Page 123 of Headstrong Like Us

He swallows more lemonade. “I thought the first time I’d take her to a club, she’d be eighteen. It’d be a gay bar. We’d have fun.”

He’s mourning this first.

I skim him in a quick sweep. Shit, I love how much he cares about his family. “You were dreaming, wolf scout. Because that girl was never going to wait until she was eighteen.” Nearly every time we see Kinney, she mentions nightclubs and gay bars.

Now that she’s here, she’s been taking it all in and drinking a virgin daiquiri.

“Yeah,” Maximoff says distantly, lost in thought.

I lift his wrist and check the time on his watch. “Your parents should be here in a half hour.” They’re giving Kinney some extra time to spend with her siblings before picking her up.

He nods strongly, but I catch his rising smile, a thought bringing him some sort of happiness.

“What?” I smile, just seeing Maximoff grin like that, and I really wish I were in his brain right now.

He licks lemonade off his lips. “I was just thinking what we’d do if Ripley snuck out to a bar at fourteen.”

My brows spike. I’m surprised he’s letting himself envision that future. But he’s still smiling. “What would we do?” I ask deeply.

He stares off. “I think we’d let our son stay, but only under the condition that wehaveto hang around him the whole time. And you’d be the kind of dad who’d totally embarrass Rip for being a fourteen-year-old in a bar.”

I laugh into a smile that vanishes too quickly. Replaced with a pain, a feeling I’m dodging. Who would’ve thought that Maximoff could speak about our future easier than me?

With a free-throw, I trash my crumpled plastic cup in a trashcan, and I push back the ache in my chest. “After that,” I tell Maximoff, “Ripley would turn to you and whine, ‘Papa,’ because you’re too good, and he forgets how much of a hardass you are. Still, you’d go buy him a Fizz.”

“Fizz Life,” Maximoff amends, gaze faraway. “It’s better for him.”

I smile. “No offense to your family’s soda empire, but all that shit is unhealthy, carbonated syrup.”

His eyes finally meet mine. “Really? I had no clue.”

I let out a short laugh, but in the next beat, we look deeper into one another.

Maximoff inhales a sharp breath. “Am I torturing us with this?”

I want to shake my head. But I nod once. “A little bit.” I’m not into masochism, and picturing a future where Ripley is permanently our son is packed with love and pain. “If we were smarter, we’d just talk about kids in generalizations.”

At least we know we’ll have them someday.

“For some damn reason,” Maximoff says, “I’d rather be dumb and talk about our life with him.”

I know I’m all-in, but it feels like Maximoff has me beat.

“It’s theHaleCurse,” Xander says adamantly, speaking louder. Stealing our attention. “What goes wrong will go wrong to a Hale. Why else would the strippers only be sent to Moffy and not Farrow?”

Maximoff cuts in, “The Hale Curse is a made-up thing, Summers.”

He’ll go to his grave telling his siblings that it’s bullshit, but I know he somewhat believes in that bullshit too.

“I don’t know.” Luna slurps from a dick straw. “Sounds like a Hale conspiracy to me.”

Kinney shrugs, unconcerned. “I’m not afraid of any curse.”

Maximoff opens his mouth, but a confrontation explodes near a bamboo-shuttered window, only a few feet away.

“I can’t believe you agreed to thatfucked uprequest,” Sulli says heatedly to Akara. “You said we were friends.”

Akara glances subtly at Banks, who leans up against the wall and chews a toothpick. The six-foot-seven bodyguard is watching the scene unfold like we are, and then Akara focuses back on his client. “We are friends, Sul.”