Fell In Love With My Roomy Chapter 131

I sit quietly on the edge of the desk as Kent retrieves the first drawer from the wall safe. I don't know where this story is going, but I'm glad he wants to share it. It's the last secret he's keeping, and I don't need him to give it up, but the fact that he wants to is incredible.

He takes a seat and clears his throat, not touching the contents of anything before him on the desk. He seems visibly upset, and I sigh, reaching my arm out.

"You don't have to do this if you don't want to," I whisper, and he gives me a weak smile, touching my arm softly.

"I don't want to tell you, but I think I should," he whispers back, and I nod. "When I turned fourteen, I started turning into a little brat," he says bluntly, and I smile a bit, only once I see that he is too.

"I think that's just a part of being a fourteen-year-old boy."

"I know... but, I know I was irritating," he mumbles. "I started getting into things I shouldn't have been, but I'm good now. It was just bad friends, fighting... that sort of thing."

"Sure," I nod, and he clears his throat.

"Cali was about to start at Dartmouth for her first year of university," he says quietly, and my heart sinks. The brief look he gives me lets me know this was a part of why he hated the idea of going there so much. "Before she left, we made a pact, traded our safe combinations in case something bad happened, then we could get in and take out anything awful before our parents could."

He sighs and runs his hands through his hair, pulling out a paper-clipped stack of papers on top of the tray first. "She got into a bunch of colleges," he says, passing me the pages. "But Dad pushed her hard on going to Dartmouth and taking business, meeting a guy who'd take care of her... you get the picture."

"So she did?" I ask, flipping through a stack of pages. Some for other Ivy League universities, others for more simple state colleges.

"It was better than Mom's alternative for her, to start modeling," he grumbles, pulling out some headshots of her. "Mom tried to get her into it when she was younger," he sighs, passing them over; even in her early teens, she's still gorgeous. "She quit when Mom tried to push dieting; she just wanted to do normal stuff, and my parents wouldn't let her. She was the oldest, so they told her what to do."

"That's terrible," I sigh, shaking my head.

"She came back that Thanksgiving and she was doing well, she was away from our parents, happy... she was on top of the world. Even stuck up for me when Dad started getting on my case more and more," he answers, and I nod. "She became more like my friend, less like my annoying older sister."

He stands up and walks back to the wall safe again, this time pulling out a photo box. He sits down again and looks at it for a few minutes, almost as if trying to process it.

"She called me more, wanted to know how I was," he explains, and I smile. "We were there for each other through the hard parts." It was nice to see Kent didn't have a strained relationship with all of his family members.

"Dad was always nagging her; she was going to be his first kid out of university. He wanted her to look good in the public eye and join more groups. Mom kept telling her to try and find a good date, start trying to find someone for her to settle down with. It's dystopian, but they had it in their minds that if she came out and graduated top of her class with the perfect guy, she'd have it made," he says, sounding disgusted.

He opens the box quietly and pulls out the top photo, glancing at it only for a second and then looking back to me.

"In her second year, she brought the boy she started dating home for Thanksgiving," he says uncomfortably. "His name was Ernest Cooper, he was a year ahead of her at Dartmouth from the same kind of family. He was going to graduate early in business, and his father had pledged a lot of money for him to start his company," he explains, and I nod. "She called him Ernie, and they seemed happy when she brought him to meet us."

He passes me a picture of a man who couldn't look any more like a red flag if he tried. He's blonde, with short, neatly gelled hair, a smile that feels greasy, and a face that screams 'I date to marry.' He's conventionally attractive, but there's something about him that I'm not fond of.

"My parents loved him," he sighs. "They raved about him and how perfect he was for her, that he and she would be so happy and that she couldn't have picked a better guy if she tried. Cali brought guys home to meet Mom and Dad before, but they didn't seem to care one way or the other. This was the first one they accepted and wanted her to be with."

"So she kept dating him," I answer my own question out loud, and Kent nods.

"Cali was awesome when I was younger. She was fun and happy, had good friends, and even the boys she dated were harmless," he explains. "She was always such a kind, happy person, so much light behind her eyes."

"I saw that," I admit, and he nods. "She's amazing."

"She is," he nods, and I smile. "All my parents talked about was how happy they were about Ernie, that he'd create some mega-fortune for the two of them, and that once they graduated, they should get married. All sorts of crap, I heard about it day and night. I didn't want that for her. I knew she was so capable, and... she was selling herself short to make my parents happy."

That made me sad. I was hoping we were past that as a society, where women were just expected to marry well. But I guess high society families had different rules.

"When she came back for Christmas just three weeks after that, she'd dropped like fifteen pounds," he says quietly. "I thought it was weird, Mom just praised her for it. She was proud of Cali for making herself even more presentable for Ernie, that he'd definitely notice... it made me so angry."

"That's pretty bad," I agree, and he nods.

