Page 18 of Hot Summer Nights

They need my money to afford the mortgage and they were using my car to get around town. Now they’re down to two, and my sister has been bugging my parents for rides to work or to borrow the car to go out with her friends and my parents stand it. They want me to buy her a new car. It’s the least that I can do for messing up their lives and cursing everyone.

My stomach hollows at the familiar words and I start to feel numb.

They’ve been telling me some version of that sentiment for my entire life, and I guess I never questioned them. I mean, they’re my parents after all and I just always trusted them and what they said. I’m sure that there’s some psychological reasoning behind why victims blame themselves, and I wonder if I could ask Gavin’s dad to explain it to me, but at the end of the day, I still believed it for over twenty-three years.

I think that Gavin was right.

I’m not cursed. There’s no such thing as curses.

We make our own luck, and my parents and sister have always taken the easy road. They don’t need to work hard or try for things. Not when they can fail, blame it on me, and then demand that I do something to make it up to them.

“I’m not a curse,” I whisper to myself, my eyes stinging with tears.

“I know. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Gavin says softly from behind me and I hurry to dry my eyes before I turn to face him.

“My family has been texting and calling me,” I tell him, passing him my phone.

I watch as he reads a few messages in the group chat, his features darkening and his fingers tightening with each new message that he reads.

“They’re wrong. You don’t owe them shit,” he promises me, a fire burning bright in his eyes.

“I know. I’m starting to see that after today.”

“Good.”

He pulls me against his chest, and I go willingly, wrapping my arms around his waist as I breathe in his now-familiar scent of oil and pine trees.

“I mean, if anyone was the curse here, it was them. They held you back, tried to keep you tied down to their level,” he points out.

It’s amazing how just a few days away from them and I can suddenly see things so much more clearly. Or maybe it’s just that Gavin took the time to show me how wrong I was.

He’s right. I don’t need them. I’m so much better off without any of them in my life.

“Are you okay?” he asks as he pulls back slightly.

“Yeah, I am,” I promise him, and he gives me a lopsided grin.

“Good. The last part for your car came in. Want to help me fix it? Then I can take you home or we can grab a late dinner or something.”

“Sure.”

I follow him over to my car and he grabs me a camping chair and sets it up nearby before he gets to work.

“It’s cool that you know how to do all of this,” I say.

He smiles. “It’s not super hard. Once you’ve done a few, you're pretty much a pro,” he says and I shake my head.

“I’m clueless about building and fixing things. It’s cool that you're so self-sufficient.”

His face heats slightly and I wonder if he’s blushing or if it’s just hot under the hood of my car.

“Do you want to learn?” he offers after a beat, and I’m tempted to take him up on it, but I shake my head.

“Nah, I’m enjoying the view too much,” I tell him with a wink, and he grins at me, shaking his head slightly.

He doesn’t seem to believe me, so I get comfortable in my chair and start to tell him what seeing him all greasy and sweaty does to me.

“I’m serious. The first time I saw you when you came to get my car, I literally said ‘holy shit,’ when I saw you.”

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