with Jennifer.” Billy attempted to get us back on track. “You said she videotaped you, and then what happened?”
“I contacted Alex, in Chicago, and asked him to remove the video from her computer and phone.” I frowned, refocusing my thoughts outward. Sometimes it took me a bit to switch gears between the distant past and the present. “I thought he had, but re-reading his message, it looks like the video was never there.”
“What’d his message say?” Billy asked around a bite of food.
“He said, ‘I can confirm the video isn’t on the subject’s phone, computer, or saved to the cloud.’”
“So you thought he’d deleted it, but it turns out—”
“She didn’t save it on her computer, phone, or the cloud. She saved it on thumb drives.”
Billy’s smile was slow and small and appreciative, his eyes moving down and to the side, then he laughed. “She’s smart.”
“She is. But it turns out her father does random checks of her phone and computer—this is according to Jessica. I didn’t put the pieces together until last Monday.”
“What happened on Monday?” He picked up his hamburger.
“I kissed her.”
Billy paused mid-bite, removing the burger from his mouth. “Good.”
“No. That’s bad. She thinks I did it just to help her practice kissing, like you helped her practice dating.”
“Oh. Bad.”
“Yeah. And then she gave me the thumb drives and told me I was dead to her.”
“She said that?” Billy was mid-bite again, and had halted again to ask me his question.
“In so many words.” I pushed my food away. I wasn’t hungry.
“Cletus.”
“Billy.”
“Don’t embellish. What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Thanks for your help. I don’t need you anymore. Here is your video. Go away.’ More or less, that’s what she said.” Despite not being hungry, I munched on a French fry. The saltiness of the French fry distracted me from the ache in my chest.
“Hmm.” Billy finally took another bite of his burger, his eyes sliding to the left as he chewed things over. “Things could be worse.”
I picked up another fry, glanced at it, then set it back on the table. “They are worse. She’s going to Jethro’s wedding with Jackson James.”
Billy’s eyebrows jumped again. “That asshole?”
“I know,” I responded flatly, sliding my teeth to the side. “I should have given him leprosy back in September. It would’ve kept him occupied through Christmas.”
“Hmm.” Billy set his burger down, studying me and wiping his fingers with a napkin. “What are you going to do?”
“That’s why I’m here. I need you to tell me what to do.”
His eyes communicated wary disbelief. “You want me to tell you what to do?”
“Yep. Because my instinct is to go over to the bakery, toss her over my shoulder, and make her mine.”
Billy crossed his arms. “That’s a bad idea. I’ve tried that, it didn’t end well.”
“Exactly. Plus . . .” I breathed in, held the air within my lungs, and exhaled slowly, my eyes flickering to Billy, then to my burger with no top bun. “Plus there’s the small matter of her wanting to have a lot of children.”
I could feel Billy’s eyeballs on me. His eyeballs had always carried a very specific weight. Growing up, Jethro was a joker, our father a monster, and Billy was the one we looked up to. He was the one I never wanted to let down.
“Cletus—”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“Then we can skip it and you can admit you’re wrong.”
“I can’t admit I’m wrong about two things in the same day.” I brought my attention back to him, found him smirking at me. “It might bring about the apocalypse.”
“Then admit it tomorrow.”
I swallowed past the ballooning anxiety in my throat. I was never anxious, so it took me a minute to adjust to the sensation.
“You’ve seen my temper. You know what I’m like when I lose it. I blackout. I don’t remember. Do you honestly think I should have children?”
Billy’s smirk mellowed into a sad-looking smile. “We all have Darrell in us, Cletus. I look just like him, so does Ashley. You think I like what I see when I look in the mirror? I hate it. But I’m not cutting off my face because I share it with our father. Your decision to not have a family, because you’re afraid of losing your temper like he did when we were kids—it’s admirable, but it’s also stupid.”
“And if I—”
“No.” Billy brought his palm down on the table, hitting it with a forceful whack. “Stop making excuses for being a coward. You want Jennifer in your life?”
“Yes,” I responded with more than my voice, the answer shaking my very foundation, coming from deep within me, from the same place I’d buried the rage along with my passion.