“It doesn’t matter what I try,” I mutter, “something always goes wrong.”
He chuckles. “How’d you like your job?”
I shrug. “It’s okay,” I say, when in reality I hate it.
Head down, he whisks eggs in a small bowl. “You don’t have to work. You know that, right?”
“I know, but I need to.”
“Okay.”
I really thought he would push the issue. Then again, he never once complained about people on the bus shoving their armpits into his face, and I thought he’d have gotten fed up with those bus rides within days. I know I did. “I didn’t realize how lucky I was.”
He flips the bacon and glances at me. “To have a job?”
“Not to work. I grew up in a bubble where I never had to see how hard life could be. I’m just looking after myself, and it’s hard. Some people have children to look after when they get home from work. I can make myself toast, call it dinner, and crawl onto the couch. I don’t know how they do it.”
“It’s harder and easier when you have someone else to look after.”
“I don’t understand.”
He scoops the bacon onto a dish and adds the eggs to the pan with the bacon grease. “My mom used to say if it were just her, she would have crawled into bed after my dad died in a work accident and not gotten back out of it. Having me to take care of pushed her to start living again when she wasn’t sure she wanted to.”
I hug my knees as he puts bread in the toaster. “What happened to her?”
“She died.”
I brace myself for the worst. “Was it like Callum’s mom?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing like that. Just a hit and run when I was in school. Wrong time, wrong place kind of thing. I went into the system and wish I’d raised myself. Maybe some kids get a good foster, but I didn’t.”
“Which is why you were desperate to earn money?”
He plates up the bacon, scrambled eggs, and buttered toast. “I was seventeen years old and hanging around on the streetwhen a man in a limo pulled over and asked me if I wanted to make some money.”
I stare at him, wishing he were joking. He must hear my mental horror because he flashes me a smile and turns to pour a glass of OJ. “Like I said, I was desperate. And I figured I’d run if he wanted me to do anything too fucked up.”
“So it wasn’t fucked up?”
“It was. Just not in the way I thought it would be. I needed money, and he needed someone to pretend to be his son’s friend.” He carries everything over to me. He puts the glass on my new table and the plate on the bed next to me. “I got cleaned up and brand-new clothes. My mission was to run into a guy my age, convince him to be friends, and spill all his secrets. Secrets I would then spill to his dad, who could use them to control him.” He snorts. “He might have had better luck getting a hot girl to seduce him.”
A flare of jealousy surprises me, and I wonder, not for the first time, whether the mate bond between us ever really snapped. Maybe it can’t. How can man break something the universe creates? “Why didn’t he?” I pick up a piece of bacon.
“Callum said he expected something like that from his dad. He didn’t expect me, which I guess his dad knew.”
“So you hung out, went skateboarding, and did all the sports that his dad told you he liked to do,” I say, remembering everything he told me when he’d walk me to work in the morning.
He nods. “And over time, he became a real friend—abrother—instead of a paid one.”
“Why?”
He tilts his head. “Why?” he echoes.
“Why did you become real friends instead of pretend ones?”
He shrugs. “I wasn’t as good at hiding the shit parts of my real life as I could have been. He figured out that his dad pickedme up off the street, and he did something I never expected him to do?”
“What?”
