Today’s vocabulary word: unfiltered
The elevator doors opened at our floor and Audrey executed a ballet leap out of the car. She didn’t wait for me, instead twirling down the hallway in a series of jumps and pirouettes.
At least she was going the right direction.
I found her moving through a sequence of dance steps near our door, her shoes abandoned a few feet away. ‘You miss it,’ I said as I fished the key card from my wallet. ‘Dancing, that is.’
She extended her leg up until her heel met the wall and then leaned into the stretch, her body open like an unfolded paper clip. Her dress bunched around her waist. I wished I could say I looked away. That I didn’t stare at the light pink panties hugging her hip or stretching between her thighs.
It was only when I felt her staring at me that I finally met her gaze.
‘I do miss it,’ she said, a loose smile on her face, ‘sometimes.’
I held the door open. She ignored it and I couldn’t get away from the sense that she was dragging my attention back to her legs, her thighs, those obscenely sweet little panties. And I knew she wasn’t herself right now. I knew this wasn’t the time for me to take what I could get. But god fucking damn. ‘Still can’t believe you gave it up.’
She snorted out a laugh. ‘I still can’t believe Padrino is a dad.’
‘What—no. We’re not bringing that back,’ I said, holding out a hand to her.
‘Oh, come on! It’s funny. I should’ve thought of that at the reunion. Everyone would’ve been like, Wait! Padrino’s a dad? My mind is blown!‘
I swung a glance down the hallway. I didn’t want to do this out here anymore. My head was a fucking carnival show and if anyone came down here and saw her like this, I’d have to kill them. Obviously.
‘Hilarious,’ I said, hooking an arm around her waist and hauling her into the room.
‘You know, it’s not a bad nickname,’ she said, fully invertebrate and giggling as I parked her on the bed. ‘Compared to—what did they call me? Antacid? Padrino is a nice step up from Antacid.’
The asshole heirs at our prep school had a thing for nicknames. It was a practical necessity when most of these guys were born saddled with names that stretched back six generations.
But they were still assholes and the nicknames didn’t let anyone forget who held all the power.
It started with a fake sneeze and Buh-less-me—a spin on Bellessi that was about as sharp as soup—but it didn’t catch on. Too much theatrics for guys who never actually had to form their own thoughts.
They mixed it up and moved on to Bless me, Father, for I have sinned—another fail. Too long, too cumbersome. And I ate the humor out of it by telling them they didn’t know the first thing about repenting for true sins.
In that sense, it was my fault that it shifted to Padrino—godfather—and that it stuck.
‘Will you tell me about him?’
Audrey sat on the bed, her hair tousled and her cheeks still rosy red. It reminded me of the time we drove to a hill outside the city to watch a meteor shower in the middle of the summer. We’d had a blanket, some beer, and the stars. I told her I loved her that night. That I’d never love anyone else the way I loved her. That the only future I wanted was with her at my side.
At the time, I hadn’t been able to imagine anything coming between us. Nothing we couldn’t deal with. It was amazing how naïve we’d been. I always thought I was too jaded for naïveté but here we were.
There was no denying that the plans we’d made for life after high school probably would’ve cracked under the weight of the real world at some point. But that didn’t mean we would’ve fallen apart. I refused to see that as an inevitability. There was no one scrappier than this spoiled society girl of mine and I lived to prove people wrong.
But the part that bothered the hell out of me was that we didn’t even get the chance to fuck it all up and fall to pieces. Not when her parents shoved her into a gilded cage, shipped her to California, and then sold her off to the highest bidder. They knew what they were doing. They’d probably had it planned since the minute they met me. Or maybe it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with controlling her.
I didn’t like that option any better.
I dropped her shoes in the closet, set her bag on the bench near the door. Tried to figure out what to do about this situation. Would coffee help? Something to eat? Did greasy food soak up ecstasy the way it did alcohol? What about a cold shower? I knew that would help me. I wasn’t sure I was comfortable leaving her alone in a shower so I’d have to go with her and— Fuck me.
I scrubbed a hand down my face. ‘Tell you about who?’
‘Percy.’ She bounced on her knees. ‘I bet you have a ton of pics. Show me?’
