“I just want to get to know you better.” He leaned forward and spoke quieter. “I think you want the same thing I do. I see it in your eyes. Until you push me away, I’m going to keep trying. Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop.”
The Old Chelsea would have told him to abandon all hope, but there’d been a glitch in the matrix, and I didn’t want this to end.
“Don’t stop.”
He grinned like he’d won a minor victory, and as a reward, he ducked into the kitchen and returned with a plate of bacon. I licked my lips without meaning to. Then he sat down and tucked into his breakfast.
Once we’d devoured most of the food, he asked, “What are you doing for the rest of the day?”
“I have an eight-hour shift at the coffee shop starting at noon. This morning, I have to finish designing a website for a debut author. And if I have time”—I hesitated—“I need to make some earrings.”
“Earrings?”
I hopped up and went into my bedroom to grab my stash. I found the box with my best ones and brought it back to the coffee table. “I have an Etsy shop.”
He came over to sit on the sofa. After perusing the jewelry, he slipped out a lapis earring and ran a finger across it. “You made this?”
I loved him for not asking me,You can make money this way?because the answer to that was uneven. “It’s just a hobby,” I lied. My shop did very well, but I didn’t like to talk about it, usually.Maybe because Bas met the most honest me, or maybe because he’d proven trustworthy so far, I wanted to share some of my secrets with him.
Out of all the earrings I’d laid out, he picked up the drop earrings bearing two flowers, one in silver, the other, slightly larger, in pink gold, dangling below. “These are unusual.”
I took one of them and traced the curve in the metal. I hesitated, but after everything he’d told me at the picnic the day before, he’d earned some honesty.
“My mom had this necklace I coveted. It was a simple chain with yellow, white, and rose gold flowers. She rarely wore it—just when she and my dad would go out on dates, which they did sometimes. She always looked so pretty when she dressed up, and I can picture the two of them like that. A normal-looking, beautiful couple.” A tear slipped down my cheek, and Bas reached over and caught it on his index finger.
“What happened to the necklace?”
“One night, my dad—” My voice gave out, and I couldn’t go on.
“Did he break it?”
I nodded. I fought to get out the words. “He tore it right off her neck and threw it against the wall.”
I heard my dad’s voice, angry about things outside my understanding. I pictured the Band-Aid on the back of my mom’s neck the day after, covering a nasty welt.
I pulled my knees up under my chin like I did when I was ten. Like I could curl up and hide in a corner of my bedroom and make the yelling stop.
Bas wrapped his arms around my entire body, knees and all. “That’s a terrible memory. Why did you keep the necklace?”
I thought,I should get a bonus point for opening up,and let out a raspy laugh. “I’m sorry. You’re probably regretting asking, right?”
He ran his hands over my hair. “You want to talk about it?”
How did he get me to open up about this stuff? “They represent where I came from—the good and the bad. It’s more honest than the bruises or the bouquet of flowers that followed.” I unclasped my hand and showed him the earrings, now biting into my skin. “These are what’s left. I picked up the pieces. This is the first pair of earrings I ever made. I’ll never sell them.”
“They’re beautiful, Chelsea.” He sat back and let me lean against him, relaxed and comforted. I’d never told any of this even to Elizabeth.
I buried my head against his shoulder, his scruffy chin inches from my nose. He always smelled deliciously edible, and I wondered if my mom ever sat like this with my dad, before. If she’d fallen in love with a better man. “He had to have been different at the beginning, right? She wouldn’t have chosen a man like that.”
He didn’t try to answer that. It was a rhetorical question anyway. I knew they’d been in love, even after things began to crumble.
“Is she still with him?”
“No, he left when I was fifteen. I haven’t seen him since.”
“I’m so sorry, Chelsea. You deserved better.”
His arms tightened around me, like he could absorb all the bad memories, and I realized how intimate our bodies had become, how easy it was to take physical comfort from him. The contact touched something deep within me, but I didn’t want to get used to a temporary indulgence.
