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“The fuck it isn’t.Itake care of your needs. Period,” he growls.
My nerves come back tenfold when his eyes flicker down to my mouth, the words he said to me in the bar and again at the town meeting playing on a loop, until all I can think about are all of my needs he could fulfill that would end with me screaming his name.
It was probably just a slip of the tongue. Several different times. He definitely didn’t mean to say what he said, and I’m an idiot for spending so much time analyzing it. I am at the freaking cemetery on the anniversary of a damn tragedy. And sure, my family is acting like it’s a Fourth of July picnic and will probably be letting off fireworks soon, but still. Not the time nor the place to be losing my mind and getting turned on over something I’m definitely imagining.
“You’re allowed to be sad today,” Ford says under his breath, while the rest of my family starts shouting out every insult they can think of in alphabetical order. Another fun, yearly tradition they like to kick things off with.
“Assholes!”
“Bastards!”
“Cocksuckers!”
Shaking my head at him that he always seems to know what I’m thinking, minus the stupid dirty parts that suddenly won’t go away, I drop my head to the side and rest my cheek on his shoulder.
“Stop reading my mind.”
Ford presses his lips to the top of my head for a few seconds, avoiding my black and orange, fuzzy, cat ears headband, before pulling back.
“Baby, if I could read your mind, this would be a hell of a lot easier,” he mutters quietly.
My heart starts to pound so loudly I’m surprised it doesn’t wake the dead—while Ginger starts grabbing a few mason jars of apple cider moonshine out of one of the coolers, and Aunt Dawn starts taking the ribs off the grill, like the world didn’t suddenly come to a screeching halt.
Baby… not babe….
Why is that one change of a letter so different? So much more? It’s something you call a lover, not a friendly nickname, right? That friendly nickname is bad enough on my psyche, but baby?Baby?Said in his deep, gravelly voice, suddenly filling my head with the sound of him grunting out that word in my ear while his big body moves between my thighs, driving into me over, and—
“Wanna tell me what you’re thinking?”
I can feel a blush immediately heat my cheeks, and I’m thankful I still have one resting against Ford’s shoulder and he can’t see my face. “Absolutely not.”
A few minutes of silence stretches between us, enough time to calm my racing heart and get my mind out of the gutter, while Penny passes around orange Solo cups filled with moonshine.
Without getting up from the grass, Ford and I hold our cups in the air, along with everyone else after Penny flops back down in her captain’s chair next to Ginger.
“Here’s to you. Here’s to me,” my mom begins the yearly toast, lifting her cup higher in the direction of the headstones, while I lift my head from Ford’s shoulder.
“Fuck you both. We’re doing better without you. So here’s to me!” my aunt finishes, joining my mom in a cackling laugh before they both toss back their moonshine, and Penny and Ginger quickly follow with their own laughter.
Ford’s hand is suddenly sliding up my spine until he moves it under all my hair to wrap around the back of my neck, gently massaging while I swallow back the tears with a sip of my drink.
“Tell me something good about your dad you’ve never told me,” Ford orders in a quiet voice, his hand still working its magic on the back of my neck, while my family resumes their alphabetical insult shouting as they start digging into the ribs.
I squeeze my eyes closed to keep the tears where they are, even though I want to cry even harder than normal that he just instinctively knows I need this right now.
“My dad and I wore matching costumes every year for Halloween night,” I tell him, smiling to myself when I think of all the ridiculous ways he dressed up for me over the years. “When I was ten, I wanted to go with a Super Mario Bros. theme. And since I was going through anI hate dressesphase, he gave me the Mario costume, and he went as Princess Peach. The year I discovered the movieAnnie, he got me a curly red wig and shaved off all his hair so he could be an accurate representation of Daddy Warbucks. God, my mom was so mad at him about that. She made us all go to the local amusement park the next day.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a punishment.”
“She hid the sunscreen and all of his hats. He burnt the top of his head so badly he walked around for two days wearing a pair of his underwear on his head with ice packs shoved into them.”
Ford throws his head back, and a deep, rumbling laugh comes out of him. The sound makes my pulse race, just like it always does when I can get a rare laugh out of him.
“My mother’s favorite color has always been petty.”
“How have you never told me this before?” I slowly open my eyes and turn my head to look at him. As soon as our eyes meet, the smile on his face drops, and he cocks his head when something clicks together in his brain. “Now I understand why you’re the only person I know who is obsessed with Halloween but refuses to wear costumes.”
I just shrug. “It’s not as fun when you don’t have a partner in crime who doesn’t mind putting on a pretty princess dress and a crown. The surprise of what we were going to wear was the best part of it all. He would start asking me for some ideas in the middle of the summer. I would have no clue what we were doing until the morning of Halloween, when he would set the costumes out on the couch for me to find when I woke up.”
