She nodded. “Ok. I think there’s some stuff I need to tell you too,” she replied with an edge of uncertainty. She chewed her bottom lip and cast her eyes down to her hands knotted in her lap.
I took a deep breath, preparing to dive in headfirst. “Ok. I had sort of a rough patch after my mom died. I was the typical out-of-control teen, not giving a fuck about grades or my future. I skipped more than I attended. And I had a temper. Shit, honestly, I still do.
“There was this girl named Amanda. Cheerleader, blonde, perky…and I was wild, rugged and had already collected quite a few tattoos and even more piercings.”
“Really?” she asked with genuine interest. “What kinda piercings?”
“Other than the ones you know about…eyebrow, lip, septum…”
She couldn’t hide the flush of her cheeks as her eyes wandered to my crotch, worrying the hell out of her bottom lip.
“Um, no. Hell no,” I smiled, with a slight shake of my head. “Nothing down there is pierced. But good to know you’re concerned.”
Her cheeks went from pink to beet red. “Oh God.”
I laughed it off and took her hands in mine before she wrung them raw. “I don’t really do the piercings any more. I guess I grew out of them. Well, most of them,” I shrugged. “But yeah… I was rough around the edges. Not the guy you wanted picking your daughter up for a date. Amanda was always nice to me though. We started as friends; we’d hang out, talk…nothing more. She was dating this guy—captain of the football team—and one night he beat the shit outta her. She showed up at my house, busted up and bleeding, scared to tell anyone because his dad was some douchebag politician. Anyway, you can guess what happened next.”
Kami nodded. “You beat the guy up,” she said just above a whisper.
“Yeah. After that, it made sense for me and Amanda to be together. She was scared to go anywhere without me, and I felt like I needed to constantly watch her. Eventually, we became more than friends. Then, after graduation, we got married.”
Her jaw dropped before pulling down into a horrified sneer. She snatched her hands from mine. “You’re…married?”
“Divorced. Amanda and I tried to make it work for a couple of years, but we just weren’t right together. We had nothing in common. We were from two different worlds. Other than sex, there was nothing to bind us.” I looked away, searching for the best way to make Kami understand. “And even that faded.”
My eyes met hers, and I swear I saw something soften in them. They reflected mine, so full of confusion, pain, anger, longing. Maybe she understood more than I knew. Maybe she could see and accept my past just as I had hoped to accept hers.
“Amanda ended up pregnant. But not by me.”
“What?”
“Yeah. She cheated on me. I found a pregnancy test in the bathroom trash, and I asked her about it. Eventually, she admitted the affair and left me for the other guy.”
“What a minute—how did you know the baby wasn’t yours?”
I scrubbed a hand over my face a bit more forcefully than I intended. I hated reliving this shit. I was undoubtedly over Amanda, but that didn’t make it any easier to rehash.
“I always used protection. Even with her. Amanda didn’t want to get on birth control because she claimed it would make her fat or some shit. I knew condoms weren’t 100 percent so I thought there was a chance the baby could be mine. But she admitted to having unprotected sex with that motherfucker.”
“Blaine,” Kami whispered, the sweet sound of her voice pulling me out of my past hell and bringing me back to the present with her. “I’m sorry.”
I brushed my fingers across her jaw. “Don’t be, baby. It was for the best. See, you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved. They have to want to fight, too. They have to see that they’re actually worth the fight. Amanda didn’t see that. She went right back to that asshole, right back to the guy who roughed her up. I agreed to step back and let them be happy. I knew that we should have never gotten married. If that was her choice, I wasn’t going to stand in her way.”
Her hand covered mine on her cheek, and she nuzzled into the touch. “But?”
I nodded. Of course there was a “but.” These stories were never cut and dry.
“The guy, Clark, came into Ms. Patty’s diner one day with his friends. I would help out over there sometimes. He knew that and wanted to rouse me up. He and his shit-stain minions started being obnoxious, ordering food and sending it back, throwing shit on the floor. I approached him, told them to leave. He didn’t take that too well, so I taught him some manners.”