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She studies me with her shrewd gaze, and I know the wheels of her mind are spinning. The way her brain works is my favorite thing about her. And when she finally says, “I think maybe someone told you something similar when you were young,” I turn away from her and cross the living room to Harold.
“Hey, dickhead!”
I offer him my index finger, and he bends, allowing me to pet him. “Hey, asshole.”
Behind me, Millie speaks with conviction, like she’s been ruminating on this for a long time. Like she’s run experiments that have proven her theory true. “I think you’re soft.”
I huff. “I am not soft.”
She’s silent, sneaking up behind me until I feel her small hand on the middle of my back. “I think you’ve built up this hard shell because someone told you that you couldn’t be soft. Like I couldn’t cry. You taught yourself to be hard. To be mean. To be…scary.”
I tip my chin down to her next to me, the side of her body pressed along mine, the curve of her breast against my arm, her warmth seeping into my skin. “You’re not scared of me.”
“No. Because I know how soft you actually are.”
If she only knew how hard she makes me. That I wake in the morning with visions of her in my head and my hand wrapped around the steel rod in my underwear.
I may be soft with her, but I am never soft for her.
Ignoring how she’s staring up at me with those pleading eyes, silently asking me to agree with her, to confess that she has magically broken down all my walls and correctly psychoanalyzed me. To tell her, You’re right. You’ve got me all figured out.
But I won’t.
I can’t. Because I am so fucking soft that giving in to even a tiny fraction of that weakness would unravel all that I’ve done. All that I’ve given up. All that I’ve built for myself, and all that I still want to do.
This armor is my shield, and I won’t let my guard down, even for her.
Spinning away from her, I ask, “Where’s Noah?”
“At home.”
“He had a game this afternoon, right?”
She follows me to the kitchen, where I open the fridge, finding all the foods I asked her to stock it with. “How did it go?”
“Not good. They lost, and he’s taking it pretty hard. Saying it’s his fault.”
I hand her a Diet Coke, then place blueberries on the counter. “It’s not. It’s a team sport.”
“That’s what I told him, but he’s like you… Holds the weight of the whole team on his shoulders. Thinks he needs to carry them all.”
“I don’t—”
She narrows her brows at me and slips her cell phone from her pocket. “Maybe if you talk to him, tell him what you would’ve told your ten-year-old self, instead of whatever it was by whomever it was to make you think you aren’t worth it… Maybe you’ll give yourself some grace.”
“Millie,” I grind out. “I’m your boss, not your pet project.”
She makes a miffed sort of sound and presses a button on her phone to put it on speaker. It rings a few times before her mom answers. “Hey, hon.”
“Hi, Mom. I’m here with Austin, and he wants to talk to Noah.”
I really don’t. Not with how she’s insisted on rewiring my insides, but her son comes over the line before I can come up with an excuse. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, nugget. Austin wanted to talk to you. Here he is.” She points at her phone with the closest thing I’ve seen to a threat out of her. A You better not fuck this up face.
So, I plop down on one of the yellow stools and drag her cell phone toward me. “Hey, kid. I’m sitting here with your mom, and she told me… Uh, she said you’re feeling kinda down after your game.”
He mumbles an assent, and I clear my throat, dragging my fingers over the hair on my chin as I think about the boy I used to be. The one who wanted to impress his father so badly, he’d make himself sick before games and cry after his team lost because he knew how disappointed his father would be. Only to be told throwing up before a game made him look weak and crying made him less of a man.
