Page 40 of Goode to Be Bad

“My fiancé cheated on me with my overweight middle-aged boss. I quit, moved, and then went on a cross-country road trip with my sister, and did the craziest thing I’ve ever done—fell in love with a badass biker and moved here with him.” She smiled over her shoulder at Crow, who was standing behind her with a giant glass bowl of guacamole in his hands.

Mom walked through the circle to me and placed her hands on my shoulders. “My husband of twenty-five years died, and I moved here for a change of scenery and pace, to start over. I met a strange, gruff, rough, enormous, foul-mouthed, beautiful disaster of a man named Lucas, and we did things my daughters would probably not appreciate hearing about, which made me realize how unhappy I’d been in my marriage before Darren died. I had to accept that, digest it, and then figure out how to fall in love all over again, as a middle-aged woman, well past her prime, with five grown daughters.”

“Ain’t shit about you being past your prime, woman,” Lucas growled.

Mom sighed, smiled. “Thank you, Lucas.” She stayed focused on me. “The point of all this, my dear love, is that there is no story about yourself you could tell which we all here would not understand, sympathize with, and do everything in our power to help you through. You are amongfamily, Alexandra.”

My throat was hot and tight. I didn’t knowanyof these women except Mom and my sisters, and the only men I knew were Myles and Crow.

So…

Family?

My family was scattered across the country—or had been until recently; now Mom, Cassie, and Charlie were here in Alaska, Torie was still in Connecticut wasting her life away with a bong and a waitress’s apron, and Poppy was in New York dodging the reality of having to either woman up and chase her real dream, or give up on it. And me? I was…I had no fucking clue what I was. Or where I belonged. Or what I wanted to do.

Or who I wanted to do it with.

Should I move to Alaska with Mom, Cassie, and Charlie? Live with my mother again? Live with one of my older sisters and their serious boyfriends? But do fucking what?

I looked around—the entire clan’s eyes were on me, every single one. And there was…love in those eyes. Acceptance. They didn’t fucking know me, so how could they love me? How could they accept me? They didn’t know me. They all—Mom, Charlie, and Cassie included—thought they knew my worst, deepest, darkest, most painful secret…the affair and abortion.

If only it was that simple.

If only it was as simple as not having a career plan or goals. Well…it was not like I had career plans beyond college; the plan was always get the degree and figure “then what” when then became now. I always assumed if I put off the notion of a career long enough, something would just…happen. I’d end up doing something.

But now even that had been taken away.

I was adrift.

I was at a loss.

I had nothing. A storage locker full of…shit. Clothing, mostly. A shitty fourth-hand futon, a thrift store coffee table, a mattress and bed frame, some books, some posters, some knickknacks from my childhood, a few photos of family, some notebooks full of old poetry and song lyrics. Some cassettes and CDs with self-recorded attempts at being a singer-songwriter.

That’s it—the sum total of me, if you count my possessions as me. If you count my personality and my achievements as me, I’m even less. I’m a partially educated twenty-one-year-old woman with no real world skills or work experience, no degree, not even an interesting romantic history to point to—just a collection of dirty stories from sleeping with any half-decent looking dude who caught my momentary fancy.

“You all think you know me. Like it’s so easy to just…knowsomeone. Like, I told you a few stories about my shitty, fucked-up life and because you’re allsoamazing, you can all justacceptme and fuckingloveme.” I glared icy daggers at Myles as I said that. “You don’t fucking know me. None of you fuckingknowme.”

“Lex, honey—”

I whirled and stormed away. “That includesyou, Mom.”

I walked out into the gloomy leaden sky, into the drip-drip-drip of a solid drizzle. Running away from everyone who thought they knew me, who thought they cared about me. Running away to…

What? Who? Where?

Nothing, no one, nowhere.

8

Myles

We all watched her go, and silence expanded throughout the bar in the wake of her departure, the only sound the faint croon of an old Tony Bennett tune.

“Thatis one fucked-up female,” one of the Badd men said.

Whack! The sound of a hand smacking a chest. “Baxter! Be compassionate.”

“I am compassionately saying she’s got some serious damage she ain’t dealt with. Fuckin’ all of us know from painful personal experience that when you don’t deal with your shit, your shit has a way of hunting you down and fucking you up until you quit runnin’ and face it.” He looked at me, incredulous. “Dude—the fuck are you still standing here for? Go, motherfucker!”