A groan passes through his lips, but he just narrows his eyes at me.
“I was a horny teenager back then. I’ve grown up a little, and I can promise you I’ll impress you with more than just my patience. Why won’t you tell me?”
Thunder booms as though it’s an omen of things to pass, and I blow out a breath while wrapping my arms around his neck.
“If you’re not going to wow me with your alleged skills, then let’s order pizza before the power goes out. I hate eating in the dark.”
He doesn’t look happy about that, but he pulls me to my feet. Immediately, I turn away and shimmy my shirt back on before pulling my panties back into place. He leaves his shirt off, and he watches me hurry through the process of covering up. I look around for my shorts, but remember he took them off in another room.
He orders pizza, and by some miracle, the power stays on in spite of the storm. He keeps looking at me questioningly, and I keep tugging at my shirt reflexively. When he opens the fridge, he frowns while looking in.
“Why do you have a gallon of water, a pint of half-and-half, and two jugs of orange juice, but nothing else?” he muses, possibly trying to make light conversation.
It’s not a light conversation topic, though. Explaining my limited pantry and fridge choices goes into the complicated enigma that is me these days. It’s an adopted lifestyle of necessity, not of choice.
Too deep.
Too soon.
Too much.
“I like to keep my options limited since I’m on a diet,” I lie. It’s a stupid lie since I’m about to eat pizza with him, and he’s definitely seen me not eat like someone on a diet.
He cocks an eyebrow, letting his gaze rake over me. I’m still in just my panties and my T-shirt. “You don’t need to be on a diet,” he says idly, then opens the freezer without looking inside it. “And I don’t think strawberry ice cream fits into a diet. Why are you lying to me?”
I shouldn’t have lied. It was a terrible lie.
“I’m a takeout whore,” I say around a sigh, to which he laughs. It’s not a lie, but it’s not the truth either. I wish I could keep my house stocked with groceries. But that… gets messy.
All those expiration dates are a daunting problem, and feeling like I’m in a race to finish it all before that date… Well, life sucks with a full fridge.
Turning around, I go to find my shorts, but just as I start to pull them on, he’s jerking them out of my hand and tossing them over his shoulder.
“It’s easier to torture you this way,” he murmurs while stepping closer, sliding his hands over the skin of my hips and slipping his fingers just below my panty line.
I stare up, watching his eyes as he watches me, waiting for me to spill secrets I never will.
“Do you like what you see when you look at me?” I whisper softly.
His brow furrows in confusion.
“You know I do.”
My hands stay at my sides as he starts to run his hands over my ass.
“Then don’t ask me to give that up. A lot has happened in twelve years, Chase. Don’t ask me to give up the way you look at me when it’s the first good thing that’s happened in a really long time.”
I clear my throat when emotion wads up in it, and his hands pause. His eyes study mine intensely, as though he’s trying to decipher what that means. The doorbell rings, startling me, and he bends to press a kiss to my lips before heading toward the front door.
I go hide in the kitchen as his voice carries through the house.
“Um… Chase James? You live here?”
“My girl does. How much?”
“Whit lives here?”
Freaking small towns.
“No,” Chase says, annoyed. “You going to give me the fucking pizza and price or interrogate me all night?”
“Sheesh. Sorry. Just thought you were with Whit. Is she single now or what?”
“Fucking eh, dude. Yes, she’s single. Good luck getting her to date a guy who isn’t legal yet. Pizza. Now. Keep the change.”
The door slams, and I stifle a smile as Chase walks back in holding the hard-to-procure pizzas in his hands.
“Hayden hasn’t changed one bit,” I muse as he puts the pizzas down on the bar and grabs a paper towel.
“Everyone wanting to know everyone’s business? That’s never going away,” he grumbles.
Chapter 31
CHASE
As she finishes eating her second slice of pizza, she turns and throws away her crust. I watch her, just as I have been doing all night. Everything is mounting up and causing me to have more questions.
