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“I saw her at the grocery store last week,” she said quietly. “Her kids were giving her hell.”
I snorted.
“That’s an understatement, I’m sure,” I said. “Because those kids are pretty awful. I love ‘em, but Jesus Christ, they’re a handful.”
“They were begging her to give them snacks and toys at the checkout.” She snickered. “I’m honestly not sure whether supermarkets are geniuses or assholes. I’m leaning toward assholes seeing as they damn well know that those kids are going to beg to have whatever toy they see while they’re standing in line for a long amount of time.”
“Assholes for sure,” I agreed. “And they’re not even good toys, either. They’re shitty toys. Ones that break within five minutes of buying them. Then they bank on you not bothering to bring it back seeing as it was only a two-dollar toy.”
“I bought a set of hangers there for a dollar,” she said, leaning up so that she could look up at me. “I returned them because every single one of them was broken when I got them home.”
“You wasted more in gas to get them back there than you did in the money you received by returning them,” I admitted.
She shrugged. “It’s the principle of the matter, though. If I buy something, it should last. Kind of the same that goes with the kid toys.”
I chuckled, loving the way the grin lit her face.
The only light that was on in the entire room was the television, and the colors were playing over the features of her face like a kaleidoscope.
I lifted my fingers and started to play with her hair almost absently, and when I finally realized what I was doing, I didn’t want to stop.
She had really soft hair, and it felt like silk between my work-roughened fingers.
“That feels good,” she whispered. “Nobody’s played with my hair like this since I was a kid.”
“Who used to do it for you?” I asked softly.
“My mom or my sister. My dad did it upon occasion, but that was when he was forced to by my mom. And not play with it per se, but brush it and stuff. I’ve always liked my hair played with,” she whispered.
“You don’t talk about your parents,” I said. “Why?”
She sighed, sounding like she was worn out. And when her eyes closed, I regretted the question immediately.
She reopened them and turned so that she was lying on my lap, her head almost laying on top of my dick.
I mentally berated myself and told my inner sexual deviant to chill the fuck out.
“You told me not to talk about him anymore,” she teased, the smile that breached her mouth taking my breath away.
I tugged lightly on the strand of hair that was still in my fingers.
“Tell me, woman,” I ordered.
“My parents never really liked Mal,” she admitted. “But we’d had a lot of problems before that. Mal was just the last straw. My sister stayed with them. She’s the golden child.”
I frowned. “What happened with your parents?”
She blew out a frustrated breath, causing the hair on her face to go flying in disarray all around her head.
“I never really conformed to what my mother wanted me to be,” she admitted. “My mom and dad were society snobs. They wanted the best of the best.”
“Then they should’ve liked Mal,” I found myself saying.
“They did… at first,” she said. “But let me back up. When I was younger, I never really dated because I wasn’t part of the in-crowd. I was that weird band geek that played the tuba, read books in her spare time, and mostly stayed to herself. When I went to college, I decided to go to a two-year college instead of wasting my time at a four-year college, which pissed my mother off, seeing as I was supposed to go to Penn State.”
I ran my finger down the line of her jaw, causing her breath to hitch.
“That was just the beginning of the end. Then, I met Mal.” She snickered. “It’s funny, but my parents had already been well past trying to get me to do anything that they wanted me to do. They’d written me off and pretty much stomached me being there up until the wedding that they refused to pay for. Mal told them to go fuck themselves, and I’ve only spoken to them on the rare holiday here and there ever since.”
I blinked.
“That… is sucky,” I admitted. “My mom was the best person in the world.”
Her face went soft. “I’ve heard stories about her.”
“She was a great lady,” I admitted. “Everyone in town loved the hell out of her.”
“And I heard that she loved the hell out of her kids… especially her boys,” Desi whispered. “Malloy tells me such good things about her. How she doted on y’all. Baseball practice. Football practice. Martial arts practice. Wrestling practice. Roping practice. Her boys named it off, and their momma took them to it.”