I raked my bottom lip between my teeth. Photos were simple enough. Lower chance of her face-planting into a wall than the ballet moves. Much lower chance of me choking on my tongue over a flash of underwear. Maybe it would tire her out.
‘Yeah. Sure.’ I swiped my phone and opened my albums. Handed it to her. ‘All yours.’
‘No, come over here,’ she said with a pout. ‘You have to tell me all about the pics. Narrate the stories for me.’ She patted the bedspread beside her. ‘Sit here. With me.’
I gulped. There was no way this would work out well for me.
‘Please,’ she drawled, her hands clasped under her chin. Full puppy dog eyes too. Fucking brutal.
‘All right,’ I said, kicking off my shoes. As soon as I sat down, she curled into my side. She had a hand on my back and the other tapping on my thigh, hurrying me along. Killing me. ‘These are from a few weeks ago. At one of the parks he likes.’
‘He looks just like you.’ She zoomed in on an image of Percy climbing a playset. ‘What a little conqueror.’ I watched the way her smile dug into her cheeks and softened her eyes. ‘Tell me about him.’
‘What do you want—’ She ran the pad of her finger along the seam of my jeans, right up the inner thigh, and I lost my words. Whatever I’d wanted to say perished and it was taking the last of my decency down to hell with it.
‘Everything,’ she replied, still unspooling me from that seam.
I’d been at least half hard since she grabbed me back at Mom’s place but it was full steam ahead now. As long as she didn’t notice, we’d be all right. And if she did, well, it couldn’t get much more awkward between us.
‘He sleeps with twenty stuffed animals and it stresses me the fuck out because I worry about them suffocating him,’ I said in a heave of breath. ‘He likes outrageous burgers. You know, the ones with a scoop of macaroni and cheese on top or two slices of Hawaiian pizza instead of a bun.’
She blinked up at me, owlish and adorable. ‘There are burgers that use entire slices of pizza to hold it all together?’
‘It’s not the sort of thing you’d ever go looking for, princess, but yes,’ I said. ‘Percy loves it. Give him a burger topped with an entire chili dog or some crab rangoon, and it’s the best day of his life.’
‘I can just see him shoving a giant burger into his little face,’ she said.
My chest just about cracked open at that. It was intensely confusing to have these warm thoughts about my son while a bit more pressure from that fingertip of hers would have me coming in my pants. Really fucking confusing. ‘He likes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and rocks and…dogs,’ I managed. ‘He likes dogs. Helicopters and planes—’
‘Well, of course he likes planes and helicopters,’ she teased. ‘You wouldn’t have it any other way.’
‘Nah, I don’t push it on him. He’s allowed to like whatever he wants.’
‘Come on,’ she drawled. ‘Admit it. When you read Peter Pan to him, you added your own chapters about the science of flying to Neverland. Distance and velocity and all the other physics stuff.’
I shook my head. ‘Nope.’
‘Jude,’ she said, stern as ever. That tone only made things more complicated for me. ‘I know when you’re not telling me the truth.’
I didn’t know if I believed that. Didn’t want to believe it. ‘I didn’t get into it with Peter Pan but we did pause Aladdin at a few points. The aerodynamics of the magic carpet—I mean, the wind speed alone would’ve knocked them off and—’
‘Like I said.’ She went back to swiping through the photos. ‘You miss him.’
‘Yeah.’ No sense denying it. ‘I like having him around. It’s weird when he’s not.’
‘Like your heart’s walking around outside your chest,’ she said.
‘Very much.’ I pointed to the screen. ‘That’s from his last day of school.’
‘Why does he look so annoyed?’
‘I’d call it contemptuous but annoyed also fits,’ I said. ‘That school couldn’t keep up with him this year and he’s still pissy about it. Actually, I could use your help with that. When you’re sober.’
‘What do you mean?’ She shifted, flailing in the most convoluted ways imaginable until she straddled my thigh. A fresh new rung on the descent into my personal hell. ‘I’m a hundred percent sober.’
‘No, baby, you’re not.’ I cupped her chin, studying her glassy eyes. ‘But I love that you think so.’
