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“Friends can talk about whatever you want,” I answer in a tight voice.
She wraps her arms around my waist and hugs me. “Then I guess friends can do this too.”
It’s awkward as fuck with me standing there, not hugging her back, but we stay like that, anyway. I’m not going to push her. If she wants to touch me, she can. She could do this all night, and I wouldn’t bitch about it. I close my eyes and inhale the top of her hair, the soft scent of coconut tickling my nose. I don’t know what it is about this girl that’s crawled beneath my skin, but I think I actually like the little stalker.
We sink into the water, and Bianca slowly falls away, floating onto her back to stare up at the stars.
“Should we see if we can make this night last forever?” She quotes a lyric from one of the songs I’ve been teaching her.
I almost tell her it can. That we can make this night, and the next night and the rest of our nights go on forever. But that sounds insane, even to my own ears. We haven’t known each other long enough for me to feel this way. And I already know when it inevitably crashes and burns, I’ll regret playing this game with her. Because she’s not someone I’m going to forget.
“What rule do you want to break next?” I ask, forcing myself back into the moment.
“Have I created a monster?” She laughs, the sound carrying on the breeze. She’s forgotten her nerves about getting caught. Now it’s just the two of us, rebels in the night, not a regret to be found.
I ease myself back against the wall, resting there while I consider it. “I’ll think of something.”
She swims in my direction, her arms slicing through the water with practiced efficiency. “I know a rule we can break.”
“Yeah?” My eyes meet hers when she stops in front of me, bobbing in the water as she reaches up to touch my face.
“How about this one?” She pulls me toward her, and I bend without protest, groaning when her lips touch mine again.
This time, she doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t doubt it. She kisses me like I’m hers, and I steal every second of it. Because right now, I know she’s definitely mine.
Chapter 15
Madden
“That’s everything.” I toss the folder onto the table in front of Ace and Birdie, then head to the fridge to grab a beer.
I don’t want to watch them dissect my life. I never intended to divulge all the messy details, though they could easily look them up if they wanted to. But I need Ace to know I’m not delusional. He’s not sure he can trust my fractured memories, and I can’t say I blame him when I’ve teetered on the edge of sanity for so long.
“The girl we picked up has blue hair,” Ace observes as he studies an old photo. “Bianca’s hair was black.”
“It was obviously a wig.” Birdie sighs as if her husband should know better by now. The reformed bad girl might look sweet and innocent, but she has her own sordid past, and we all know she was a master of disguises.
“Why would she wear a blue wig?” Ace grumbles.
“Because she wants to hide who she is.” Birdie rolls her eyes.
I pull out a chair at the kitchen table and sit down across from her. “You think so?”
“A blue wig is either a fashion statement or an identity scrambler. There are no in-betweens. And the way that girl was dressed in shabby-ass clothing, I highly doubt she was trying to make a statement.”
“She was wearing fake glasses, too.” I stare at the wall, wondering where the fuck it all went wrong. The Bianca I knew would have never been caught dead in the clothing we found her in. Her style was simple and classy, or at least, I thought it was. But I’m beginning to think I never really knew her at all.
“She’s really beautiful.” Birdie examines one of the old photographs. Bianca was only seventeen in that picture. It was the same year I met her.
“So do you agree that it’s her?” I ask because I really can’t tell what they’ve concluded at this point.
Birdie reaches for the missing poster, reading the description out loud. “Five foot two inches, one hundred and twenty pounds, black hair, brown eyes. I mean, their features are similar from what I could gather in the short time I saw her, but I’d really need to see her cleaned up. Maybe you could get a photo of her now to compare. This girl has been living on the streets for a while, and she’s a lot thinner, so it’s not super easy to tell.”
“It’s her,” I bite out, refusing to accept any other alternative.
