Page 26 of His to Seduce
He stayed where he was, his hands loosely draped in his lap, but his eyes bored into me from the distance.
“It wasn’t all bad.” It hadn’t always been. It had been normal. It meant no birthday cakes or presents at Christmastime. It meant the smallest tree we could afford, or sometimes none at all. But it also meant stringing popcorn strands with Christmas music in the background. It meant homemade cookies from scratch, the only dessert I’d had until I was ten and went to Suzanne’s birthday party. It meant learning to sew my own clothes and finding fabrics on clearance. It meant my mom making a game out of searching for the nicest clothes at secondhand stores.
“What did your mom do?” he asked.
Memories that always buzzed beneath the surface grew louder. God, I hated thinking about that. “The best she could,” I snapped, more harshly than I intended.
But God, after everything, my mom who was sweet and often flighty became a dragon, breathing fire on her quest for vengeance. She didn’t stop, didn’t care what people thought of her; she fought for me. Tooth and nail until that bastard was imprisoned.
David lifted his hands, his sigh heavy in the quiet. “Camden, honey. I’m not judging. I’m just asking…trying to get to know you here. You can tell me anything—you know that, right? I wouldn’t judge you for how you grew up.”
“Thinking of that time isn’t easy for me,” I admitted. “She worked. All the time. Odd jobs, cleaning houses and office buildings; sometimes she worked at banks as a teller.” A flash of our rusted-out coffee can always filled with change appeared in my mind and I blinked the thought away. “She waited tables. Tended bar.”
“I see.”
He didn’t. Although I let him assume that was the reason I wouldn’t date a bartender.
“Your parents?” I asked, desperate to get the topic off me. I’d told David too much already. He made me think before I spoke, and it was hard to hold everything in sometimes when all I wanted to do was purge it. “What’s your family like?”
He laughed softly, shaking his head, and ran a hand through his hair.
Looking at me, he grinned and dropped his hand to the towel. To the edge that was tucked in. “I’ll need to be in the pool for this.”
I glanced away, his quiet laughter ringing out like a rock concert. “I can feel you blushing from here.”
“Shut up,” I muttered. “Can you hand me my beer?”
I needed something to cool me down. Knowing David was now naked, sliding into the water, the waves in the pool increasing as he pushed through them and in my direction, made my pulse jump.
“Thank you,” I said when he got close enough for me to take the bottle from his hand. He took a seat next to me and draped his arm around the edge of the pool at my back. His hand went straight for my hair, tangling in it and playing with it. I stiffened for a moment until I remembered who was touching me. “Your family?”
“Ah. Norman Rockwell at his finest.”
“Really?” I could picture it. Clean-cut David in polo shirts and khaki shorts, clothes always neatly pressed and hair perfectly combed. The perfect family, holding hands in a green field or on their way to church. “What does your dad do?”
“He worked an office job. Stuffy suit, large office, lots of windows and spreadsheets.”
The past tense he used hit me immediately and I turned to him. We were inches from each other, close enough where I could lean in and kiss away the pain, clear from his eyes and the downturned shape of his lips. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, but his smile was still sad. “Died when I was eighteen, Camden. We’re good now.”
My mom had shown me one photo of my sperm donor holding me at the hospital. I was wrapped in the typical hospital-issued blanket and pink beanie. Even in the photo, he didn’t smile. There was no joy in his eyes or his expression about the fact that he’d had a kid. I didn’t know if he was upset about having a kid in general or if it was something aboutmehe couldn’t stand. Mom told me he left the next day.
I’d stared at the photo for an hour before I ripped it up and threw it in the trash. Now, I couldn’t even remember what he looked like, if I had any of his features. I hoped to hell I didn’t.
“How?” I asked, curious about David’s dad.
“Aneurysm at work. He was on the phone one second, on the floor the next, and gone before anyone knew what had happened.”
“Wow.” I sighed and before I could stop myself, I pressed my hand to David’s cheek. My thumb brushed against the lines at the outer edges of his eye. “That must have been tough.”
“It was. But we were all close. I was in college, my sister, Lindsay, already married. Mom had a hard time with it, but life moves on, you know? I had almost twenty good years with the man. Mom had thirty. We have a lot of good memories.”
He had a sister. Married. A mom. He talked about his family like they were all close.
I envied him in a way that I hadn’t any of my friends who grew up in similar families.
“What are they like?” I asked, and his grin widened.