"That's why I hate it when you put yourself down," he admits honestly, shrugging his shoulders, and my heart softens. "I could barely get her on the phone for the rest of the year. I tried hard, but she was always busy. She didn't come home for any of our big family functions that summer either. It got really lonely and isolating. She was my crutch in those moments, and I had to get better at doing them alone."

"I'm sorry," I whisper, giving his hand a squeeze. I understood what he meant, me and my brother were the only thing that got us through family things growing up.

"I was about to go into my senior year when she made an unexpected visit home," he explains, getting a different picture out of the box.

"They'd been traveling all summer; he brought her to Central and South America to see the parts of the world she'd never been to before. When she showed up, I didn't even recognize her."

He passes me a picture, and I do a double-take at the girl in the photo. It looks nothing like her. She's wearing more makeup, is far more tanned, though that could be from being in the sun all summer, and her hair is platinum blonde. Not to mention she looked far thinner, her collarbones were much more sunken, her arms thin.

"She'd never been blonde before," he answers, speaking my thoughts out loud. "Talking to her was complicated; it was like she never left his side. She was pretty quiet, which was not like her at all," he explains, and my stomach sinks. "But with some time, she started talking to me more, laughing and making jokes. I told her I missed her, and she assured me she'd call more that year," he says, and I nod. "When I asked her why she dyed her hair... she said Ernie liked it blonde."

"Ew," I scoff.

"That's what I said," he nods. "When I tried to tell her not to do that, she said 'I didn't get it. I really didn't at all. She wasn't herself anymore, at least not in front of anyone else."

I had an eerie feeling about where this was going. I hoped she divorced him early into that marriage.

"She did call more that year, but in short bursts; she could never talk long," he sighs, and I press my lips together. "Whenever she came home, she always came into this room and put things in her safe. That was weird to me... but I never wanted to violate her privacy."

He reaches into the bottom and pulls out a ring box quietly. It felt a little wrong to go through someone's personal things like this, but I'm sure this was the only way he felt he could talk about it.

"When they came back at Thanksgiving... she was engaged," he whispers. "I can't even tell you how happy my fucking parents were. Dad was already calling Ernie his son, Mom was squeezing the life out of Cali every time she saw her, telling her how excited she was for her," he explains, opening the box and passing it to me.

"Jesus," I mumble, looking at the massive stones on the band. This ring had to cost thousands.

"Ernie spoke for both of them, about their excitement and their plans to get married in the summer. She wasn't even going to be graduated, and they were going to be married," he huffs. "I was so angry I left the room."

I understood his anger. If someone had completely steamrolled my family member and turned them into someone they weren't, I'd be upset too.

"My dad was pissed at me. He pulled me into his office that night to scold me for not being excited about that, that it reflected badly and blah, blah, blah," he sighs, rolling his eyes. "I didn't like Ernie. He'd taken the light right out of my sister's eyes in two years flat. My parents thought this was the best thing that could have happened to us. Mom praised him for getting Cali to go blonde and lose some more weight."

That was terrible, it was revolting to hear about parents being so excited for something so messed up. Mine would be removing me from a situation like that.

"By Christmas, she'd dropped out," he spits, passing me her official dropout form, and I furrow my eyebrows.

"Was your dad upset?" I whisper, and he shakes his head.

"Not even a little bit. In his head, she'd come out of Dartmouth with much more than a degree; she was ensuring a powerful marriage with loads of money to dampen any disappointment," he explains, and my stomach turns over.

"She came to visit a lot in the few weeks leading up to Christmas. Mom and her started working with a wedding planner. Right after Thanksgiving was when I fucked my back up, I was in a wheelchair, and it made me miserable. I had to move myself to get away from the wedding shit; it was too hard to watch."

"How?" I whisper, and he sighs.

"I could tell she was just... going along with it. It wasn't what she wanted at all; she just kept saying yes. My parents were so happy, my dad assumed they'd get married because he was about to finish his degree. Mom was so excited to watch her get married; she's been excited about it since Cali was born."

"You think she felt pressured," I conclude, and he nods, chewing the inside of his cheek.

"I know she did. It was her job to make my parents proud. She spent her life doing it, and it was crushing her. Dad was so wrapped up in the business, and mom was so wrapped up in the money and the picture-perfect wedding... she just gave up," he whispers, and my heart breaks.

"The two of them moved in over the holidays, and I was genuinely miserable. Watching him speak for her, do everything for her, and just... control everything she did sickened me. That's not who we are; that's not how she was, and... it broke my heart."

"That's awful," I whisper, and he nods.

"I tried to talk to her about it, but... she just told me I didn't know him. That I should spend time with him. I tried to point out that I was in a wheelchair, but she wouldn't hear it," he sighs. "He sat down at the table with me one night when I was working on some schoolwork I got behind on when I was sick. He sat down with me, got a glass of brandy, and just sat there quietly."

This guy sounds like the scariest guy in the world to date, possessive and angry, aggressive about things. Drinking isn't a good thing to layer on top of that.