‘I’m perfectly aware of what’s going on. Everything’s just a little fuzzy. Like felt. The fabric.’ She rubbed the pads of her fingers together, directly in front of her eyes. ‘No, no, it’s moss. That’s what I feel like. It’s like I’m made of warm moss.’
Audrey rocked against my thigh as she spoke. She was hot, even through my jeans. Scorching hot. And she’d hate me for this tomorrow if I let her continue.
‘Okay, that’s enough.’ I shifted up, groaning as my belt strangled my cock, and reached for her waist. I managed to turn her around and settle her between my legs, her back to my chest. I banded an arm over her to keep her still though I knew it wouldn’t do much good.
‘But why?’ she asked, wriggling in my hold. ‘We have this big bed all to ourselves. We never had beds. Remember? There was the back seat of my car and that really old storage room in the library and—’
‘I’ve already told you to behave.’
I closed one hand over her mouth, grabbed my phone with the other, and went back to the photos. The album opened to me and Percy at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, a reef shark floating by behind us. She tried to say something but it was too muffled to understand.
I let my hand slide down her neck, coming to rest on her sternum. ‘Mind your manners, princess.’
She gave me a tart glance from the corner of her eye that was almost enough to make me beg her to ride my leg. She must’ve seen the hunger written all over my face because she rocked back against me, her ass working my cock with a sweet, filthy drag that was almost worth her hating me tomorrow. ‘I know you want to.’
I stared up at the ceiling. ‘Not like this I don’t. Not tonight.’
‘But—’
‘No, Saunders. You had your chance back at the motel but you went and hid behind that little pillow fortress of yours. Didn’t you?’ I moved my palm up her neck, turning her just enough to catch my gaze. ‘You’re so pretty when you’re fearless and free to ask for all the things you don’t think you should want. So fucking pretty.’ I pressed my lips to her temple and let a breath rasp out of me. ‘But the next time I touch you, it’s going to be when you don’t need any help asking for it. When I know you’ll remember every second.’
She made an aggravated, huffy sound and I was ready for another rebuttal but she sagged into me. The frenetic energy that’d pulsed in her just a moment ago bled out and she dropped to my shoulder.
‘Just let me—’ She slipped her hand under my shirt and pressed her palm to my torso. ‘Okay. That’s better. I like this too.’
I held my breath, waiting for her to dive bomb my dick again, but a minute passed with just the gentle sweep of her thumb along my side. It was back, that sensation of coming apart. Like she’d picked the right threads and now I was one good pull away from being unraveled.
‘Why?’ I asked, masochistic enough to squeeze every drop of tonight’s honesty out of her. ‘Why do you like this?’
She yawned, curling into me a little deeper. ‘Because you just let me…be. I don’t have to worry about anything. I don’t have to think.’
I sifted a hand through her hair, letting the strands slide between my fingers. So soft, so silky. I’d always loved her hair. There was something about it that quieted entire corners of my brain. I couldn’t explain it, I just knew that untwisting her bun or running my lips over the crown of her head calmed me the hell down.
‘There’s nothing you need to worry about anymore,’ I said. ‘I have you now.’
She murmured in agreement, and for a few minutes we fell into a rhythm of her thumb on my side and my fingers in her hair. There’d been times over the years when I’d questioned whether I’d loved her as much as I remembered, or if the intensity of the feelings I still shouldered was nothing more than a byproduct of living without a shred of closure.
But right now I knew it would always be like this. That I’d loved her in a way I’d never be able to recover from. She’d marked her place on my bones and inside my organs, and ruined me.
It was Audrey or no one, just like I’d told her under that meteor shower. And I was running out of time to get this right. All we had left was tomorrow, really. She flew back to Boston the day after. I was headed back to Seattle for meetings. It wasn’t enough. None of this was enough.
‘Have you ever thought about how basketball is about chasing pumpkins, tennis is hitting lemons, baseball is catching onions, and football is about throwing potatoes?’
I blinked down at Audrey, my head still busy inventing ways to squeeze more time out of the next thirty-six hours. ‘I haven’t thought about that,’ I said. ‘But I know Percy would love it. He’d repeat that endlessly.’
