“But it’s not the one you’re wearing right now.” Brooke wiggled her fingers, still waiting.
I pulled her up to sit, and while I took off my T-shirt, Brooke managed to take off her sweatshirt all on her own.
Her beautiful, yet very tired-looking green eyes met mine after I pulled my shirt down her body to cover her back up.
Before I could put the sweatshirt away, Brooke hadwrapped her arms around my now naked torso and tried to pull me onto the bed. “We should sleep,” she muttered sleepily, pressing her face into my stomach.
I raked a hand through her hair, a chuckle rumbling in my chest. “We need to brush our teeth first now that you’re awake.”
Brooke groaned. “Only if you carry me.”
I picked her up immediately. “I’ll carry you anywhere for the rest of our lives if you ask me to,mi princesa.”
23
BROOKLYN
Reece was waiting in the car outside, and all I wanted to do was pop into Claire’s to pick up our coffee orders when all of a sudden, someone tapped on my shoulder.
“Brooklyn?” a rather raspy voice spoke quietly.
I didn’t recognize the voice, and since the Barista was just handing me my two coffees I wasn’t thinking, let alone looking at whoever tried to speak to me.
“Yeah?” I said, then finally turned around only to stare into a face that was both familiar and alien to me.
She looked sort of put-together, though there was an emptiness in her eyes when she looked at me. Her blonde hair was stuck up into a bun and her outfit was lazy.
All those years, I’d hoped she was doing miserably. Every time she was reaching out, Dad shot her down for me because I never wanted to meet this woman. Someone who’d been so desperate to get rid of me, then come crawling back seemed like a person who didn’t know how to live their life in the slightest.
But she looked… okay.
I really wish she didn’t.
“Before you runaway?—”
I already turned around and made my way to the exit doors. Luckily, I paid online when I ordered the coffees an hour ago, so I was free to go.
I wanted to forget her voice, wanted to unsee her face.
The only times I saw her face were in pictures when I was younger, but I could barely remember those. Emory threw out the last pictures of her sister when I was ten and confirmed I didn’t want to have any memories of her, they weren’t mine anyway.
“Brooklyn.” Her hand laid on my shoulder again, but I didn’t want to cause a scene in a café, so I didn’t scream.
“Don’t you dare touch me,” I said, keeping my voice down.
Millie removed her hand from my shoulder, sighing. “Can we please talk?”
“No.”
“But, Brooklyn, I jus?—”
“Leave me alone.” I took a step back, putting space between us.
It was a miracle she even knew my name. Dad said she never bothered to learn it, and she could’ve easily asked her parents for it.
I remembered my grandparents to an extent, and up until I learned why I never saw them anymore at some point, I held onto those memories like my life depended on them.
My grandpa died a couple of years ago, but that was okay because the few memories I had of him drowned in the pool of his lies a long time before he passed. My grandma was still alive, as far as I knew anyway, but I hadn’t seen her in about fifteen years. The few memories I had of her were also tainted by the reality of what she’d done to my father, even if he definitely never told me the whole truth about her.