Everything Whit was drunkenly asking is grating on my nerves now. Mika used to be very much a control freak. Overly so. Judging by her over-zealous writing room upstairs, she’s still a meticulous note-keeper and control freak.
So why would she specifically request to not be involved with any of the numbers and schedules at the bowling alley? And why no food in the house? She loves cooking. Always has. She was the first person to ever cook anything for me. Hell, she’s the one who taught me how to cook for myself.
And what the fucking hell happened to her stomach? Those were cuts. Someone definitely fucking cut her to pieces and did enough damage to scar her for life. Was that all at once or over a period of time?
I can tell she doesn’t want to talk about it, and I know what it’s like for someone to try and pry dark secrets out of you. What sucks is that I always told Mika the stone cold truth. She saw it. I took her into that hell and she saw what I went through.
It didn’t change the way she looked at me. It didn’t change the way she loved me. It didn’t change a fucking thing, and it made me love her that much more. It’s also the reason I knew I was the one who had to walk away when reality came crashing down.
She’d hate me by now if I had made her live through that hell until the day my mother finally died. I couldn’t just leave her though. She might have not deserved me looking after her, but I couldn’t have dealt with the guilt if I hadn’t done all I could.
My father? Well, when he dies, he can rot in hell with no guilt on my end. At least my mom kept me alive when I couldn’t fend for myself, and she also made sure I had clothes, even if they were ratty and used.
“So what’s up with your parents?” I ask quietly.
“Dead,” she says without looking at me, and I grimace.
“Sorry.”
“Dad’s better off. He had a stroke just before I turned eighteen and he usually didn’t even know when someone was around. He just died within the past year, but it was a blessing. He didn’t want to be like that. No one does.”
She says it like she’s detached… emotionless. I’ve never heard her sound like that. This is the same girl who cried over a random dead bird we found on the roof one summer. I had to bury that fucking bird and let her say a prayer for it.
“I always liked Milton,” I say softly. “He never treated me like the James boy.”
“Until he told you that you weren’t good enough for me,” she says coldly.
“That wasn’t on him, Mika,” I say on a heavy breath. “We were living in a fantasy bubble and you know it. I don’t want to go back to that conversation. What happened to your mom?”
She tenses, and her lips thin like she’s pissed. “She died. Nothing special about her death.”
She’s twice as cold this time, as though she’s angry at me for even asking while not giving a damn about her mother’s death. It’s actually a little disconcerting.
“That’s vague,” I point out in a very non-abrasive way.
She shrugs. “I don’t want to talk about it. How about your parents? How’d they die?” she asks with the same chilly edge, as though she’s trying to verbally stab me for asking about her family.
“Mom finally overdosed. Dad isn’t actually dead. Just in prison. He finally ripped off the wrong guy. As far as I’m concerned though, he’s dead to me.”
She nods stoically, as though she’s drifted into another place. Definitely need to shift this subject. I feel like I’m losing her.
“Where all have you worked? I finally got to look you up, since I had your pen name. Saw the publishing thing started a few years ago.”
“Five years ago,” she says softly. “It’s the only job I’ve had. Mom wouldn’t let me work anymore when I lived there. She wanted control over my money so that I couldn’t save any more up.”
She sighs heavily, and I cock my eyebrow.
“What about college? Where’d you go?”
She looks up at me with pain in her eyes that I don’t understand.
“I didn’t go to college. Why are you asking so many questions about my past?”
That really makes no fucking sense. Why wouldn’t she go? She never talked about college, but it’s because we only talked about the impossible future we dreamt up. Without that dream, I wouldn’t have made it through my early teen years.
And five years? She only got her first job five years ago? As a writer? She never showed any interest in writing anything but letters to me.
“Just trying to learn a little about what happened to you after me, Mika. Why is college a sore spot?”
She doesn’t answer. She grows increasingly irritated by the second. When she starts biting her nails, I frown. She never chews her nails. Or didn’t. She always talked about how disgusting it was.