Missed Me, Missed Me, Now You Gotta Kiss Me

Time with Dad

    It’d been a week since the…um…incident. I hadn’t heard from Liam since. I understood he needed his space….Okay, well, that was a lie. I didn’t understand it at all. He still came to work, but he never came up at the house and I wasn’t quite brave enough to go down there. From what I could guess—and he wasn’t talking to me anytime soon, so I only had to guess—is that he was a little ashamed—maybe?—that I had seen him like that. I s’pose I would be, too.

  I was disappointed he wasn’t talking to me or not. Didn’t he know me better than to think I was scared of him?

  Anyway, I was in hiding. The whole week I had been going to work with my dad up in Nashville.

  My mom and the twins were fine. She had to be on bed rest for the next few weeks, but in the end she’d done the right thing by going to the doctor. Thank God my dad had come home to take her out to lunch; otherwise she’d have had to drive herself over to the hospital in Franklin.

  I didn’t tell Lulu about the incident. I figured if she had known about Kyle and Jessica, she would have told me. Why tell her now if the truth now when it had been so cleverly hidden from her? Maybe there was a reason she didn’t know—besides the obvious fact of her older brother being a damn pervert.

  Work with my dad was pretty cool. I never really got a lot of time to spend with him, so I just one day asked if I could come with him to Nashville. I got to meet the people he worked with—Doretha is my all time favorite person—so that was a cool change. Most of the time I would just be on the computer—this guy he worked with gave me a Brown and Caldwell laptop; it was kind slow, but still, it was a free laptop. Other times I would get adventurous and take his truck, browsing the streets of Nashville.

  I loved Nashville. I loved the troubadours there; some of which were good, others just kind of okay. The knick knack shops were my favorite, though. I even found some keychains and stuff with my name on it—you know how hard it is to find ‘Piper’ on simple souvenirs?

  But I loved lunch time. My dad knew the best places in Nashville to eat. After discovering the Mad Platter and Cheeseburger Charlie’s, though, I was done exploring food. The Mad Platter had to die for spaghetti with this amazing cinnamon iced tea—while that didn’t sound appealing, and I totally was neither an iced tea nor cinnamon fan, it was amazing.

  Cheeseburger Charlie’s was just indescribable; I hesitate to call it a fast food place. For picky cheeseburger people—I said no mayonnaise and no pickles, damnit!—this place was perfect. You just ordered your patty and they served that with bread. You had to go over to a buffet and put all the lovely stuff on it.

  My dad recommended the veggie burger. I was not a veggie burger fan, but when my dad told me even he liked it—and him being a steak and potatoes kinda guy—I ordered it. At first I regretted it because the patty looked like someone had barfed up some vegetables and beans and made it a patty. But it turned out to be the best damn thing ever. I often found myself dreaming of them since.

  It was cool, though, catching up with my dad. We didn’t talk about anything personal—the words ‘boyfriend’ and ‘Liam’ never came up. We just shot the shit. It had been a long time since my dad and I had just talked for the hell of it.

  “So what’re you wanting for your birthday?” he asked me one Thursday afternoon as we ate our lovely Cheeseburger Charlie’s; I didn’t come to Nashville often, so I was making the most out of it.

  I shrugged, remembering that puppy. The puppy, you see, reminded me of Liam; which reminded me we hadn’t spoken in a little over a week. While I wanted to talk about that, I was kind of afraid to tell either of my parents about the incident. It had been taken care of. I was sure Liam’s beating was the worst Kyle would get for a punishment. Why bring it up? I was fine. Liam was….fine-ish. Kyle was hopefully in the worst kind of pain. Taken care of.