She tried to glare at me, but the side of her lips crept up. “Mercy. Nobody needs to know that I was named after a car my dad most likely wanted so it could help him get laid. Anyway, you think that’s bad? Wait until tonight when you’re trying to sleep, and your brain points out that all six of us have different mothers. I know Dad has no common sense, but let’s be real. Any of those women could have put a stop to Dad’s luxury car name insanity. He isnotthat charming.”
“Novas aren’t luxury cars,” I pointed out.
“Nova was a compromise. According to my mom, Nova’s mom is a hippie who was naïve enough to believe her daughter was being named after a brightening star.”
“Well, your dad was Air Force. Those guys tend to be stargazers,” I joked. Growing up as an only child with parents who’d never gotten divorced, I couldn’t imagine what Mercy’s life had been like. “Are you close to all of your siblings?”
“Nope. Ben’s the only one I’ve even met… well, that I remember. Mom and Dad split before I was two and Mom moved us north to Portland. As far as I know, all my other sisters and brothers still live in Cali. Dad retired from the service about a year after I was born and moved to Seattle for a job. That’s where he met Ben’s mom.”
“Wow.”
“Indeed. I’ve thought about reaching out to the others, but Nova’s the closest to my age and five years older than me. I don’t know that we’d have anything in common. Porsche has friended me on social media, but her daughter’s closer to my age than she is. My family is weird.”
She could say that again. Still, knowing that Mercy hadn’t grown up in a traditional family just increased my respect for her. She could have turned out to be a sniveling pile of self-pity, but instead she’d educated herself and dived into a career path she felt passionate about. She’d seen a lot of shit, yet she managed to hold onto her innocence and hope. All of this combined with her classically beautiful face and curvy body, created a package I could hardly resist.
“My mom’s not a bad person,” Mercy continued. “She has issues from her childhood that she never figured out how to resolve. To this day, she still measures her self-worth by the amount of affection she’s receiving from whichever man she’s dating. Regardless, she protected me. Even though she dated a lot of scumbags, she made sure I was never alone with any of them. She didn’t want what happened to her to happen to me. When I started learning child psychology, I wanted to build a time machine so I could travel back and help her, to be the person who cared enough to ask the right questions and get her the kind of help she needed. She’s too far gone and set in her ways now, but if I could have gotten to her as a child, I feel confident that I could have made a difference in the way she turned out.”
“That’s why you’re passionate about the preschool,” I replied. “You want to help kids like your mom.”
She nodded. “I know that probably sounds crazy or narcissistic, but yes. There is no time machine, and Mom is beyond my help, but the little boys and girls I work with… there’s still hope for them. I want to help them break the cycle of abuse and neglect and poverty. I want to show them that it doesn’t matter what life they were born into, they can be so much more.”
“I don’t think that sounds crazy or narcissistic at all.” Her dedication and enthusiasm practically made her glow. She was so fucking gorgeous it took everything in me not to reach out to her and pull her against me. I understood her, because we both had regret driving us. I couldn’t find a time machine to send me back to save my dad, so I tried to make up for it by saving the lives of others.
Mercy shrugged. “Yeah, well let’s just say I don’t have a lot of friends my own age.”
“Hm?”
“I’m a lot to take in, Landon. ‘My mom was raped as a child’ isn’t exactly the best conversation starter, and I suck at small talk. I usually don’t know any television star’s name, what else they’ve played in, or who they’re dating. I don’t care about that stuff. Instead, I want to talk about ending child poverty and protecting the future. I make it awkward and am known to be a little intimidating.”
She was rambling, talking shit about herself and showing me the insecurities she felt because she was different. But she didn’t understand how beautiful her uniqueness was. Desperate to show her, I didn’t think. I just lowered her pan to the sidewalk to free up my hands and closed the distance between us. Then, my mouth covered hers.
A spark zinged between us. It was like I could taste the passion on her lips and feel the intensity in our touch.
Her eyes grew impossibly wide, and she froze. But she didn’t push me away.
Encouraged, I pressed my body against hers, feeling her soft mounds press against my chest. Deepening the kiss, I licked at the seam of her lips, silently begging for entrance as my hands circled around to her back to pull her against me and hold her close. Her lips parted with a sigh, and she let me in. Relieved, my tongue swept over hers, sampling, exploring, savoring. She tasted like marionberry cobbler, vanilla ice cream, and life, and with every second I stayed connected to her I felt a little more rejuvenated. A little less like the cynical asshole I’d become.
Kissing Mercy felt like coming home. Finally.
All too soon, she pulled back, separating us. My hands fell to my sides, instantly missing the feel of her. The night felt colder and lonelier as it filled the space she’d occupied.
Her eyes were dark with lust, her breathing was shallow and quick, and her lips were swollen as she searched my gaze. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
Stunned, I stared at her. No woman had ever asked why I’d kissed her before. How the fuck did I even answer that? “I don’t know. I… You were talking shit about yourself and I… I don’t know.”
“You’re only here visiting, Landon.”
I couldn’t tell which one of us she was trying to remind, but her words rattled me. Forty-five days of leave had seemed like a life sentence, but now it felt like a single day of freedom. “I know.”
“I can’t… I don’t even know you.”
“What do you want to know about me?”
“Nothing, because you’ll be gone at the end of next month and I’m already going to have to pick up the pieces of your mom that you leave behind. I can’t let you break me.” She started to pace in front of me. “Let’s be logical about this. We obviously share a connection through your mom and this neighborhood, and we’re both in the business of healing people. It’s natural for those sort of connections to be misconstrued as emotions like affection.”
She was trying to reason away the attraction we felt towards one another.
“But the good news is that we’re both mature adults and we can control ourselves. This doesn’t have to be awkward or strange or—”
