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Smoke catches up with me in the hall right before my dad’s room. It feels a little strange to be in here without my dad. This room is totally his, from the books stacked up on the far end to the leather jackets hanging from hangers on pegs behind the door.
“You can close the door,” I toss over my shoulder without looking. “Everyone will know not to disturb us that way.”
I don’t turn around until I hear the door click shut. Maybe I shouldn’t because it might mess things up, but when I turn and see how Smoke’s eyes are deep gray pools of uncertainty and even pain, my whole body starts vibrating. I know that look. I can imagine myself as a child, looking that way day after day. That’s the look of someone used to being abandoned. Someone who is afraid to make connections with other people—real connections—because they know those people could disappear at any given moment.
He took a risk with me. I get that now. In more ways than just the operation that he was working on. He let me in that night in ways I don’t think he lets many people. I got close, under the surface, and I might just have let him in because the thought of him going anywhere now is crushing already.
I don’t know who is more shocked when I race across the small room and throw my arms around his thick, corded neck. I run one hand through his short hair, dragging his face to mine. I angle my head just right as he takes my mouth. I melt against him at the force of the kiss. I hadn’t meant for it to feel so possessive. Or maybe possessing is more like it. I feel possessed. By him. When he strokes my tongue with his, then suckles it into his mouth and groans like I’m the sugar melting all over his taste buds, it’s more erotic than I could ever believe. My legs get weak, and I have to pull away so I can say what I need to say before my brain gets totally scrambled. I take Smoke’s hand and lead him to the bed. He hesitates before he sits, and I know it’s weird. This whole thing is pretty crazy.
I don’t release his hand. Instead, I keep his rough palm and his fingers locked between mine. I trace my finger over his knuckles and then over a vein at the back of his tanned, inked hand. He groans at the contact, and hello, hard nipples and wet panties.
“I’ve been thinking about what to say….” My voice is husky and breathless. I have to swallow thickly to clear the sexed-up tone out of it because I do want to get out what I need to get out, no matter how my nipples might be shards of glass or how badly my lady biscuit is aching. “I was mad,” I admit quietly, studying the gray and brown flecks in the white floor tile. “I was so mad. And hurt. I thought it would be a great thing if I never saw you again. I thought that all the way home. I told myself you were an asshole so many times that it was like a mantra.”
“An asshole mantra,” Smoke says softly.
“Yeah, but then I got home, and I just felt sick. I know it was the anxiety, but I kept thinking that maybe it was morning sickness—except, in this case, night sickness—and it reminded me so quickly that this is bigger than fear, half-truths, or negative emotions. It’s bigger than you not telling me something and me taking it to heart and refusing to listen and be understanding. I don’t want that to be our story. What I want is to be the mother that mine wasn’t, but I can never be the father that mine is.
“However this goes, whether we’re friends or more than friends, I always want to be a team because this baby inside me? I’m convinced the baby’s a she, but if the baby’s a he, then he or she will be a person just like us. Except I don’t want our baby to grow up to be just like us. We might be just fine, good people, but I guess…I guess what I’m trying to say is that every parent wants what’s best for their child and even better because they want to fix all the mistakes and crappy things they went through in their own life. It’s more than just a want for me. It’s a need. I’m willing to take myself out of myself and focus on that. Everything else is just noise, I guess. Or static. Or whatever people say. It’s nothing. That’s what it is. Nothing that can’t be talked out, and nothing we can’t get through if we take ourselves out of ourselves and focus on what’s really important.”
