“Maybe.”
“What’s happening with your New York apartment?”
“I’ve sublet it.”
“Okay, so that’s one worry you don’t have. Anything else?”
It was an odd thing to sit here and work through her options and just talk about the stuff she hadn’t until then. She’d spoken to Lynx a little bit, but he’d been busy doing his rock star stuff. But this, sitting here with Jay, felt right. No one was interrupting them, and they were just talking about things—real things.
“It sounds to me like you just need time, Blue. So take some,” Jay said.
She nodded. “What about you, Jay? Anything churning inside you I can help you with? Seeing as I’ve just unloaded on you.”
“Hardly an unload. You know the Dukes, right? If they have an ingrown hair, it’s a production that the entire family are involved in.”
She laughed. “They’re good people.”
“Really good,” he agreed.
They fell silent, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, like you’d expect it to be between two people who’d spent a single night having awesome sex.
“I took a DNA test,” he said softly. “And I don’t want to look at the results.”
“Why?”
“Because my father and mother were terrible parents, and part of me doesn’t want to connect with anyone linked to them.”
Blue knew nothing about Jay’s past other than that he’d arrived at her school when she was young and stayed there. No one had talked about him other than how he was always at the Dukes’ house.
“Did you—was your childhood really bad, Jay?”
“The worst.” His words were cold and flat. “My father used to knock us around and never supported us financially.”
“But what if there was someone different? Another branch, or link to your past, that was good. Someone with whom you could connect, Jay. You need to check your results.”
“I always wanted a family. The normal kind I used to watch on TV, and then I met the Dukes?—”
“Aww, come on, there is no way that family is normal,” Blue scoffed.
“True that. But I wanted to come home to something near normal.”
“Oh, well, in that case, you should have been a McAllister. We were the poster family for normal.”
That made him laugh.
“But you were loved, Blue,” he said seconds later.
“And you weren’t?”
“No, never. Not until the Dukes.”
“Get in here, Haddon! I have a pool game to thrash you at.”
Blue looked behind them and saw Dan standing in the doorway.
Jay got out of his seat. “Thanks for the food and conversation, Blue. See you around.”
“See you, Jay.”
