Page 48 of His to Seduce
“Oh, sweetie.” She reached out, covering my hand with her small but toughened one, and squeezed. “They’re not all bad. You know that.”
“Not all of them,” I admitted, muttering. I took a swig of milk and thought of Tyson and Declan and Aidan and Jackson…how good they all were. How nice they were. How well they treated their women. “But the ones we find sure do suck.”
Because there were still Jack and Dan and Trenton…all men I’d tried to have relationships with. One had cheated, one just quit returning phone calls, and Trenton, whom I’d spent over a year with, one day simply walked out, saying he couldn’t handle the fact that I hadn’t been able to tell him I loved him yet. None of the men I had ever dated were patient or kind or protective.
My mom’s soft laugh grabbed my attention, and I glared at her. “What?”
“Sounds to me like my girl has had her first heartbreak. Tell me what happened.”
“David. David happened.” Before I knew it, I spilled everything. From the first night he walked into Fireside, to the first night he flirted, to his continued flirtation and my finally succumbing in Jamaica. I told her all of it. The laughter, the way I felt with him, how free I felt and how happy, for maybe the first time. Being with David was like being swept in the clouds of adventure and excitement, and what a bunch of crap it had proven to be. Because then I told her about the pier and discovering that he’d been lying to me. That Trina had known the truth and hadn’t told me. That he hadn’t even tried to stop me from leaving, just watched me walk away, knowing how hurt I was…knowing he was the cause of that hurt.
“But he did come after you,” my mom said when I was done ranting and raving and eating my weight in cookies. “He was at your place this morning.”
How he’d done that was still a mystery I hadn’t yet solved. I had caught the last flight off the island and as far as I knew, there weren’t any direct flights from Jamaica to Detroit.
“Yeah, probably to tell me more lies.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Why would he do it the first time?”
“I don’t know.” My mom shrugged. “Perhaps you should have let him explain.”
I gaped at her smirk and her scolding tone. “What? This man has lied to me for months, and you think I should have just listened to whatever he had to saynow?”
“I’m saying that you’re not exactly an open book, either.”
I flinched, shoulders tightening. “Wow.”
She sighed and leaned forward. She turned her coffee cup in circles in her palm, staring at the milk inside as if it held answers. “What happened to you when you were young…that was horrific. Life altering. But while you’ve done so well in many, many ways, and I don’t want you to think I don’t see that…” She trailed off and took a sip of her milk. I could see her figuring out what to say behind tortured green eyes. “Well, you also closed a large part of yourself off to people. I mean, Trenton was a really nice boy and he really liked you, and that boy tried for a year to get you to open up to him and finally left because you couldn’t.”
“Yeah…heleftme,” I said, irritation prickling at my spine. Dating him right after college and I first got my job at the accounting firm where I still worked made sense. He was just a couple of years older than me, and had talked to me for three months before ever asking me out. A year later, he’d kissed me goodbye and walked away.
“Yeah, because you wouldn’t let yourself love him and he got tired of trying. But even then, when he left, you weren’t nearly as upset with him as you are over this guy. So how’s he different?”
David’s smile and his warm hand, the way he’d patiently stood by while I gathered my courage to jump off that rocky ledge, flashed in my mind. He’d pursued me for months. He’d never gotten upset with my rejections, instead using them to try harder. And somehow…he’d beaten me back to Latham Hills in order to talk to me.
But more than all of that…there was one thing that stood out about David from all the other men I’d tried to date.
Forcing down a thickness in my throat, I whispered, “He made me feel safe.”
Silence filled the space between us, and my mom eventually turned, grabbed a new mug, and filled it with coffee. “You know, after everything that happened, I didn’t trust myself to date for a long time. You were in college before I ever went out on a date again, and even then, I kept every single man at arm’s length.”
“You dated?” My eyes widened. I hadn’t seen her with a man since that day and had honestly never given it any thought.
Tears filled her eyes, and her hands began to shake. She set down her coffee and wiped a finger around the rim of the mug before she met my eyes again. “Bringing that man into our home, knowing what he tried to do to you, learning the way he’d looked at you andwantedyou…God, Camden. Can you understand the guilt that I carried for putting you in that position?”
“Mom.” Both of us were crying now and I could barely speak. This wasn’t the visit I’d wanted. I came here for comfort and cookies, not to face a past better left buried.
“You have no idea what that does to a mom, Camden. To me…when I’d struggled every day to give you a decent life and knew you deserved better, knew I wanted better for you, and then to have that happen…”
“You were a good mom.”
“Maybe.” She sniffed and swiped her eyes clean. “But it wasn’t exactly like I trusted myself for a long time, either, or my ability to choose a decent man. I had to get over that. I had to force myself to see the good in people, not push them away when they were innocent. I hate that I see you doing the same thing. We can’t put the past behind us until we move on from it, honey. Running and avoiding isn’t the same thing as moving on.”
Warm tears trailed down my cheeks and I looked away. My gaze locked on the living room floor. Where Evan had thrown me to the ground, where he’d climbed on top of me.
Where, in his fumbling to remove his belt, I’d been able to knee him in the balls hard enough to get him off me.
