It’s been a month since that catastrophic day at my parents’ house and I’ve barely spoken to either of them. I tried to give them time and space, doing my best to check in intermittently to tell them I loved them and was thinking about them but it was a vast difference from our constant texting and phone calls every few days. I missed them. The texts to my father pretty much went unanswered and while my mother responded and even called me once or twice, she said she was still struggling with it and needed more time to really grasp this change. On top of everything else, Mason and my father now weren’t speaking after Mason went to his house and laid into my father for not speaking to me. I feel like I’ve created such a divide and now Thanksgiving is this week and I have no idea if I’m even going to see my family.

Like Christmas in my house, Thanksgiving is huge and it’ll feel weird not being there but I can’t imagine they want JP there and I want to be wherever he is.

“Baby, you should go.” He leans against the doorjamb of the bathroom as I get ready for my last class of the week. His arms fold over his chest as he stares at me at my state of undress. I was only wearing a bra and my underwear under a tiny robe but he’s staring at me like I’m completely naked.

“You’re a machine, you know that? And we do not have time,” I tell him, knowing that if he keeps looking at me like that, it’ll end up with his mouth on my cunt and me late for class. “And no, what about you?”

“I’ll go to my mom’s with Trey.”

I turn around as I let my hair fall from around the curling wand. “Trey’s not going to my house with Chloe?”

“No, I think he’s avoiding your parents for my sake.”

“Why? They’re not mad at him.”

“He’s mad at them. He doesn’t want to say anything out of line.”

I sigh. Another strained relationship. “It’s our first Thanksgiving together as a couple, we should be together.” JP told his mother shortly after everything happened in the very off chance my mother told her during one of their lunches. But unfortunately, my mom has been avoiding JP’s mom as well. But I think that’s more out of “what can I say to the mother of the man I’m so angry at?” My mother was raised to be very respectful of her elders and disrespecting Ella Price would have my grandparents turning over in their graves.