AllFreeNovel
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I smiled. He’d suggested we spend the day at the rooftop pool in his building, but I hadn’t brought a bathing suit on this trip. Dane had told me we’d buy a bathing suit wherever I wanted. I’d picked Target. Then I’d taken great pleasure in taking Dane there, making him shop with me, and making him pay a whole twenty dollars at the checkout for the tankini I bought.
I had to give him points, because he’d done it without complaining. And now we were floating in the giant rooftop pool in his building, alone, the Chicago skyline spread out around us. The city I hated was almost beautiful from this high up. We’d been here all afternoon, and I didn’t want to leave.
“Part of being a stylist,” I explained, “is knowing when to spend money and when to jump on a bargain.” I gestured to my black-and-red bathing suit. “This was a bargain.”
It was hard to tell behind the sunglasses, but I was pretty sure Dane took a good look at my tankini, top to bottom. “I know how to shop for bargains,” he said. “I grew up as poor as you, remember?”
I did remember. “Baked beans,” I said. “One can is lunch and dinner! The best way to eat on a budget.”
“Canned tuna,” Dane said. “Green’s Market sold it cheap by the case once the expiry date had passed. It was worth the risk of food poisoning.”
I laughed. “That’s disgusting.”
“I know. I can’t even look at canned tuna now. Can’t smell it. The memories are too bad.”
I laughed again, and we were quiet for a second, because here we were, on a rooftop pool in one of the most expensive buildings in Chicago. Dane had come such a long way from that kid with glasses whose parents were never home, who ate canned tuna while he taught himself to program.
“Why are we the only ones here?” I asked him as we floated to the deep end, then started to circle back.
“Because I told the concierge I wanted the pool to myself for the afternoon.”
“And he made it happen, just like that?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
I looked him over again, trying to be discreet about it. Dane was wearing black swim trunks, and he had that nice, thin line of hair leading from his belly button down into the waistband. What a perfect line of hair that was. His stomach was tight with muscle, too. He had a light smattering of brown hair on his chest—not too much, not too little. I knew a lot of men who waxed their chests. It looked better for photographs that way, but I’d always found it disconcerting in real life. Probably because I subconsciously compared most male chests to Dane’s.
“What?” Dane said when I was silent for too long.
“I’m just thinking,” I said, looking away to cover up my ogling.
“About what?”
I blinked up at the sky, where clouds were moving over the sun. The words bubbled up out of me, though to be honest they’d been hovering on the edge of my mind since I’d gotten off the plane in Chicago. “Do you think I should visit my mother while I’m here?”
If he was surprised by the change of topic, he didn’t show it. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you should.”
“Really?” I frowned. “It’s something a good daughter would do.”
“According to who?” His voice was hard.
I glanced at him in surprise. “According to everyone, I guess. Everyone thinks you should be nice to your mother.”
Dane pushed up his sunglasses and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Not everyone has your mother, Ava. She’s bad for you. Even when she wasn’t sick, she was the shittiest parent I’ve ever seen. And I had shitty parents myself.”
I watched his face, the tightness in his jaw as he spoke. I was always so steeped in my own misery when I talked about my mother, I’d never paid close attention to Dane. “You don’t like her,” I said.
“Of course I don’t like her.” Now he was tense, trying to keep his voice calm. “Do you know how many times you came over to our apartment with tears in your eyes? You never wanted to talk about it, but I always knew. The days you came over looking sad, the days you were quiet except to call yourself fat or ugly—I knew those were the days she’d done something new. Told you that you were stupid, or to stop whining, or that you were in her way. You used to do your homework at the library until they closed every night because you didn’t want to go home. Remember the time you asked her to go to a parent-teacher meeting because the teacher had asked for it? She laughed in your face and said You must be joking. You looked like she’d hit you. I was fucking furious. I still am.”
My jaw had dropped during this speech, and my heart had sped up. I remembered the parent-teacher incident, though I’d suppressed it until now. I remembered telling Aidan about it at the time. Had Dane been in the room? I must not have noticed if he was.
“I didn’t…” I tried to make the words form. “I didn’t talk about any of that.”
“No, you didn’t,” Dane said. “I may have been an antisocial nerd and a virgin, but when a girl comes over to your apartment with tears in her eyes, you fucking notice. At least, I did. She did it to you over and over again. So no, I don’t think you need to visit her, even though she’s sick. And I think that anyone who wants to judge you for it can fuck off.”
He slid off his floating chair and into the water, graceful for a guy so big. In two strokes he was at the edge of the pool. I watched him pull up onto the tiled deck, his arms flexing, the muscles moving in his back. I stayed where I was, in the water, still in shock.
He’d seen. Dane had seen everything.
