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“Oh my God,” she mumbled, her fingers working their way up into my hair as I snuggled closer into the space between her neck and shoulder.
“It’s okay – I don’t really give a shit.” I took a deep breath, inhaling her scent before I went on. “The social worker said no one knew my real name, so they gave me that one.”
“How did you get to be Stark, then?”
“It’s Landon’s last name,” I said. “I took his name about three months after I started fighting for him. He’s the closest thing I ever had to a father, and I wanted a tie to someone, even if it wasn’t real.”
“Just like Mister Fluffy,” Raine said.
“Not the fucking dog again!” I growled, tilting my head to look up at her.
“He didn’t have a name either.” Raine pushed my hair behind my ear and trailed her fingers down to my neck. “I never knew where he came from or how he got where he did. He had nightmares, too, you know.”
“The dog had nightmares?” I snorted.
“He did!” she insisted. “He would whimper and growl in his sleep.”
“You know I don’t like that shit,” I reminded her, “comparing me to a fucking dog.”
“I loved Mister Fluffy,” Raine said quietly, “and I love you, too. You have a lot in common. He was fiercely loyal to me and would try to protect me when people he didn’t know came around. It took a long time for him to trust me, but once he did, I couldn’t have asked for a better companion.”
I thought about it for a bit, but I still didn’t like it.
“What did he think of your boyfriends?” I heard myself ask.
“He didn’t like Andrew too much,” she said. “He did eventually stop growling at him, though.”
“What about the others?”
“There weren’t any.”
“Why not?”
“No one ever…appealed to me in that way.” I felt her shrug her shoulders. “After my dad died, I had Andrew. He understood what I was going through, so I didn’t have to explain it to him. Once we broke up, I had so much else going on in my life when my friends were dating and stuff, it was just too much. I didn’t want to have to explain to some guy why I would start crying out of the blue, or why I was in therapy, or why I kept visiting with lawyers even when they said they couldn’t do anything else for me.”
“So you never went out on another date?”
“Well,” Raine laughed. “I tried to once.”
“Tried?”
“This guy asked me out when I first went to college,” she said. “We went to dinner, and Andrew showed up and kind of caused a scene.”
“What did he do?”
“He was really mad when he found out I had a date. He showed up at the restaurant and started questioning the poor
guy. He was acting like an overbearing parent, and when my date figured out he was my ex, he just threw some money down on the table and walked out. He said he wasn’t going to put up with that kind of…stuff. He never spoke to me again.”
“Andrew’s a dick.”
“He’s not; he just wanted to protect me. He was afraid I would get hurt.”
“If I had been on that date with you, I would have fucked him up.”
“Bastian! You can’t just do that.”
“Why the fuck not?”
