AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When he stopped at the roller blades, she came back to his side, showed him her phone screen. “I like roller blading at night.”
In this part of New Orleans? Hopefully she did it with a gun and pepper spray. “That’s when I do my five-mile run. Somewhere between eleven to two a.m.” Which was when he found it hardest to sleep. “Maybe I’ll meet you here one night and we’ll see who can keep up.”
She made some gestures, signing the words before she typed them. He liked watching her doing it, even without knowing what they meant. Yet. He glanced at her screen.
“Thinking about your family keeps you awake?” she asked.
“Sometimes. I run it out, and sleep like a baby.”
A tight smile at the semi-lie. Then she crooked two of her fingers, dipping them twice, tilting her head toward the bathroom. He lifted his hand to emulate, and she adjusted his fingers for him, mouthing it. “R.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He pretty much had the sign language alphabet down, but translating it in conversation took longer to process. An R dipped twice. Rest Room.
As she excused herself, he practiced the gesture once or twice. Figuring it was okay to explore what seemed like the “public” spaces in her absence, he stopped at a shelf, studying a photo of a man who had to be her dad, holding a very young Skye on his lap. She looked about three, and she was laughing. He had a guitar propped next to him, his other hand resting on it. Their surroundings looked like a studio.
She was as adorable as Aubrey, which made his heart hurt. When Skye rejoined him, he nodded at the photo. “Is he a professional musician?” he asked.
She spelled it out slow, letting him follow the letters. He spoke them aloud as she signed them.
“W… A… S.... He was. Oh. Sorry.”
The ghost pain in her expression said the loss would always hurt, no matter when it had happened. “Mom?” he ventured. He hadn’t seen any pictures of her yet.
In answer, she brought him back to the computer screens and parked herself in front of them. She gestured to a rolling stool he could pull up next to her. When she rested her hands on the keyboard, she took a breath, preparation.
He put a light hand on her shoulder. “Don’t if it’s too hard,” he said. “You don’t have to do that just because I was curious.”
“You didn’t ask just because you’re curious,” she typed. “That’s why I’ll tell you.”
With that cryptic comment, she erased the line and started typing from a blank screen. He brought the stool closer so he could shift his hand to the top of her chair. His fingers rested between her shoulder blades, doing a light stroke. It felt like she needed it. She didn’t tell him to stop.
“I don’t remember much of what he told me about her, but he wrote a song called “Thank You.” It was written to her. About me.”
Her fingers slowed, as if she was giving more thought to the words as she typed now. “They weren’t married, and she didn’t want a pregnancy to slow down her life, her music career. He convinced her to carry me full term rather than getting rid of me. Said he would take total custody and she could leave afterward if she wanted to. She did.”
She paused, thinking. He moved his touch to her nape, another easy stroke, and she began typing again. “He did everything. Even arranged for a wet nurse. My aunt told me that. His sister. She took me in after he died. He’d made sure if anything happened to him, I would go to her, not my mother.Not that it mattered. She signed papers before I was born, surrendering me to him completely. She never even held me. Checked out of the hospital and headed to Nashville. Which was fine. Dad figured out how to be a fatherandmother to me, and he knocked it out of the goddamned park.”
From her faint but genuine smile when she typed the line, he could tell she meant it. Her love for her dad had eclipsed and left her mother’s indifference behind long ago. Which said what a remarkable guy he must have been. And how strong she was.
Skye rose, nodding toward the sectional sofa. A cue that she was done sharing soul-deep stuff. On the way, she pointed toward the bar, tipped a drink to her lips.
“I’ll take a beer if you have one,” he said, “but I can find it if it’s there. Do you want anything?”
When she indicated she wanted a soda, he took care of that. The bar was well-stocked. Apparently, Ben had left her everything, because there was dust on a few of the bottles, including some seriously high-grade alcohol. His Mistress wasn’t a home drinker, then, and she didn’t apparently have many guests who were. A glass of that scotch would have been good, but he’d told her he’d get a beer, so that was what he grabbed.
When he brought her the soda, she’d slid off her shoes and tucked her feet up under her on the couch. They were still in their memorial clothes, him because that was all he had, though he’d removed the jacket and rolled up the sleeves.
“If you feel like changing, don’t stay spiffed up just because I am,” he told her. He had a change of clothes in the truck, but he wasn’t going to retrieve them until she seemed ready to get that comfortable with his presence in her space.
Setting her soda aside, she reached over to loosen his tie. She slid the knot free, silk slipping through her fingers as she set it aside. Then she opened two buttons of his shirt, restingher fingers on the white tank he’d worn under it. She typed one-handed, the message making him smile.
“This is my favorite suit porn look.”
Thanks to the crazy rollercoaster this day had been, a lot of things were moving through him he wasn’t sure he wanted to take over. So he went for the same teasing note, glancing at her blouse. “Want me to show you my favorite businesswoman porn look?”
She flicked his chest with a reproving nail and answered his earlier comment. “I’ll change in a little while,” she typed. “So why did your mother name you Tiger?”
Crap.Right into the swamp of his childhood, though the question was straightforward enough. “I was premature,” he said with forced casualness. “She wasn’t as careful during the pregnancy as she should have been, but in all fairness, she didn’t grow up in an environment where prenatal care was a priority. But once she had me, she cleaned up her act. Never took another drink or any drugs that I remember. She told me, ‘You fought like a tiger for your life, so I knew I had to fight the same way to deserve you.’”
