When I blink and return to where I actually am—in Carter’s driveway, in Sage’s ugly old van, the rain whipping even harder all around—I snap. “Look, Sage, I know what you think you’re doing here. You think that you can fix me up and make me whole again, by making me like you. You found jewelry and plant hunting and Tenn and now you’re engaged and pregnant and getting your new stupid car to go with your shiny new life. But it’s not like that with me.” I inhale sharply when lightning cracks way too close to the car, lighting us up in equal parts glowing gold and blue. “I can’t be happy until I fix my gift, and I can’t fix my gift until I find Mama, and you know her gift means we’renevergoing to find her! Which means I am forever unfixable, unlovable,which is why Carter, and you, have always found it so fucking easy to run away from me, am I right?”
I’m too scared to look at her when she breathes, “Teal, no—”
I take a deep breath. Dammit. I’m not supposed to be doing things like blowing up on my sister, one of the few people I’m trying to fix things with! “Look, I know I just said some shit I’m going to regret in about sixty seconds, Sage, and I’m sorry, okay? I just can’t stand feeling this way. I can’t stand—” I lift a hand, gesturing to the sky. “Let’s finish this later,” I say. “I need to breathe, you need to get home.”
I consider it a victory when I don’t slam the door on my way out of the car. Old Teal would’ve snapped the car damn well in half. That’s gotta count for something, right?
25
By the time I’m inside,I’m soaked to the bone and whimpering in pain. It’s been too long since I’ve taken one of the prescription pain pills.
Carter shoots up out of nowhere like a damn vampire rising from his coffin. “Jesus,” I say, startling back on my bad foot. “Fuck,no,” I add as I tumble to the ground.
Carter grips my arm and hoists me up into his arms before my face can meet the wood floor. “Stop fucking saving me all the time,” I mumble into his pec.
“Maybe I like saving you all the time, you ever think about that?”
He sets me on the sofa gently, like I’m something precious and beautiful. It feels like a lie, not just because I’m actually not precious and beautiful, but because as of late, one of his hobbies is to romantically reject me.
“I’ll get you a towel.” He reappears in about twenty seconds with what looks like half the towels he owns, and he begins wrapping them around me like I’m some orphan he found on the sideof the street. And I’m too exhausted—and in too much pain—to stop him.
He clears his throat. “Would it make a single bit of difference if I scolded you for going out while your ankle was this fucked?”
“Nope.”
“Thought so.” He says it with tenderness. Like he’s accepted my stupidity as some dreamy personality trait. He pulls out a glass of water and one of my painkillers, and I down both like they’re as important to me as air.
“I got takeout from the Greek place downtown, the one by the pizza places. You like the chicken gyros, right? With extra tzatziki on the side?”
I can’t help but give him a weak half smile. “You remembered what I like?”
His eyes on me are the way pure gold looks next to candlelight. “I remember everything, Teal.”
It’s these kinds of things that make my brain and my heart trip all over each other. Like the way he told me how much he wanted me at our wedding party, how he had to run to hide his apparently massive erection when I kissed his neck. How he ran after me and yelled at me after I climbed the beach rocks, how he grabbed his heart afterward like I’d nearly ripped it in two with my carelessness over my person. The way he kissed my body and ate me out last night, like he was savoring me, like he’d spent a decade waiting to do that and he tried to make it last as long as he could.
So he doesn’t want me for real. That’s not news to me. I know I’m not supposed to believe my ex’s words—No one would ever want you but me—but there’s a grain of truth there, a grain that’s not going to dislodge until I find Mama.
Why not enjoy this marriage, then, while I can? I can leave my heart out of it. All I have to do is remember thathisheartchecked out of wanting me years ago. It’s a very effective reminder.
The pain in my ankle has already gone from throbbing to dull, so I turn to him and say, “Can I make you come, Carter?”
He freezes—I think he was about to stand and heat up our dinner—and huffs out a short exhale. “We can’t. Sex isn’t—”
“I don’t want to have sex with you,” I say sharply. It’s only half a lie. I would love to have sex with Carter, but not if he so obviously doesn’t want it. “I want to suck on your cock until you come down my throat, if you’re good with that.”
He freezes again, only this time his cheeks pinken right before my eyes. When I look down at his lap, there is no denying how my words have affected him. He swallows. “Here?” he says in a bit of a croak.
I get on the ground, on my knees and on my hands, and crawl to him, dragging my injured ankle slightly above the ground. I don’t think I look particularly like a jackass. I’ve got the ab control to make this look natural despite my injury, I think.
He groans. “Jesus, Teal, seeing you like that. All hungry for it. You want to do this for real?”
There are things I know I can’t tell him right now. I can’t tell him that I have wanted him for so long—even before he came over and kissed me a year ago at Nadia’s, when he stopped me because I’d drunk too much moonshine.
And I can’t tell him that I broke things off with Nate Bowen, who was arguably the nicest and most polite boyfriend on the planet, because I couldn’t stop thinking about that damn kiss.
I can’t say these things, so I hope I can somehow convey them with my hands, my mouth, my tongue. I lift up on my knees, wincing just a little when I rest my ankle on the floor.
“You okay?” he says quickly, blinking out of his lusty haze toput a hand on my shoulder. “We should probably just eat, Teal, yeah? You don’t—”
