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He flashes a slight, almost predatory grin.Crap. He’s on the hunt, and I’m starting to get the feeling that the thing he’s hunting is information about me. Instead of answering my question, he purses his lips thoughtfully. “Hm, a politician, perhaps. Or a pirate?”
“Pirates aren’t a thing anymore,” I stubbornly correct.
“Adorable that you believe that. Wrong,utterly wrong, but adorable, nonetheless.” Lucas chuckles, amusement glinting in his amber and brown eyes. “All right, not a pirate. Maybe he’s in the movies. That would explain your being born and raised in L.A., although your mother was in Idaho.”
“Why are you so obsessed with my father?” I lean back, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Because you’re so reluctant to talk about him, of course. You’ve presented me with a tantalizing mystery, you can’t expect me to simply ignore it.” His eyes are now burning the way a cat’s does when it has its eyes on its prey.
I sigh as I accept the fact that he really isn’t going to let this go. “Fine. You really want to know? He might be a pirate, a politician, or a movie star for all I know. I never met the man.”
Lucas cocks his head to one side, steepling his hands and tapping the tips of his fingers together. “So, you visited your mother recently, then?”
“How do you know that?”
“You have a younger sister, and you’re young yourself, so I assume she moved away recently.”
I wriggle in my seat as the pressure of his questions weighs on my chest. I’m usually pretty good at keeping my walls up and not divulging too much information about personal topics that I prefer not to get into, but something about the blunt directness of Lucas’s questions makes it harder for me to deflect. He seems to truly want to know the answers, and that’s disarming as hell in a very dangerous way.
“Well, you’re wrong on both fronts,” I say after a beat. “She was hospitalized when I was sixteen, and was shuffled between various facilities for a while. When California burned through her insurance, she had to go elsewhere. Idaho has a lot of low-cost programs, so she was sent there when she ran out of options.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he murmurs, sounding almost sincere. “Low-cost programs for what? Something chronic, it sounds like.” He shoots me a self-deprecating little smile. “Although I would be loath to assume incorrectly twice.”
I snort, rolling my eyes at the way he manages to sound both cocky and self-deprecating at the same time. “I don’t know if chronic is the right word. She has… issues.”
“Issues,” he says thoughtfully, giving the word a lot more weight than its syllables should be able to carry. “Is that the medical term?”
I huff a sad little laugh and shake my head. “I don’t know what the correct term is, honestly. She’s been diagnosed with all kinds of things, and the diagnosis changes every time she sees a new doctor. It’s not the doctors’ fault, though. It’s not like they’re all interpreting the same symptoms differently or anything. It’s her.”
Lucas is silent, his face soft and curious, inviting me to elaborate. I swallow hard and give him an apologetic look. Even though it’s a golden rule of mine not to burden others with my past, his concern and curiosity is opening my mouth faster than I can think to keep it closed. Or maybe it’s the nervous energy needing expelled from my body. It’s either share the dark parts of my past, or sit here and try not to imagine him naked.
“I haven’t talked about this since the last time I tried to explain it to Cassidy, my sister,” I continue. “I remember when I was little—ten or so—I used to read psychology books obsessively, trying to figure her out. Weird, I know, but she was always dragging me and Cassidy along to her appointments, and we’d be stuck in the waiting room for an hour or more, and there were always textbooks and psychology magazines. So I would read them to Cassidy to keep her still and pass the time.”
He looks impressed. I ignore the warm glow his attention is creating inside my chest and go on. “My mother… well, one day she’d be acting a certain way, and I’d think okay, she’s definitely bipolar. The next, maybe she’s a narcissist. Then borderline personality disorder. The problem wasn’t the doctors. The problem was she was never the same from one day to the next.”
“That must have been difficult for you.”
I shrug, “Not really. I mean yes, absolutely. When she was around, life was difficult. But starting when I was about six, she’d just disappear for days at a time, and that would give me space to manage things better at home. I was able to create routines for Cassidy and me, keep us fed and clean… all that stuff. It was always so much harder when she was there with us. She’d yell at me for things like ‘getting into the food’ at mealtimes, or running the bath when she apparently didn’t want me to, then have a breakdown about what a horrible mother she was, start hallucinating or generally freaking out, which would terrify Cassidy. Then I’d have to put Cassidy to bed and calm her down without doing anything to set mom off.”
I’ve never spoken about it like this before, from my perspective, without worrying about hurting anyone’s feelings. I know Cassidy has spent most of her life feeling guilty, believing that she stole my childhood, and speaking candidly to her about all of this would only confirm her fears. But now that I’ve started talking to Lucas, I almost don’t want to stop. There’s just so much junk inside that I’ve kept locked down.
“And no one ever intervened on your behalf? Your pirate father never showed up to take you away?”
From Lucas’s tone, I get the sense that he’s trying to add some humor and keep the conversation light, but there’s no hope of that. I’m in too deep now, and he keeps asking questions I’ve been dying to answer my whole life. I never realized how heavy this all is.
“No. He never did. We’d have social workers stop by once in a while.” I glance out the window. “But somehow, she always knew they were coming, and would be there to greet them. She’d clean the house, bathe us and feed us, be super sweet and functional for a little while. She would give them all the information on her therapy and whatever else, then they’d go away again. She’d stay like that for a while—a week, sometimes two—and then she’d inevitably spiral. Then it was a few weeks of awfulness while she tried and failed, then she’d disappear, and I’d take over again.”
He frowns. “You say you never met your father. Not even when your mother was pregnant with your sister?”
I shrug. “I met a few men, but my mom is wild. One of them might have been Cassidy’s dad, but I’m pretty sure none of them were mine. She and I don’t really look much alike. She’s blonde and tan with blue eyes, California all over. I can get a tan if I dedicate to it, but she was born golden. Our faces aren’t even the same shape.”
“Do you resent your parents?” he asks.
“I used to,” I confess. “My father for being MIA, my mom for being out of her mind. Then later, I resented my mother for holding me to impossible standards when she couldn’t even do the bare minimum. But then it dawned on me why she did that. She didn’t want me to become her, and she desperately needed me to be functional because she couldn’t. I couldn’t envision a man capable of staying with her for longer than a month or two. Our father, or fathers, probably don’t even know we exist. I can’t blame them for extracting themselves from a toxic relationship, especially if they didn’t know she was pregnant.”
Lucas nods, a surprising glint of understanding shining in his eyes. “I can relate to the bit about holding you to impossible standards. When I was younger, my father would get himself locked up in some deal or other, and when it was clear that the deal wouldn’t work out in his favor, he’d call me in to solve the problem.” He gives me a little smile. “It’s only one of the reasons why I left his company to begin my own.”
“What are the other reasons?”
