White Space Season 2

he was cursed. He had tried it on many occasions, each one swearing it would be the last. The last time with the Avalon was fine, but the time before that was awful. Jon was in Austin, meeting a friend at his lake house. He wanted an SUV and asked for “something like a Tahoe.” Apparently, a PT Cruiser was “something like a Tahoe,” though Jon thought the PT should have stopped rolling down the line a while back. His dissatisfaction with the selection quickly turned into a mild argument about the many shortcomings of Happy Driver Rentals.
    Jon wasn’t expecting anyone to kiss his ass because he was Jon Conway, but the frustrated asshole stuck behind the counter seemed determined to nudge their mild disagreement into a full-blown fight because of his last name. In this particular case, Jon didn’t want to argue, or fight, and definitely didn’t want to end up on a fucking LiveLyfe page with some bullshit caption about him being a spoiled rotten, silver-spooned celebrity, so he took the PT Cruiser. The second he climbed inside he noticed a bunch of bright orange shit stains smearing the back seat, several missing levers and knobs, a cabin that smelled like piss, ass, and vomit, and about a foot of weather-stripping missing from the door.
    Once Jon realized he’d be staying on the island a while, buying was a no-brainer. Still, mostly because of Cassidy, he tried first with a rental, standing in line for a half an hour, before leaving pissed. He went back to his hotel and ordered a pair of Blacklanders, one for him and another for Houser. He would have gladly ordered one for Cassidy, but there was no mystery about how that would go over.
    Both SUVs were waiting at Jon’s hotel before the sun sank in the sky.
    He chose the Blacklander because it gave him something to drive that was a neater fit with the new life he was easing into more by the day.
    Cassidy tried making Jon feel bad for dropping so much cash on a set of new SUVs just because he could, but what the hell was money for if not spending? That was her problem, not his. She could enjoy a life with him as much as she wanted, and pluck all the ripe fruit which hung from his tree. It was too bad she had such an aversion to wealth, as if its very nature corrupted everything. Cass was wrong, Jon had tasted the fruit, and it was delicious.
    Emma, on the other hand, was too young to be affected, and thoroughly enjoyed everything Jon was permitted to give her. He had a hard time not loving her for this, even more than he already did.
    Driving Emma around the island was now one of his favorite things. It helped him to see his first home as if for the first time. Jon didn’t realize it, until Emma was sitting in the back of the Blacklander while the two of them were whipping from one side of the island to the other a few days before, but he had never been in a car alone with a child. He didn’t count time spent with Leslie Wyoming — a surprisingly gifted tween who starred in Glass Houses with him and Jessie Riley — since that car went nowhere and was surrounded by cameras.
    Being in a car with a kid was awkward at first, not knowing what he should say to someone he barely knew and who was so much younger than him. Cassidy had always been the buffer between them. Without her, Jon was left to navigate conversation on his own.
    Eventually, after a few of the lamest jokes to ever leave his mouth, conversation flowed, like river to ocean. Once Emma started talking she found it hard to stop.
    Jon loved driving with her. It gave him a chance to see the world, as well as the island, through Emma’s innocent eyes. What he saw was beautiful, and made him think that perhaps he’d allowed himself to grow too jaded. His filter had kept him from enjoying things for what they were.
    It wasn’t just the world she saw differently. She also saw him differently than anyone else. Sure, Emma had seemed impressed with his stardom when they first met, a bit, but now she treated him like something else entirely — family. And the good kind of family, not the version warped by the Conways.
    In some ways, Jon wished he could adopt Emma’s manner of dealing with people — honestly, without worrying about their hidden agendas, without worrying about saying the wrong things, without worrying about his comments being taken out of context or twisted by the media.
    As he drove to The Gardens and was about to face off with his father, once and for all, Jon decided it was time to do