They’d ended up with a route, though. Scarlett hadn’t computed the days of travel, but she was going to have to. The trip had gotten quite lengthy once Megan started opening up about things she wanted to see. Scarlett hadn’t added any destinations of her own—this was Megan’s trip, after all, and she was just along to do some of the driving.
The worst part of all of this was how much she wanted Megan to have a good trip. She’d let that friendship go, and now she was getting sucked right back into it again. Back when they stopped talking to each other, it had seemed a necessary evil. Now, though, Scarlett missed her, and she missed the friendship they had.
She hadn’t missed the fact that Megan was really cute.
She wasn’t hot. Megan wasn’t a “hot” type of girl. Maybe with a haircut and the right makeup, and a really slutty dress, sure, but Megan as-is had this fresh-faced beauty that Scarlett had quietly mooned over back in high school, and then ignored, because Megan didn’t swing that way and Scarlett was terrified of being rejected.
Whatever. The damage was done. She was going on a road trip with Megan Harris in only a few short days, from the looks of things, and she hadn’t packed or, hell, even bought that gray velvet suit she’d been eyeing in the mall.
She had a lot to get done. And that wasn’t counting all the ways she was going to have to distract herself from her frustrating—and frustratingly cute—road trip buddy.
She pulled into her driveway. Jacen had gone to bed already, or was out with his boyfriend. Good thing she had the place to herself; she needed some alone time to think.
And, as embarrassing as it was, maybe a cold shower.
* * *
Megan spent the next day in a flurry of disbelief and worry, vacillating so quickly between the two sometimes that she could barely tell them apart. One minute, this was the best idea she’d ever had, and the next, she was being reckless and irresponsible. There was no middle ground in her mind, not when she was doing something so far outside her comfort zone. But her comfort zone had gotten way too limited, and it was time to shake it up.
Now, with the two of them leaving in just a few days, Megan was in focused efficiency mode. She had tacked a to-do list onto the fridge and checked it again, for the third time today, to make sure she was on schedule. She’d blasted through almost everything on it, but a few annoying items still lingered, and she was going to get them done today.
The next item on her list was cleaning out the fridge, and that was where Matt found her an hour later, down on her hands and knees scrubbing the glass shelving.
“You still going through with this?”
This question again, like he hadn’t brought it up a dozen times in the last weeks, either directly or obliquely. Megan rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand, not bothering to look up from her task. “Yes.”
“You don’t have to do this to prove something to me, you know.”
Like she would actually do that. She laughed. “Sure. Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Eh, I don’t know if I want to keep that job. They booked me two Saturdays in a row, and there’s a concert I want to go see next weekend.”
Megan sat back on her heels, pausing, the cold air of the fridge on one side of her face as she looked up at her younger brother. The mixture of annoyance, anger, and disgust rolling in her stomach was making her feel sick, and it wasn’t anxiety about the trip. “What the hell are you doing with yourself, Matt?”
“What?” He shifted back, frowning. “You’re asking me that? You, who don’t know what the fuck you’re doing with yourself without the diner?”
She had told herself she’d deal with reality after her trip, and reminded herself of that, tamping down the uncertainty his words evoked. “I paid your share of the electric and cable bills again.”
“Thanks.” Matt reached past her to grab a can of soda off the top shelf, where she was still cleaning.
“No, not thanks. You owe me a hundred and twenty dollars.”
He winced. “Meg, I’ll get it to you before your trip. I want to keep a cushion in case I get to go to that concert.”
Something snapped inside her, like a rubber band overstretched inside her brain, the parts ricocheting sharply around her mind. “Move out.”
Matt laughed. “Soon enough. I’m saving up, you know that. It’s way cheaper to live here than at my own place, and my friends aren’t responsible like you—”
“No. I mean, this month. Move out.”
Matt stopped laughing all at once. “You’re serious?”
“As a heart attack.” Everything else had vanished in the face of her resolve. She’d put this off long enough, always resistant to putting out the effort, always coming back to the underlying belief that family took care of family, no matter what. Her brother had been taking advantage of her for years, and he was going to keep doing it until she stopped letting him. That moment was today.
“You’re kicking me out, just like that?” He pressed a hand to his heart. “I’m your brother.”
The calm settled over her like a soft blanket, smothering the anger and frustration that so frequently colored their interactions, and Megan no longer felt sick at all. “Yes. I’ll give you thirty days. If you can’t find a place by then, you can ask mom and dad to crash with them.”
Matt pressed his lips tightly together. She had never drawn a clear line like this with him before, never made him act like an adult, and dammit, she couldn’t survive like this anymore. Not today, not now, not with everything else in her life.
“Fine, whatever. You know this trip isn’t going to fix anything, right? You’re going off with your girlfriend, and you’ll come home and be the same girl you’ve always been. And then you’re not going to have me here helping you.”
She didn’t even want to fight with him over this, didn’t need to correct him. He could believe whatever he wanted. She was done. Megan turned back to the refrigerator. “You can get boxes for your stuff at the liquor store.”
Matt swore under his breath and walked away, leaving Megan alone with the fridge. She smiled into its depths. He could say what he wanted, but she could feel changes yet to come.
Packing? Packing was a different story.
By all accounts, this should be easy. She liked the methodical precision of arranging outfits and folding them neatly into packing cubes. She had mapped out the predicted weather for the entire eastern seaboard for their trip, as far ahead as the websites would let her, sketching out the next ten days as close to precisely as she could. But she was a Florida girl; temps making it down to freezing was a newsworthy event around here, and where they were headed, thirty degrees was an optimistic high. How many sweaters did a person wear when it was below thirty? She didn’t even own long underwear, but was long underwear something a person owned in this day and age, or was that just some Little House on the Prairie thing?