‘Can I see more photos of him?’
I went back to the album and handed it to her. She scrolled for a few minutes, keeping up a running commentary on the array of Percy’s grumpy expressions, all the photos I had of various engine parts, and the screenshots she accused me of never once referencing. I refused to admit any guilt on that last count.
But then she zoomed in on a photo where I had Percy’s head tucked under my chin and she said, ‘I see it now.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You were meant to be a dad,’ she said. ‘I never thought that far ahead. For us. I mean, I did but those were just big, distant dreams and we had no idea what the world was really like. What was waiting for us.’
A bitter laugh shook my chest. The fucking truth of that.
She swiped to another photo. ‘But I see you now and I know you were meant for this. You’re a really good dad.’
I didn’t know how necessary those words were to me until Audrey spoke them into existence. And maybe it was hearing it from her that made them land in the place where I’d needed them most. All I knew was I wanted to give my kid everything, even if I hadn’t expected him and I’d missed his earliest days. Even if Penny’s family didn’t believe I had any place in his life.
‘Thank you,’ I managed.
‘What does he want to be for Halloween?’
I twirled her hair around my finger, brushing the ends over my lips. ‘It’s June, Saunders.’
She held up a pic of Percy wearing Spider-Man pajamas with a dragon cape on top and carrying a Paw Patrol stuffie. ‘This kid has known what he wants to be since November first of last year.’
I huffed out a laugh. ‘It changes daily.’
‘Such a cutie.’ She twisted in my arms to meet my gaze and her smile felt like an electrical current, all raw, spine-splitting power. I wanted to grab her and shake her and make her see how she was the one in control here. Make her understand. ‘You know how I know you’re really good at this? You have photos of the moments you want to remember.’
‘Everyone does that.’
‘Yeah but you took twenty pics of your kid reading a book on the couch. And there’s another twenty of him eating a slice of watermelon. Twenty more at the library, in the race car cart at the grocery store, waiting in line for the subway. That’s on top of the other eleventy hundred selfies of you two, your sweet little faces pressed together like you’ll never be able to hug him tight enough.’ She pressed a hand to my chest. ‘You want to remember all of it. Because you love him’—she held her arms out wide—’so much.’
I sucked in a breath but my lungs didn’t want to expand. Probably had something to do with getting whacked with an emotional two-by-four by the woman who still knew how to reach in and wrap her fingers around my soul.
I gathered her hands in mine, brought them back to my chest. I needed something else from her now and I wasn’t above using these hallucinogenic circumstances to get it. ‘When are you going to tell me what happened with your ex-husband?’
Her whole expression shuttered. Even her shoulders pulled inward. I didn’t need the details to know what that reaction meant. But I had to hear this.
Her gaze lowered, she said, ‘I work very hard at not thinking about that part of my life.’
Swallowing down a thorny knot of tension, I asked, ‘Why?’
‘Because it almost killed me.’ The words fell from her lips like a simple fact rather than the source of my greatest fears. ‘But I got out and it’s over and it’s better for me when I don’t go back to it.’
Everything inside me surged with the kind of brutal energy that made me want to find him, drag him out of his absurd life, and make damn sure he knew she’d never suffer at his hands again. But I knew it wouldn’t help. Wouldn’t erase those years for her. And it wouldn’t fix anything more than scratching a primitive itch for me.
I kept my hold on her gentle, running my thumbs over the insides of her wrists. ‘You never got my emails, did you? After they sent you to California?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘What emails?’
Another hard swallow. ‘That changes a few things.’
Today’s vocabulary word: drift
I rolled over and yelped at the ache rippling through my shoulders, down my back, and around my hips. I hadn’t felt this battered since convincing myself I could dig a path along my side yard and lay a brick walkway by myself.
My mouth was dry like chalk and my head rang with a deep, dull headache. I would’ve hidden under the covers and slept all day if my stomach wasn’t twisting in that old familiar way that told me I needed the bathroom more than anything else.
