Read Online Catching Cassidy by Melissa Foster - Free Book Online Page A

courage and thought she’d blast through it. She doesn’t always need me by her side, but this time I wish I’d been there. I wouldn’t have cared about lining up for graduation. I would have confronted my parents and tried to make them see that Delilah’s an amazing person and her sexuality doesn’t change a thing.
    Who am I kidding? There would have been no changing their minds. They were stubborn pricks when they wanted to be.
    After a while we go into town and buy groceries. Then we drive around talking about what we want to do this week and wondering what our friends are up to. Basically, we avoid talking about anything relating to our parents. As we pass the pier, I know we have to face the bar at some point. Maybe tomorrow. Delilah doesn’t need to deal with this stuff, and I have no idea what this stuff might be. I don’t even know what it means that we own the bar. I mean, my parents ran it during the summers and Jesse takes care of it the rest of the time, or at least he did until he bought his restaurant. I doubt he’ll want to take over this fall. I guess I’ll figure it out at some point. The staff has to know what to do, right? I imagine there isn’t much to owning it, but then again, what do I know?
    I hear Cassidy power up her phone as we pull down the street toward our house, and my mind careens to a halt, revisiting the reason she’d turned it off in the first place. I hear ping after ping of text messages coming through and glance in my rearview, fighting the urge to ask about them. She’s staring at her phone with an angry look in her eyes, so I know Kyle has texted, and I tighten my hands on the steering wheel. I don’t say anything as I drive down our street. Our beach house is built at the end of a private road, so we don’t have neighbors on either side of us. The neighbors pretty much keep to themselves, even Mr. Mahoney. He’s a curmudgeonly old man whose house is closest to ours. He’s practically deaf, and a glance in our direction is all he ever offers.
    There are only five other houses on the street, and they’re all a good distance from ours. Three of them have been flipped in recent years and renovated, with second stories added to the ones that were only one story. Most of the houses, like ours, have cedar shingles that have aged to varying shades of gray. Two of the recently renovated homes have a different type of siding that’s beige, and I think they look out of place. All of the houses have gardens that look like someone dumped a bucket of mixed-up seeds in the dirt and then forgot about them. Colorful flowers and tall grasses billow out over the garden edging.
    “I always forget how much I love the gardens here. They’re so different from back home,” Delilah says as she tucks her hair behind her ear.
    I park in front of our house and watch Delilah for signs of sadness, even though she sounds fine at the moment. I’m also waiting for my own discomfort to set in. We sit out front for a few minutes, staring at the two-story, seven-bedroom house. It was a bed-and-breakfast before my parents bought it, and they never changed the setup, so each bedroom has a full bath with a shower, which is pretty cool. The house has an open floor plan, with a great room, a large, open kitchen, and three bedrooms on the first floor. There’s a loft with a pool table, as well as four more bedrooms upstairs. It’s way more than we ever needed, and I remember telling my father that when I was finally old enough to see that it was. As a kid you never think of those things. It’s just a house. But by the time I was in high school, it struck me how enormous the house was compared to our friends’ houses. My father had said, If you work hard and get good grades, you’ll be able to afford homes this big, too. He had a way of skirting my questions and needling me at the same time.
    Even though I’d take a little needling over my parents being gone, I’m astonished when I get out of the