And I take advantage of the fact that she’s relaxed enough to tease me by pressing for more information.
If I’m going to fill that emptiness inside her, I need to know everything.
“Tell me about your family, Red.”
ELEVEN
Joey
It’s a sneak attack.
Such a gentle question after he got me to relax by being funny and cute that I’m not prepared.
Ishouldhave prepared.
I should have known this man wouldn’t let this shit go.
“Seriously?” I mutter.
“You not wanting to share makes it seem like you lived with a bunch of serial killers.”
They may as well have been.
They’d all but murdered my siblings.
The thoughts slide through my mind so quickly that I’m not prepared, that I don’t have time to block them, to stop them from showing on my face.
Something I know he picks up on in an instant.
Screech!
My body jerks as he tugs my stool close to him, his legscoming on either side of mine, one of his hands dropping to my waist, the other resting on the counter near my arm.
“What the fuck is that, Red?”
I inhale.
He’s close, so close. And his deep blue eyes are fixed on mine, those golden flecks molten with rage. “What did they do to you?”
I don’t want to talk about this shit.
I don’t want tothinkabout it.
But I also don’t want to draw this argument out because I know Damon, I’ve experienced the recalcitrant asshole side of his personality many times over the last years, most recently last night. Hell, I experienced it thirty minutes ago on my back porch.
If I just say it, it’ll be done and we can move on and never talk about it again.
“It’s not so much as what they did, but what theydidn’tdo,” I say quietly. “We were homeschooled, my siblings—I was the oldest of four girls and a boy—and I. Which isn’t bad in of itself. Plenty of people do it successfully. But my parents weren’t educated themselves and they weren’t consistent and they didn’t do more than shove a workbook in our faces and expect us to magically educate ourselves.” I sigh. “By the time I argued enough to be allowed to enroll in school, I was three grade levels behind in reading and four in math. My siblings didn’t fare any better.”
He nods, but doesn’t speak, just lightly squeezed my hip.
There and listening.
Because he knows there’s more.
And, unfortunately, there is.
“Because they weren’t educated and because we didn’t know better, we also weren’t looked after in a lot of other ways. We lived off-grid and the water wasn’t clean. We got sick a lot.And none of us were vaccinated against any diseases, even though my parents were. So, when we brought chicken pox home from school, we were all pretty sick…”