A hand over my eyes to hide from the worst of the sunlight slicing in through the curtains, I shuffled to the edge of the bed. I made my way across the suite like I was trudging through a snowbank and into the quiet dark of the bathroom. I locked the door and yanked some towels off the shelf because these episodes always made me cold. Nothing could convince me that bare feet on frigid tiles didn’t set off a chemical reaction that kicked the whole matter into a new level of awful.
I liked to think about my irritable bowel like a bridge troll. I knew what made it angry and, over the course of many years and much error, I knew how to cross that bridge without bothering the troll too much. But I also knew that the troll was, by definition, irritable. There would be times that I pissed it off for no discernible reason and I’d just have to deal with the wreckage it delivered.
The troll hated tomatoes and cucumbers, and deviating from my usual schedule. Traveling with a troll was tough but I’d reached a point where I knew myself well enough to manage these issues without too much noise. The real problem was prolonged stress. That fucked it all up. Whenever I found myself on edge for days at a time, emotionally activated and hypervigilant—or married to a self-obsessed, paranoid narcissistic asshole—the troll lost its shit.
All of which was to say I’d put one foot after another for the past five days, knowing this end awaited me. I wasn’t sure what’d set it off but that didn’t really matter. It was inevitable.
Half an hour and most of my will to live later, I emerged from the bathroom. I still had a towel shawled over my shoulders and it’d probably stay there until I could get some fluids into my system and stop shivering. Very chic. Very sexy.
I sank onto the edge of the bed, my zip pouch of meds clutched to my chest, and grabbed the bottled water on the nightstand. A piece of paper fluttered to the floor and I would’ve left it there if I hadn’t noticed Jude’s precise handwriting on the page as it fell.
I hadn’t processed his absence from our hotel room until now but dealing with the troll always gave me tunnel vision. I grunted out a sigh as I reached for the paper. On a page from the hotel notepad, he’d written:
Saunders —
My mother gave you two hits of ecstasy last night. Drink all of this. Going to the gym. Don’t leave the resort without me.
j
Well. That explained a few things.
As I reread the note—no signature though none was needed—last night drifted back to me in pieces. The memories were strange, like photos captured through milky filters, but they were all there. Every last humiliating one. Even me pawing at Jude and attempting a standing wall split for reasons that must’ve made sense at the time.
At least I knew why my hips felt like an overstretched rubber band.
I propped myself up in bed, blankets clutched to my chin, and called the only person who could help me fix this.
With my phone propped on my bent knees, I sipped the water while waiting for Jamie to answer. When she came into focus, I found her in an identical position. She was swaddled in a bathrobe, both hands wrapped around a steaming mug.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I had a lot of sex the other day,’ she said, ‘and now I have a UTI.’
This always happened to her. ‘Are you on meds?’
She bobbed her head. ‘I just feel like I’ve been stomped on.’
‘We need to find a specialist for you. This shouldn’t happen so often.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘I hate seeing you in pain like this,’ I said. ‘I’ll help you find someone. I’ll go with you.’
‘We’ll talk about it when neither of us look like last week’s laundry.’ She took a sip from her mug. ‘What’s the news? Please tell me that you finally let that fiancé of yours fuck you right through a concrete wall.’
‘More like I accidentally did ecstasy and begged him to fuck me through a concrete wall and then made him explain in detail why he wouldn’t do that. Oh, and I humped his leg until he was so embarrassed for me that he put a stop to it.’
She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Do I want to know where you got the X?’
‘His mom gave it to me,’ I said, heavily salting every word.
‘Sabotage or silly goose? Which side is she on here?’
‘Silly goose, most likely,’ I said, remembering Janet’s horror when she’d realized what happened.
‘Okay, here’s what you’re going to do.’ She held up a finger. ‘First, we’re not embarrassed by the things we said and did when we were high. Especially when getting high wasn’t our choice.’
‘While I do support that,’ I started, ‘I’ve already died of embarrassment. You’re speaking to my ghost right now.’
‘Well, Ghost Audrey looks at least twenty-five percent alive so my recommendation stands. Next, we’re going to listen to our id. The things we do when we’re wasted are the things we actually want but don’t let ourselves admit. They’re an owner’s manual for managing our unconscious needs.’
All I could think about was grabbing Jude only for him to pry my fingers from his pants. ‘I don’t think we can do that because my id is oddly fond of sexual harassment.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t that bad,’ she said.
