A gift that I got just like that, the way he was giving it to me now.
It was there.
But it would never be mine.
“A while,” he answered my question.
“I ever go soft?”
That got me a full smile and I knew I should feel lucky.
I never went soft. I was all hard. I’d built a shell around me no one could crack. I had reason. A really fucking good reason.
Problem was, I built that shell so hard, even I couldn’t break out of it.
That wasn’t exactly a bad thing. It could be considered good. It meant I couldn’t open myself up to the likes of Garrett Merrick, or the rest of the male population who were shades or whole freaking strides less than him, to walk all over me.
Still, I should feel lucky because Merry didn’t mind the hard. He looked past it to be my friend. A lot of folks didn’t.
That was good too. You didn’t put in the effort, why would I bother with you?
Merry put in the effort. A lot of folks in that ’burg did when I’d moved there, even after what had happened to make me move there.
Which was why I stayed.
Not for me—for my kid.
Ethan needed people around him like that.
“You aren’t drinkin’,” Merry pointed out, tipping his head to my glass.
I lifted it and shot the whole damned thing.
Merry burst out laughing.
I slammed the glass down and grabbed the bottle to pour more.
“Only you would shoot a fifty dollar glass of Feb and Morrie’s finest Scotch,” Merry noted.
I topped his off and poured myself another one.
Then I again shot it.
When I did, Merry burst out laughing again.
Which was precisely why I blew one hundred dollars I could not afford in less than thirty seconds.
Laughter like that coming from Garrett Merrick was worth every penny.
* * * * *
The bed moved and my eyes opened.
I closed them immediately as the sick hit my gut and the throb of pain made itself known in my head.
It took me a few beats, but I heard the noises.
A man was getting dressed and doing it quiet.
Shit. What did I do last night?
It had been a while since something like this had happened. Around about the time I got hooked up with Ethan’s dad, thought I’d hit the mother lode, found myself knocked up, and got myself left behind when the asshole evaporated. Hard to live wild and have a good time pregnant. And a single mom at twenty-four, you got your shit together. So, between working to keep my kid fed and in babysitters, I didn’t have many shots at living wild.
Ethan, however, was right now at a friend’s house. A sleepover.
And expending effort I didn’t have in me, considering I was totally hungover and maybe still a little drunk, I remembered that last night, for the first time in years, I’d lived wild.
I’d done this shooting the shit with Garrett Merrick, polishing off a bottle of scary-expensive whisky, chasing that with beer, going all out, putting everything I had into it to do what I could to ease the heart of a brokenhearted man.
Somewhere between polishing off the bottle and moving to a less expensive one, things turned.
We got a taxi.
We came to my house.
We fucked, we did it wild, and we did it for a long, long time.
And now it was morning, I felt like I had twenty seconds of sleep, and he was up before me, quietly dressing.
It had been a while, but I knew the drill. I knew those careful sounds he was making.
He didn’t want me to wake up. He wanted to get his ass out of there and get home. Get a shower to wash himself clean of me. Get his head straight enough to kick his own ass that he did something as stupid as banging me. And, only since he was Merry and Merry was that kind of guy (other guys wouldn’t bother), finding it in himself to determine the right time to make his approach and make it clear where we stood.
We’d fucked.
But nothing had changed.
Friends, even though he knew the taste of me and I knew the feel of him.
I always thought everyone got it wrong, and lying there, eyes closed, pretending to sleep to let Merry have what he needed—a clean getaway—I thought it again.
It wasn’t walking out of a house into a taxi or your car in your clothes from the night before that was the walk of shame. You wanted what you wanted, you went after it, you got it, then you left it and went on with your life. There was no shame in that. None.
The shame was lying naked in your own bed listening to a man be quiet while dressing because he woke up next to you not wanting one thing to do with you. It didn’t matter how that happened—if you gauged what was going on with him wrong and he was just out for a fuck, or if you both got trashed and things got out of hand when you didn’t mean them to.
I lay still feeling the burn of that shame that singed deeper because the man who wanted not one thing to do with me was Merry.