“How does living in your car relate to your Alan Rickman kink?”
She snorted a laugh.“It’s not a kink.”
“Okay,” I murmured, pretending to be unconvinced.“Your Alan Rickman obsession, then.”
She rolled her eyes.“I find his voice soothing, that’s all.”
“Sure.Let’s say I buy that.”I mirrored her eye-roll.“He does have a pleasant-sounding voice.But you still haven’t explained what Alan Rickman has to do with living in your car.”
She exhaled a beleaguered sigh.“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”
I grinned.“I like to call it annoyingly persistent.”With my arm still around her, I rubbed her shoulder, coaxing her to continue.“Now tell me.How did this Alan Rickman thing start?”
She huffed but leaned into my side again.“Okay, so … you remember how I was living in my car, right?”
“Yes, we’ve been over that,” I deadpanned, glad to see the lift in her mood despite the depressing direction our conversation had taken.
She snickered before continuing.“Well, one of the first things I discovered about sleeping in a car is that it’s both too quiet and too loud at night.Even with all the doors locked, it doesn’t feel safe.Every little noise sounds like a threat, and there are alotof little noises.”She dragged in and released a deep breath.“But I couldn’t play my radio all night without my car battery dying within hours, if not minutes.And I couldn’t stream music on my phone because I couldn’t afford a plan with data.Plus, even if I’d had access to Wi-Fi, my battery wouldn’t have lasted.And I refused to let my phone die—for safety.”
My stomach clenched so tightly it stole my breath.She’d had nothing.No safety net.No home.No way to drown out the fear.
“And that’s when you discovered the wonder that is Alan Rickman?”I asked, forcing myself to pay attention to her instead of getting carried away with worries over things long past.
A small smile teased her lips.“I went to a thrift store and found an old portable CD player with some random CDs.The Alan Rickman disc was inside the CD player when I bought it, and it quickly became my favourite.His voice was soothing.”She paused, her gaze unfocused, as if she were reliving that time in her car all over again.“Whenever fear threatened to overwhelm me, I listened to that homemade CD.Whenever I had to park somewhere new, somewhere uncomfortable, it gave just enough background noise to distract me.Something steady.Something familiar.”
“His voice was your security blanket,” I murmured.“Safety when everything else was uncertain.”
Her shining eyes grew distant.“Exactly.”
Jesus.My heart ached at this new image of Maya at eighteen, scared and alone, clutching a second-hand CD player in the backseat of her car, listening to Alan Rickman’s recorded voice to feel safe.
My parents’ death wrecked me, but at least I’d had Nana.Maya’s parents were still alive, and she’d had no one.Nowhere to go.
Her sole comfort was a stranger’s discarded CD of Alan Rickman’s voice that she’d found by chance in a secondhand store.The misery of it was almost too much to bear.
“Now I’m even happier that Nana found you on the side of the road and brought you home.”
forty-four
make them pay
Liam
ItwasallIcould do to keep the bed from shaking with my fury now that Maya had finally fallen asleep.She’d lived in her car.For years.And even though she appeared to have made peace with the time she was homeless, I couldn’t get over it.
Throwing an arm over Maya’s waist, I pulled her close and nuzzled my face against the column of her throat, inhaling the soft vanilla scent of her shampoo, but it didn’t calm my racing mind.
She should never have been put in that position.Not by her parents, not by her bosses, not by her friends, and certainly not by the police.Every single person who should have been there for her had let her down.
It made me so fucking furious I wanted to puke, to break shit, to find every one of those assholes and make them pay.
Revenge schemes swirled in and out of my brain as I lay there listening to Maya breathe.Teaching her parents a lesson was probably out.If they were as immature as Maya had made them out to be, I doubt I’d able to change their minds.
Hunting down her old bosses was still a possibility, though.Sending a few thousand sparkly revenge dicks to those assholes wasn’t nearly enough punishment for what they’d done, but it would help my attitude.I still wouldn’t be happy, but I’d feel slightly better.
“I can hear you thinking,” Maya mumbled, spinning in my arms to face me.“What’s wrong?”
Fitting my thigh between her legs, erasing any space between us, I kissed her forehead.“Nothing.”The lie slipped out smoothly.“Just can’t sleep.”
