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I don’t say anything. There’s a tiny part of me that warms to his words like a freezing little girl to a roaring fire. Apart from my mom, he’s the only one I ever told about my dream of being an author. I thrill to the idea that Brody still believes in me like that.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I feel like I’m supposed to work for my dad.”
“But do you want to?”
No. “I don’t know.”
He pokes his fork at me. “You only get this one life, right? You can’t spend it doing something just because you think someone else wants you to.”
He’s right, of course. I stare at his earnest face, and realize that Brody doesn’t seem to hate me as much anymore. I guess he’s forgiven me for showing up at the barbecue. Not sure if he’s also forgiven me for what happened between us years ago, but I’m not about to ask.
After we clean the breakfast up, I ask him to take me home. “If I keep disappearing, Dad will worry about me. Besides, I am supposed to be here visiting him, after all.”
Brody nods. “You wanna come back here tonight? My bed’s pretty comfortable.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Keeping the shock off my face, I reply casually: “I have to go to work tomorrow. You’d need to drive me back home super early, so I can change and try to do my makeup to hide these bruises.”
“I can do that.”
Brody takes me back to Dad’s place on his bike. The whole way there, my head is filled with thoughts of spending the night with him again. It feels so much like it was when we were first married — the thrill of living together making every moment seem special and golden.
I miss it. I miss all of it. And even though I know I shouldn’t, I find myself hoping that him asking me to come back and stay the night again means something.
You’re going to get hurt, badly. You know that, don’t you?
Pushing my inner voice to the back of my mind, I nestle against Brody’s back, close my eyes, and let myself dream, just for a little while.
22
ROGUE
Idrop Rory off early Monday morning, while Ironwood is still mostly asleep. She makes me stop half a block from her house, hops off my bike, plants a soft kiss on my cheek, and scampers down the street to her dad’s house. I huff out a laugh as I watch her go: it’s almost like we’re in high school again and she snuck out at night after curfew to be with me.
Afterwards, I go grab some breakfast at Della’s Diner, then grab my truck and head out to work. My job today takes me to the house of a client named Sandra. She’s divorced, about forty years old, with a killer body that looks at least ten years younger. Her ex-husband is out of the picture, but he must have had some money. Sandra doesn’t work, but she still lives in the same fancy house she did when they were married. I don’t talk about her husband, though, and neither does she. Truth be told, neither one of us does much talking when I’m there.
Thankfully, she’s not around when I show up, so I just get straight to work. I’m not in the mood to talk to her — or anyone else — right now.
I need to be alone with my thoughts.
For most of my life, I’ve been more comfortable alone than with other people. Maybe that’s why I ended up following my asshole father into the landscaping business. Working for him was never part of the draw. But I like making things grow. Even more than that, plants are an escape from the fucking bullshit of humanity. Plants aren’t assholes. They don’t talk back. They don’t give a shit about human problems. All they want is sun and water and food. They can thrive even when everything else in life is chaos.
As I work, I finally let myself ponder the question of why I brought Rory back to my place and asked her to stay the night. Twice.
It’s something I’ve never asked another woman to do. She’s the only one I’ve ever shared a bed with. When we were teenagers, I used to dream of waking up next to her. I hated driving her back home to her parents’ place and spending the night without her. The first morning I woke up with her in my arms, I felt like I’d won the goddamn lottery. And I swore to myself I’d never forget how lucky I was — that I’d never, ever take her for granted, like my dad had with my mom.
Dad absolutely hated Aurora back then. Not that he ever really got to know her. Mostly, I think he hated the idea of her. By then, my mom had been gone a while, and he had started drinking more and more frequently. When he got drunk enough, he’d go from never, ever talking about my mom to talking about her pretty much non-stop. How she’d betrayed him. And then, he’d tell me that Aurora would eventually do the same to me.
“All women do, in the end,” he’d say, bitterness soaking his slurred words. “Even that too-good-for-you fancy pussy you got yourself. You fuckin’ wait.”
But I knew better than that. I loved Aurora like I loved life itself. She was my light in the darkness, just like her name.
But then, in the end, she did betray me.
Just like my dad said she would.
I hated like anything that he’d been right. Had he really seen it in her, even when I hadn’t been able to myself? Was love really as blind as people said it was?
Whether Dad knew something I didn’t or not, I vowed to myself I’d never let myself be fucked over by love again.