‘Did I not mention the leg humping?’
‘You’re not the first and you won’t be the last,’ she said with a wave of her hand. ‘What I’d like to know is why you can’t embrace the honesty and see if you have as much fun on his leg today as you did last night.’
‘I’m very busy being dead,’ I said. ‘I don’t see any time in my schedule to revisit that horror.’
‘Okay but really,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you have a fling with him?’
I leaned back against the headboard and sipped my water. My belly didn’t clench or gurgle like it intended to reject the water, and that was fantastic news. ‘Because what then?’ I replied. ‘We just have sex and then go our separate ways?’
‘Yes, I do it at least once a week with multiple people. I promise, it’s fine.’
‘You haven’t been in love with those people since you were fifteen,’ I cried.
‘Ahhh. Now we’re getting somewhere.’
‘That’s not what I meant. I just—it’s not as easy as a fling.’
‘Of course it isn’t.’ She said this like she’d been waiting for me to figure it out all along. ‘But that isn’t a good enough reason to play dead.’
I motioned to my towel shawl and my bloodless face. ‘I can’t imagine why you’d think I’m playing.’
‘Ha. You’re hilarious.’ She lifted her mug in salute. ‘Stop being ashamed. Start being honest with your fiancé.’
‘Fake fiancé,’ I added.
Jamie gave me a wide, toothy grin. ‘We’ll see about that, baby girl.’
‘Glasses in the daytime,’ I said. ‘That’s new.’
That’s new? What the hell was wrong with me? God, what I wouldn’t give to transform into a little mouse and disappear right now.
‘Yeah. A little bleary today. I didn’t sleep much last night.’ He shrugged, adding, ‘I was worried about you sneaking out or jumping off the balcony.’
Heat crawled up my neck. ‘I’m sorry about—well, everything. And, you know. Attacking you. Repeatedly.’
He swiped a piece of toast from my plate. ‘The only problem was that I didn’t know if you actually wanted it.’
I stared down at the napkin on my lap. I wasn’t prepared for him to grab that matter by the throat just yet. ‘Still, I…fondled you and I didn’t take no for an answer and that wasn’t okay.’
‘You were drugged. By my mother,’ he said around a bite of toast. ‘Fuck, I’m the one who should be apologizing here.’
‘I wasn’t paying attention. When she gave me the mints,’ I added, as if that was important. ‘I was worried about garlic and offending the wedding dress lady.’
He paused, then pointed the toast crust at me. ‘The…wedding dress lady?’
‘Yeah. Janet had me trying on dresses.’
Jude stared at me for a beat before swallowing. ‘Find anything you like?’
‘Not really. It was just to give Janet the bridal shop moment she wanted. I’ve already done the big white dress thing.’
‘Yeah. I know.’ He pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘I was there, Saunders.’
I reached for my tea. Sadly, I couldn’t climb all the way into the mug and hide there until the sun extinguished itself.
‘Not so fearless today, are you?’
I tore myself away from the mug and met his gaze. I didn’t know if it was the headache or the ecstasy hangover or my bridge troll turning me inside out but I asked, ‘Is that really what you want to discuss right now? My wedding day? Because I think we need to talk about Janet’s suspicions about us if we want the party tonight to go well.’
He leaned back in the chair, an arm banded over his chest as he polished off the last of my toast. ‘Tell me about these suspicions.’
I gave him an overview of her offhanded comments from yesterday, the quick barbs about him not joining me for Emme’s wedding next weekend and the trap I fell into when mentioning a summer wedding. Now that I’d answered some of Janet’s questions and offered up a few random details to her, there was more room for our stories to fall apart.
‘I think I’m the source of the doubt,’ I said. ‘She’s worried I’m going to leave you at the altar or something like that.’ A terrible thought struck as I added more hot water to my cup. ‘That’s not what you’re planning, is it? I’d really prefer if you killed this bit before the invites hit the mail.’
‘Fine. I guess I’ll come up with something new.’ He flagged down a waiter. ‘Or we stay engaged a little longer.’
