I swallowed and decided to take advantage of the moment. “I need to tell you something that has nothing to do about what just happened, but about our family, okay?”
“What?” he croaked suspiciously.
“Dallas—”
“Oh.”
“Oh, what?”
“I know about Mr. Dallas already,” he announced.
I sat up and set an elbow under me, watching his puffy, red face as he stared up at the ceiling. “What do you know?”
“He loves you. You love him,” he muttered with an eye roll, glancing down at me briefly before focusing up again. “You know, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Aunt Di with a baby carriage.”
Uhh, where the hell had that come from? “How… did you know?”
“I have eyes?”
This fucking smart-ass.
“And he told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
He glanced at me from his spot still lying flat on the mattress. “Remember when Jonathan’s mom yelled at you during the tournament and you cried?” How could I forget? “He told me.”
What the hell? “What did he say?”
Josh rolled his eyes, sliding his elbows underneath his shoulders to sit up, bored with this conversation. “I don’t know. He said he liked you—yuck.” I blinked at him. “One day during practice when we saw that dad talking to you, I told him I didn’t like you talking to him, and he said he didn’t either. So I asked him what we should do, and he said nothing because you were never gonna do anything with him and that one day soon, between me and him, none of those jackasses—he said it, not me, don’t get mad—would never bother you again.”
Was my heart about to burst or was I imagining it? “And what did you tell him?”
“I told him okay as long as he didn’t make me go live with Grandma and Grandpa—”
“I would never make you go live somewhere else!”
“That’s what he said! Jeez. He said he knew I already have a dad, and he told me that his dad died too and that he knew that if his mom had got married again when he was young, that he would never call anybody else Dad. So, he said we could be friends and he could show me how to do stuff and we could be a family, that I didn’t have to call him anything but Dallas if I didn’t want to.”
I was not going to cry. I was not going to cry. “And what did you tell him?”
“I said okay.”
“Okay? That’s it?”
He grinned. “What did you want me to do? Ask him for money?”
I burst out laughing. “You’re the man of the house. You can’t just give me up like that.”
He shrugged and said, “You know how many Xbox games he has?”
My mouth fell open and I shook my head at him. “You traded me for Xbox games. I cannot believe it.”
“Believe it.”
Where the hell had this monster come from? Had I created this?
I had. I really had.
