Worth It All(55)
The trailer door opened and she looked up and watched Jenny come in. “Hey.” She’d left Jenny a message, but she hadn’t seen her to give her an update. Jenny dropped her purse and went to the fridge.
“You’re home early. Have fun?”
“Yeah.” Jenny poured herself a glass of milk and joined her at the table, grabbing a cookie from the paper plate in front of her. “Yum.”
“Casey and I made slice and bake.” She studied her cousin. “You didn’t have too much fun if you’re home at ten, having a glass of milk.”
Jenny shrugged and bit into the sugar cookie. “I think we should talk about you. You slept over last night.” She waggled her eyebrows.
“Yeah.”
“Well, come on, girl, spill. Was it good? Tell me everything.”
Everything would be way too much to tell. She’d come undone under his very capable hands and mouth. It was impossible not to. One night in his arms and she felt like something huge had changed inside her.
Jenny leaned her face in close. “My God. Are you about to cry? If you are I’d say it was way better than good.”
“It was…incredible. He was incredible.”
Jenny squealed and sat back.
“But it definitely wasn’t the responsible thing to do.”
“I bet it was worth it,” Jenny said, picking out another cookie.
“Yeah, but there’s a battle going on inside me, complete with swords and Roman headgear, shouting about shame and stupidity, while my heart and my body are more like Julie Andrews spinning on top of a mountain.”
“I’d go with Julie Andrews. I mean, look at their faces.” Jenny tapped on the open textbook. “Those people do not look happy. No singing songs and eating jam and bread going on there.”
No, but fun and happiness didn’t always lead to a better future. She knew that. So why was this so hard? Why was her heart putting up such a fight? “I’ve got Casey and—”
“And everything you do is for Casey.”
“Yes, it is.” Because that’s what she’d promised her daughter before she’d even been born. That every choice she made would be putting her first. “Last night I was thinking of myself.”
“Is that so bad? Does taking care of Casey exclude doing anything for yourself? Would it hurt to have both?”
“Maybe. I mean I wanted him, so much that I stopped thinking about anything else.” Her eyes fell closed. “I was getting lucky with my daughter sleeping right down the hall.”
Jenny broke off a piece of cookie. “Is that what it was? Getting lucky?”
“No.” It was way more than that, which scared her even more.
“So, what comes next?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what should come next. I don’t even know what I want to come next.”
“I call liar on that one.” Jenny stood and took her glass to the sink.
True. She’d like about ten more nights in a row exactly like last night. “With the way I ran out of there this morning, I’ll be lucky if anything happens at all.”
“Mmm. Let me guess, you woke up and your intense sense of duty and work and striving for perfection kicked in, and you ran out of there with your tail on fire.”
“Pretty much.” She’d considered coming home in the middle of the night, but waking Casey, driving home at midnight, hadn’t seemed like a good mom move either. So she’d stayed, slept with her body pressed tight to Jake’s. Maybe what scared her the most was how much she wanted to feel him there again. How much she wanted to be with him in any capacity.
“Are you afraid it won’t work out?”
“Work out?” She turned to stare at Jenny still at the sink. “What does that even mean? We date? I become a single mom with a boyfriend? And then what? It fizzles out and six months or a year from now I have another and then another, and Casey grows up with men coming and going?” It made her stomach hurt to think about it.
“Why are you so sure it won’t work out for you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m not sure there’s even such a thing as working out.”
“That’s sad.”
“Do you think there is? How would we know, Jenny? I’ve certainly never seen it.”
“I have. All the time.” Jenny grinned. “Don’t you watch TV?”
Paige shook her head. “Maybe you have to have it to believe in it.”
“Or…maybe you have to believe in it to have it.”
That seemed like a mighty big risk. Her mom had always been willing to risk it, the leap-before-you-look type, and it hadn’t turned out well for her at all. In fact, most times it had turned out very badly.