I let out another guttural sob.
“No? Fine. I’ll pay him to be nice to you. How about that?”
I’m full-on sobbing against McCarthy’s chest. “Stop trying to fix this. You can’t fix it. All the money in the world won’t make him stop wishing I’d never been born. I thought I was over this.” I grab the wet lapels of his overcoat. “Why doesn’t anyone love me? It’s not fair. None of them—none of the men who proposed marriage, none of the stepfathers—shoot, one of them wanted to date me. And my own dad just wants to use me. I’m so stupid!” I cry. “Gosh, why are you even here? You don’t care.” I swipe at my face.
“I care.” He tips my face up, turning me toward him like a flower to the moon. “I’ll burn down the whole fucking city for you then buy you one of those disgusting muffins. I care about you very much, Jenna.”
“No, you don’t,” I sob.
He kisses me. His mouth is warm. “I do.” He licks his tongue into my mouth, kisses me there on the bus-stop bench, like we’re in a romance movie—except it’s freezing fucking cold and I drank too much cheap wine.
“Why is it always raining?” I fish a wet tissue out of my bag. “You better not have driven over here.”
“I figured you wouldn’t want an audience for this, so I sent the driver to do a loop.”
“That’s charitable of you.”
“Following the ten-step plan.” He wraps an arm around my waist. “Can I take you home, Jenna?”
When I’m donewith my hot bath, complete with actual expensive wine and pizza, McCarthy tucks me into bed and curls up next to me.
He takes my hand and kisses it softly as he looks up at me from where his head is cradled on my chest.
“My mom never wanted me, either,” he says, almost exhaling the words. “She hated that I looked like my father, said I was annoying and needy. Clingy. Salinger would always keep me away from her because she’d hit me with a wooden spoon. So I know how you feel.” He cranes his neck to kiss my collarbone. “Maybe one day, we’ll have ababy, and they’ll have a mother who loves them and a dad who never leaves.”
“Why are you talking about babies?” I whisper.
He kisses me. “My brother has a baby, and it’s a trip. She’s so cute—looks just like him and his wife.”
He glances up at me again, gray eyes soft. “You need to get out of Seattle. We can go anywhere you want. We can go to my island in the Pacific. There are World War II ruins. Or my chateaux in the Alps. We can go to the East Coast but not New York because I don’t want to subject you to my family.” He turns slightly. More of the length of his body presses against mine. “Come to think of it, Boston’s out too.”
“Let’s just watch a movie.”
“Home theater it is. I never use it, so I might have to call my brother to tell me how it works.”
“Laptop.” I run my foot against his calf.
“Are you serious?”
“The older I get, the more I just want to be comfy.” I burrow into the nest of blankets he’s wrapped me in.
Sighing like I just asked him to go unclog a drainpipe or something, McCarthy grabs my computer and props it up at the end of the bed.
I snuggle back into him when he lies in bed next to me. “This is comfy.”
“This is insane. What are they doing?” McCarthy’s lip curls when I start the YouTube video. “This isn’t a movie.”
“Bold of you to assume I have the attention span for a feature film at this point in my life. They try new things from Trader Joe’s and rank them.”
“How is this better than my house in the Alps?”
“The only thing I like about skiing is the food at the end, and I can do that from the comfort of my own home.”
“I am going to take you to my island because I want to see you in a bikini the color of the water and fuck you on the beach.”
“All that blond hair—you’ll get a sunburn.” I tease him.
On the screen, the girls are making faces as they try the calamari spice popcorn.
