Never Fall in Love with the Fisher Boys

21- I'm Here

I didn’t see many miracles in my life so I considered this a little miracle: I had succeeded in avoiding Carter as much as possible all week at school and at home. Although I still hadn’t figured out what to do about finding out that he likes me more than I had originally thought.

We spoke sometimes, mostly when we were driving to and from school, but I tried my best to keep a distance between us. I sat away from him during dinner and stayed in my room doing homework for the rest of the time. It was painful considering that I really liked hanging out with Carter but I didn’t want to interact with him without being able to figure out how I felt about any of it.

Although all of his brothers knew that I knew his secret, I don’t think that they told him because he didn’t seem to be acting differently toward me or anything, which was good.

On Saturday, I had spent the morning finishing up an English essay and then decided to go downstairs to get something for breakfast and I was surprised when I didn’t see any of the guys hanging around in the living room or the kitchen at all. Granted, there were a plethora of rooms to hang out in in this house so I guess sitting in the living room wasn’t always the first choice.

I sat alone at the bar in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal as I tried to figure out what I was going to do that day. I’d finished all of my homework, I didn’t have soccer practice, and I didn’t want to sit around and sulk about Carter all day either. Maybe I could hang out with Andy although he was probably hanging out with Sophie. I was on comfortable terms with Will again so maybe I could go see what he was up to or something.

Just as I finished slurping up the last drop of milk from the bowl, the landline phone started to ring on the kitchen counter which was strange to me because the landline was hardly ever used. I wasn’t sure if I should answer the phone or not considering I wasn’t really part of the family that lived in the house but after a few rings, I decided to just go for it considering nobody else was answering it and it could be an emergency.

“Hello?” I answered the phone after walking around the island to get to it.

“Hi, is Tom around?” The deep male voice on the other end wondered.

“Um, he’s in his office right now, I can go get him,” I said to the man.

“Oh, no don’t worry about it, it’s not a big deal,” The guy insisted. “Can you just tell him that Randy Titus called and to have him call me when he can?”

“I’m sorry, who?” I croaked, thinking to myself that I must have heard him wrong. Whatever he just said, it wasn’t that his name was Randy Titus. It couldn’t have been. Randy Titus is my father’s name so there was no way that Tom would know my father. I just heard him wrong.

“Randy,” He repeated, confirming that no, I was not being delusional.

“Right,” I sighed, trying not to freak out as the wheels started to spin in my mind. “Of course. I’ll tell him.”

“Great. Thanks,” The man said before he hung up the phone but I was still stuck there in the kitchen standing next to the phone’s receiver without the ability to move even one of my muscles. I was sure that I had even stopped breathing.

Randy Titus: My father. The elusive Randy Titus. The only three things that I knew about him were that he was my father and that he had left when I was tiny, too young to remember, and his name. I was never allowed to ask about him to my mother because she’d just get so angry at me for bringing him up. He was such a sore subject for her that I learned early on that I’d never know anything about him.

It could be another Randy Titus. It could just be a huge coincidence.

Something inside of me told me that coincidences like that just didn’t happen though. There was just no way.