*
It was close to lunchtime when Sawyer drove me home. I crept in through the back door, hoping to sneak straight upstairs, but my father was in the kitchen drinking coffee. “How was Shelby’s?” he asked me quietly, one thumb ringing around the edge of his mug.
“Good,” I said.
“Good,” he repeated. Then, as I made for the staircase: “Reena.”
Uh-oh. I turned around, eyes widening. I felt like he could see right through my skin. “Yup?”
“Sit down.”
“I was just going to—”
“Serena.” His voice rose suddenly, and I thought of Moses on Mount Sinai, the voice of God and the burning bush. “I don’t know if you were or were not with Shelby last night, but I do know that this needs to stop right now.”
I blinked, tried ignorance. My cheeks were very warm. “What does?”
His eyes narrowed. “Please don’t insult me.”
“I’m not,” I said. I was holding on to the edge of the countertop, clutching at it with my fingertips. “I don’t mean to.”
“Please don’t think I’m so ignorant that I don’t know what’s going on with you and Sawyer, all right?” He looked so uncomfortable that I almost felt sorry for him. “I might not know what, exactly—and I get the feeling, quite frankly, that I don’t want to know exactly what—but I am telling you now that you need to put a stop to it before you do something you’ll regret.”
I glanced instinctively out the window, but of course there was nothing to see there: I’d had Sawyer drop me halfway down the block.
My father saw me looking, rubbed a hand across the side of his face. “Reena,” he said, more softly this time. “I love you. But you are on very thin ice here. And I don’t think you understand what you’re dealing with.”
I squinted at him. “Meaning …”
“Meaning, Sawyer has a lot of problems.”
Bald denial was my first instinct. “Oh, Daddy, he does not.”
“There are things you don’t know about him, Serena. There are things you don’t know about the world. And maybe that’s my fault, maybe I’ve kept you from—”
“Can you stop?” I asked sharply. It was the closest to the edge I ever got with him, but I just—I did not want to be having this conversation. I didn’t need anyone else telling me all the things I didn’t know. “It’s not like that. He’s not just some random—” I broke off, tried to think how to explain it to him. “You know Sawyer.”
My father looked at me like he’d never seen me before in his life, like he honestly had no idea what to do with me at all. “Yes, Reena,” he said finally. “I do.”
We stared at each other, like a standoff. For a moment I wished for my mom—someone to take my side in all of this. Eventually I shrugged and raised my chin. “Can I go?”
I was expecting an argument, but my father just sort of sagged. “Go ahead,” he told me finally, and as I pushed through the door into the living room I was almost sure I heard him sigh.