Fluke

33: Adulting, Part 1

Brett had to know. He had to know about that letter, and he somehow managed to keep it a secret from me. As much as I liked to keep my language relatively clean, I couldn't help but wonder how the fuck he managed to pull that off.

I scanned it one more time to make sure I read it correctly. It was the exact same letter as the first time I went through it. I read it again, but it still didn't magically change.

I didn't even mean to read it, but when I caught a glimpse of the sweet, feminine handwriting on the paper, my eyes were drawn to it, because all my life I wanted to have nice writing like that. Morgan could have written a death note, and I still would have thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

But that was beside the point. I didn't know who this Morgan person was, but she seemed to know Logan very well.

I looked up at Brett. "Has Logan ever mentioned a Morgan before?"

Ugh. Her name ended in -gan­ ­just like ours. It disgusted me.

"Not to me, no," Brett replied. "Why?"

He stirred the pot of shit, then pretended he didn't know why it was sickening.

I shook my head. "You know why. He's got this cute letter from a girl named Morgan, and that's not me."

Logan never let me get close to him. He'd always lure me in like a fish, then throw me back out into the open ocean (and even though I liked the ocean, it was quite lonely out there). It wasn't his aloof personality, but the fact that he already had someone that he was close to.

Who else did I have besides him? No one.

Maybe I was just being dramatic. Maybe Morgan was his sister, or his cousin, or his best friend (who was either a girl he wasn't interested in or a guy with ultra-feminine handwriting). Those were three plausible other solutions that I had to consider. Out of all the possibilities, there was only one that meant I was a side bitch.

"I need to talk to Logan," I said.

"Reagan, you can't do that. You're mad about it, then he'll get defensive and lie, and you'll never find out the truth," Brett replied.

"I've taken your advice way too many times already. I'm going to talk to him. Now."

That sounded great in theory, but in practice, I wasn't confrontational enough to even ask him politely about Morgan.

"What did the letter even say? You might just be overreacting," Brett said.

I read it out loud to him, word-for-word, and he hesitated.

"Twelve years? How old were we twelve years ago?" Brett asked.

"I don't know. I mean, I'm twenty-one now, so subtract—" I trailed off. Mental math was a lot harder for me than it had to be, especially with regrouping.

"Don't hurt yourself," Brett said.

"Hold on, I have a calculator right here," the only other female voice on the island (besides Morgan's bubbly, friendly handwriting) said. Jia staggered into the room, one hand over her lower abdomen and the other typing in numbers on her phone.

"Get back to bed. What are you doing up?" I asked.

"I heard floundering, so I came to figure out what was going on. Plus, I just figured we were interrupting everyone's conversations today, right Brett?"

"I was just trying to help," Brett said.

Jia rolled her eyes. "Of course you were." She looked down at her phone, then up at me. "It's nine."