Like Father, Like Son ✔

Chapter 17 - Senseless

CHAPTER 17

CAT

After she finished the groceries, Cat made her way a little dazedly to a car rental and managed to get her hands on a blue Ford Focus. She then drove to the campus and found Nick already waiting with Luke on the front steps of the daycare. They went out to dinner together at a nice restaurant nearby, just the three of them, but Cat didn't really enjoy the evening as much as she would've liked to.

She knew better than to bottle up her feelings like this. She really did want to tell somebody about her encounter with Sara, but Nick was just so focused on tomorrow and the last thing she wanted was to ruin his fun.

She already knew that Amanda and Hannah's reactions would be far from supportive. They'd seen her that first year after her parents disowned her. They were witnesses to the hundreds of emotional breakdowns she had and they'd be against her getting in too deep with people that clearly wanted nothing to do with her.

But Sara was different. She was fourteen years old when everything went down, old enough to somewhat understand what was going on but still too young to say anything about it. Cat didn't blame her for not sticking up for her. Their parents weren't exactly the kind of people you wanted to go up against, whether you were fourteen years old or a few months shy of twenty.

"Cat, hey you still with me?" Nick's voice broke through her thoughts on Friday morning. They'd dropped Luke off at Nick's parents about half an hour earlier and now they were driving on the I-90, heading south toward Shelbyville.

The teen mother's eyes drifted to the right of the windshield and landed on his grinning face.

"Hmm?" she murmured distractedly.

"I think you're going kind of fast," he said and probably not for the first time. He reached over to place a hand on her knee and gave a light squeeze.

Cat glanced at the speedometer and eased up slightly on the gas pedal. Nick was right; she was going at least twenty miles over the speed limit.

"You OK?" he wondered.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just trying to make sure we haven't forgotten anything," Cat lied.

"Oh yeah, I'm sure that's exactly it," Nick said sarcastically. It was like he could see right through her and knew exactly when she wasn't being entirely honest, which was kind of funny really. For a blind man, he sure was perceptive. "You're the most obsessive packer I've ever met, and that's including my sister. If you forgot anything, I swear the world might just implode."

Cat shrugged, but of course he couldn't see that. They just sat there in silence for about a quarter of a mile before Nick spoke again.

"Is it about me?" he asked, sounding a lot more serious. "Is it about tonight, because if you're not sure, we don't have to—" he added, but knowing exactly what he was thinking, Cat just had to cut him off. If there was one thing she was sure about right now, it was her feelings for Nick Bradley.

"No! Nick, it's not you— at all. I'm not having second thoughts or anything... I um," she trailed off, feeling like such an idiot for even allowing him to get that idea in his head. He probably knew something was up, that she wasn't entirely here on this trip with him, and he must've concluded that she didn't want to have sex with him anymore. "Something happened at the grocery store yesterday," she murmured.

"What?" Nick asked, a wave of dread washing over his features. Cat let one hand drop from the steering wheel to wrap it around the one he still had resting on her knee.