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He smoothed his hand down her straight back. “Let’s go to bed.”
She turned then and met his eyes. She looked tired and sad, but clear. “Do you live here now?”
She asked the question without any kind of edge, only curiosity. Jay’s first instinct was defensive. He wanted to say no, god, of course not, that would be crazy.
Except he didn’twantto say that at all. So he made himself say the most true thing, even if it might lead to hurt. “I do if you want me to.”
They hadn’t come anywhere close to this topic before. He’d been with her almost nonstop since he’d found her on the grass in her father’s yard, he’d slept with her every night, but they hadn’t talked about it as an arrangement. She’d needed him, wanted him close, and he’d stayed close.
He wasn’t sure, honestly, if he would like living in this apartment, which was cool but not something he’d have picked on his own. He liked living at home, actually—though that was one of those things maybe a grown man shouldn’t admit.
But more than his mild discomfort with the apartment itself, more than his old comfort with living with his folks, he wanted to be with Petra. Everything else paled in comparison. He could be with her in a downtown flophouse or a big house like she’d grown up in. He could be with her in a castle or a cabin, or hell, a fucking tent. He didn’t care. If she was there, he’d be home.
“I don’t want to be without you,” she said. There was a fragile note in her words, a vulnerability that went so deep it about broke his heart.
“Then I live here now,” Jay told her. He pulled her close, and she tucked herself in, fitting with him like a puzzle piece.
He kissed the top of her head. “This is home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Petra sat in her carand tried to work up the will to go into her father’s house.
A full month had passed since the day she’d walked blithely in, carrying groceries and thinking about the meal she’d make that evening, and how her father and Jay were going to meet.
A full month since she’d discovered that her father had killed himself rather than face a prison sentence for his second DUI.
During that month, she’d been in the house a few times—to collect the clothes her father had laid out to be buried in, to gather up all his papers, to clean out the fridge and any other perishable food from the kitchen, a couple of times to find something she needed to complete the Mt. Everest of paperwork that followed the end of a life.
But each of those times, Jake had been with her. She hadn’t had to face it on her own.
He’d offered to come with her today, too, but her work today was something she needed to do on her own. As much as she feared it, she couldn’t imagine how someone who’d been a stranger to her father could be a help to her as she packed up his life.
At least not this first day. On this first day, she needed to be alone, with no one around to see her reactions, whatever they might be. It would take several days—she’d blocked out two weeks—to truly get the house ready for the estate sale and then the sale of the house. She intended to take each room in turn, and she intended to accept the help that had been offered, from Jake, and his mother, and Katie and Maude, and Keisha. The whole Bulls club had offered to be strong backs for any furniture that needed moving, too. Petra meant to take all that help.
Just not today.
Today, she, an only child and now an orphan, would go into the house she’d grown up in, on this, the last day it would ever look as it had always looked, and she would feel whatever she had to feel. Without an audience. Without causing anyone concern.
First, though, she had to get out of her car and go in.
Her phone buzzed. It sat in the console, and the vibration against the plastic there made it louder than usual. The way she nearly jumped out of her skin made it very clear, not that she’d had much doubt, how afraid she was to go into that house alone.
With a shaking hand, she picked up the phone.
