The Sentinels come on, make it easy, say i never mattered.

Penn had always imagined that telling the truth, revealing his weaknesses, being vulnerable, would’ve been so much worse than it actually turned out to be. Admitting it was actually something of a relief. But what mattered most was Fenn’s reaction, which was somehow softer than her previous ones thus far. She effectively called him an idiot and a fuck up, but that was nothing new. It was the way she said it that mattered to him, that he always mattered to him. Like it was okay for him to just be himself. Like his flaws, egregious as they may be, didn’t make him entirely unlovable.

He smirked at her response and chuckled softly. He wondered what she was referring to exactly when she confessed to making the same mistakes, but decided it didn’t really matter. It probably had something to do with Bronco, and he honestly had no desire to hear it in that case. If she wanted to tell him, he wouldn’t stop her, but he certainly wasn’t going to ask.

”Hey, your dad was all about trying to be my BFF by the time we got back,” Penn replied with a nonchalant shrug to go with his smile, ”And in my feeble defense, you didn’t miss them before we left. You did by the time we came back, though. So I feel like it wasn’t a totally insane concern.”

He studied her quietly, a question teetering on the tip of his tongue. He thought they’d hashed this all out once before, so he couldn’t help but wonder why they were revisiting the topic now. He wanted to know why it mattered to her, but he suspected once again that it had more to do with Bronco than to do with him, and he once again didn’t really want to hear it.

It did occur to him that this likely still made him a coward. He couldn’t just grow up all at once, though. What would I have left to write about if he did that?