“What’d you get?” She tries to peer around my shoulder.
I scoop her up tighter in my hands, and I carry her into the kitchen to set her on the island beside what I had delivered. She picks through vibrators, cock rings, dildos, nipple play devices, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t even remember ordering.
“You buy the whole store?” she asks, casting me a teasing glance.
“Some of it’s for you, some for me, some for us.” I tuck stray strands of her hair behind her ears. I’m just so fucking glad she showed up, that her timing was just off and she wasn’t avoiding me. My chest tightens unbearably at the thought of her ghosting me. Ever since she came on the road with me, my heart can’t get through to my head that her being there was more for show than for real. She came because it was good PR, and Tamiko asked her to, and even if I shouldn’t care that was the reason, I care so fucking much.
“Show me something that’s for us,” she says as she pushes away wisps of my hair that keep falling across my forehead and into my eyes. “I need to get you a hairband.”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” I say with a little laugh. “I’ll get it cut.”
“I don’t know. Messy is kinda cute.” She scooches forward and wraps her arms around me. “Tell me what’s been going on with your family.”
“That doesn’t really go with sex toys, doc.”
“Pick out one that’s for both of us, then we’ll have a real chat about what you’ve been avoiding telling me.” She searches my expression.
Shit. The things I’ve actually been avoiding telling her have nothing to do with my bio family reappearing.
“Okay?” She prods.
I pluck out a dual couples’ vibrator that had some pretty descriptive reviews and set it on the edge of the counter. “This one.”
She hops off the island and takes my hand, leading me over to the couches. Instead of sitting beside me, she pushes me down, and then she straddles me.
“Tell me.”
“You expect me to concentrate when you’re sitting like this?”
“I know how good you are at compartmentalizing,” she says, and she brushes my hair back again. “What do you know about them? What do you want to know? Do you want to meet them?”
“I read my mom’s diary,” I say, and I rest my hands on her hips, trying to resist the urge to get her to rock. Rather than giving into that desire, I tug her a little snugger against me.
“Was that hard?”
Something is definitely getting hard, and I can’t help a little smirk. She taps me in the chest with the back of her hand.
“Concentrate,” she reprimands, and even that’s sexy as hell.
“Weird, I guess,’ I say slowly, trying to force myself to concentrate on what she wants to talk about and not what my body wants to do. “I was three when she died, so the little I remember… Typical mom shit. She wasn’t really a fully formed person to me. Seems like she got along fine with her parents until she got pregnant. The boyfriend—my dad—had moved away before she knew. Couldn’t find him, or that’s what she says in the diary. First name only in the diary, and she didn’t even list him on my birth certificate. Parents wanted her to abort. She refused. They kicked her out. She broke off contact. And then it’s just a lot of hardship while she tries to raise me.”
“She never got in contact with them again?”
“No, according to the diary. The fact that they didn’t seem to know she died, that I went into foster care—I guess that supports that?” I don’t know or understand enough about family dynamics to figure out if that seems likely. Which is part of what’s made me hesitate to reach out to them. Did they really not know she died? That I was alone? “Her entries make her seem a bit stubborn.”
That gets a laugh out of Sawyer, and she kisses my cheek. “Apple didn’t fall far, huh?”
“Yeah, I mean… That’s the part I think I’d like. Getting to know her through them. At least a little. She’s been this shadowymemory all my life. To have her feel real would be… I think it might be good for me at some point.”
“But?”
“Do I really know theyjustfigured out their daughter died? That she left behind a kid who was run through the system until he was thirteen, developed a talent for hockey, and got taken in by a single dad and his son?”
“You think they’ll want something from you?”
“Besides knowing a piece of my mom—their version of her—what would I wantfrom them?”
“Family connection. When you have kids someday, you might want that.”
