“What?”
“Names,” Jake repeated, more to himself than to her. “I need names and addresses.”
Claire’s soft laughter interrupted him. He looked over his shoulder at her, the sheet still tucked around her, but she was smiling.
“Your sister-in-law beat you to it, I’m afraid,” she said, raising her eyebrows.
“Holly?”
Claire nodded. “She marched to Aman—” She stopped for a second. “This girl’s locker—”
Jake’s heart came to a grinding halt. “What was her name?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Claire whispered, shaking her head, her dark eyes confirming what he already knew.
“You said Amanda. The Amanda at the barbecue?”
Claire shrugged and looked away. He really didn’t think her story could get worse, but it had, and he realized now he had hurt her even more than even he was prepared for.
“It doesn’t matter. That was a long time ago. Anyway, Holly, in front of everyone, whips open this girl’s locker and takes out a bra and then starts pulling out all this padding. Long story short, the principal came along and the three of us got detention for three weeks. She couldn’t stand me. I was the focus of all her extracurricular efforts. I would have éclairs put in my locker or smashed on the front of it. Of course I couldn’t eat them,” she said with a choked laugh. Jake tried to find the humor in it, but he couldn’t. And then he thought of her the night of the barbecue, knowing she was pregnant, thinking he didn’t care about her at all, watching him with Amanda.
“So anyway, that day after gym class was kind of the last straw for me. I started experimenting with losing weight and it became obsessive. I saw a teen psychologist specializing in eating disorders, but it was an ongoing issue for me for a few years. I know this sounds silly and trivial—”
Jake shook his head, trying to find his voice. “Not at all.” He was trying to come to terms with everything she was telling him, and he felt guilty for his own part in making things harder for her.
“I know it’s something someone like you could never understand,” Claire said with a little smile.
“Someone like me?”
“Oh, come on, Jake, look at you. You have always been the image of male perfection.”
“Claire—”
“I would look at you…” She took a deep breath. “I would look at you and wish I were your girlfriend. I kept track of every single girl I ever saw you out with, and I compared myself to them, and I always thought I was never as pretty or as thin, and that you’d never go out with someone like me.”
Jake swallowed hard. His throat ached with emotion for her, and his throat burned with words he wished he could speak because she was wrong. He knew what it was like to be an outcast, to be on the outside looking in for his entire life.
Claire was infiltrating all the parts of him he had closed off. She was still sitting there on the bed, the sheet wrapped around her body like armor. He saw the pride etched in every inch of her beautiful face, and he saw the vulnerability, and it made him ache with a pain he didn’t know he could feel for someone else. He saw her as she’d been when she was young, the shyness, the embarrassment, the sadness. He wanted to erase it. He wanted to go back to when she was in high school and save her from it all. He wanted to go back and save both of them.
“We always have that little piece of who we were when we were growing up inside of us. You can’t completely lose it. Those experiences have made us who we are. If we have a daughter, I want to teach her she can be anything in the world, that she can do anything. I want her to be so strong she doesn’t care what the number is on the scale. I want to spare her everything I went through.”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t think there could be a better mother than you. I don’t think there could be a better role model than you. Every time I think I’ve figured you out, you floor me. I’ve never known anyone like you, and if you think any woman I’ve ever been with could compare to you, you’re wrong,” he said, approaching the bed, needing to close the distance between them. He needed to show her with his words, with his hands, with his lips how much she meant to him. He saw the doubt flicker across her eyes, noticed the stiffness in her shoulders.
She opened her mouth. He cut her off.
“Things have happened to me, and I’ve done things I’m not proud of, but if you somehow got it in your head that I didn’t look twice at you because of the way you looked you’ve got it all wrong. I’ve wanted you for a long, long time.”