I waited while he ordered seventy percent of the breakfast menu. Forever a growing boy, it seemed. ‘How much longer?’
‘I don’t know.’ He dumped some sugar into his coffee, stirred it longer than necessary. Didn’t meet my gaze. ‘If we’re going to put these suspicions to rest, we should make it believable tonight.’
I heard the challenge baked into those words. I knew what he meant. I also knew it was an opening, a side door into a house where the front steps still looked a little too steep to me. ‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right with that?’ he asked. Subtext: are we turning this fake engagement into a full-contact sport?
‘I’ve played worse games for fewer prizes,’ I said, my tiny, mug-dwelling mouse nowhere to be found. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
His gaze swept over my loose button-down and limp ponytail to land on my lips. He lingered there a moment then ran a hand over his mouth. ‘Someday I’d like to hear about those games.’
I shook my head. He didn’t really want to know about life with my ex and the way I parried and sparred with my family. The way I still fought them for inches, even when I should’ve built a brick wall of boundaries and left them to learn how to climb. But I didn’t want to watch the disappointment register in his eyes. I knew he expected better. Expected more. Hell, I expected more. I didn’t know how I hadn’t realized that until now. ‘I can’t give away all my secrets.’
‘You used to give me everything.’ He cleared his throat and glanced away. I didn’t think he’d meant to say that. Not out loud. ‘We need to stick together. Tonight,’ he added. ‘We’re playing for the same side.’
‘Right. Stay together, keep the stories straight.’ I gave my oatmeal another halfhearted stir. ‘They can’t catch us with contradictory details if we’re never apart.’
He stared at his coffee before taking a sip. ‘You’ll tell me if it gets to be too much. I don’t want you to…’ He jerked a shoulder up, let it fall. Studied me over the rim of his mug. ‘I don’t want it to be like that night at the motel.’
So good of him to bring that up. ‘I don’t think it will be.’
Jude pointed at the oatmeal. ‘What are you doing there? Are you ever going to eat that?’
‘Shut up,’ I grumbled. ‘I’ve had at least four bites.’
It was more like two but he didn’t need to know that.
‘The fuck you have,’ he said. ‘What do you want? Scrambled eggs on a roll? Or in a tortilla? I’ll ask them to make it for you.’
‘No, it’s okay. I’m fine with oatmeal.’
‘You’re not fine and you’re not eating, you’re glaring. And you don’t even like oatmeal so I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing with this.’ He moved my bowl to his side of the table like it would prove a point. ‘Since you look like you’re about to fall off that chair, tell me right now: on a roll or in a tortilla?’
‘I don’t feel well,’ I said through gritted teeth.
‘Hangover? Or is it something else?’
I balled my hands inside the sleeves of my cardigan and gave a pathetic shake of my head like I was a sickly Victorian child. ‘I don’t use enough recreational drugs to know whether it’s from the ecstasy or just something I ate. My stomach can be really sensitive and flare up over random things, especially—’ I flapped my hands near the sides of my head meant to round up all of this. ‘Greasy eggs will definitely make it worse.’
‘Okay, no grease. Understood. Probably no salsa, right? What about other veggies? And how about cheese? Is that okay?’
For no good reason at all, I wanted to argue with him. Tell him he couldn’t just take my oatmeal and force scrambled eggs upon me. That I was the one who got me through the worst of it. That even when I was married, I’d lived on my own, without anyone looking after me, and I didn’t need him to start now.
The notion of someone helping me, even in this small way, was so foreign that it felt like an attack. And that made me want to cry.
‘If you don’t tell me, I’ll order both and eat whatever you don’t.’
I gulped down a fresh blast of emotion. It was ridiculous to have a reaction like this to a breakfast order. I could let him do this for me. I could let him help, even if I had to put myself in a mental straitjacket to do it. It wouldn’t hurt me and I wouldn’t come out of this owing him anything.
‘No cheese. No veggies. Just plain.’ When he lifted a brow, I added, ‘In a tortilla.’
He pushed to his feet, saying, ‘You got it, Saunders.’
As he skirted the table, he kissed the top of my head and twisted a hand down my ponytail, and I didn’t feel so much like a ghost anymore.
