Oh, man. She liked hearing him call himself Daddy.
“Is there anything else you need from me tonight?” he asked.
She shook her head no. She wasn’t going to ask him to stay.
“I have a feeling that might be a lie,” he said. “And we’re not allowed to lie to each other, are we?”
Oh, shoot. She forgot how easily he could read her face.
“So I’m going to be really nice and give you one more chance to tell me if there’s anything you need from me.” His voice was stern again, and she couldn’t resist answering him.
“Can you stay with me until I fall asleep?”
His face seemed to soften, which didn’t really happen that often. Cash was a hard-looking guy. He often seemed all hard lines and firmness.
As though a lot had happened to him in his young age.
“Of course I can.”
She smiled.
“That’s better. I like it when you smile. I don’t like to see you stressed or scared or anxious.”
“Pretty sure I’m always one of those things. Unless I’m hiding in my bedroom.”
“Hiding in your bedroom?” he asked. “Do you do that a lot?”
“All the time,” she typed. “I don’t really like to leave. I like all of my things around me. Strange places and lots of people stress me out. I live with Dotty and Monroe and I work from home, so I spend most of my time in my room. Anything I need, I can get delivered. So I don’t really need to talk much. I guess maybe that’s why my throat is easily irritated.”
“Did you talk a lot as a kid?” he asked
She frowned. “I think I did when I was younger. My mom had some issues. She could either be overprotective, telling me about all the dangers in the world and how I had to stay inside to keep myself safe; or she’d completely lose it on me, yelling and screaming, and telling me how I’d been unwanted and how she wished I’d never been born. I guess I learned to be quiet so she didn’t notice me as much.
“Jesus, fuck. Your own mother said that to you?”
She nodded.
“What about your sisters? Did she do the same to them?” he asked.
“Oh, we don’t have the same mother. We’re all half sisters, each of us had different moms. And our dad was never really around. He left us when I was young.”
“So the three of you didn’t grow up together?”
“Well, we kind of did, sort of. It’s hard to explain, but you see, we all grew up in the same town. I met my sisters at school. I didn’t know I even had sisters until then.”
“Jesus, your mother never told you about them?” he asked incredulously.
“My mother wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. She didn’t send me to school until I was seven. And that’s only because Child Services paid us a visit to tell her that she had to enrol me, or start teaching me at home. I was really happy to go to school, even though my mother refused to help me with anything. Up until then she’d kept me fed and in clean clothes. After that, she seemed to give up. She got sick and took to her bed.”
“That fucking bitch. No matter what she had going on, she should have looked after you. So you went to school?”
“Yep. And that’s when I met my sisters which was the best thing that ever happened to me. The three of us immediately bonded. They looked out for me. Brought me food from home, gave me clothes that they’d grown out of. Dotty and Monroetried to get their moms to let me live with them, but they refused and I get it.”
“Do you?” he said. “Not sure I do.”
“Dotty’s mom was actually married to our dad, and he cheated on her with our moms in our own hometown. So, I totally understood why she didn’t want me in her house. Monroe’s mom cheated on her husband and got pregnant with Monroe. They had other children, and Monroe always got left out. Her mom wanted to forget she existed. There was no way they wanted to take in another child that would be a reminder of the affair that her mother had had with our dad.”
“Jesus,” he muttered.
