Hehadsaid that at dinner.
“Okay,” I agreed, bouncing again. “Let’s talk. I do love to hear your voice, so please. Use it. Use it on me.”
Cody cursed and tightened his grip on my hips. “I was inside you today, Liem, and it’s all I can think about already, so please don’t fucking talk to me like that.”
“These instructions are becoming not only complicated but a bit contradictory,” I observed.
He pressed a kiss to my forehead, so sweet and at odds with his distress. “I need you to distract me from dragging you back to the bungalow and taking you again.” He met my gaze, concern filling them. “Are you sore?”
I smiled widely. “Deliciously. Thank you for asking.”
“Goddammit, Liem,”he groaned, dropping his forehead to mine. “Please.”
I took pity on him and started talking.
“Tell me about your mother.”
He tensed, then lifted me off his feet. “That’ll fucking do it.”
Offering my left hand, I gave him an apologetic smile. “Shall we walk?”
He stared at my hand cast in blueish shadow from the dusky light, then took it.
The waters of the Gulf became more turbulent as we walked, and we passed very few people as we drifted along the shore.
My heart beat a furious rhythm as the wind picked up again, my hair blowing wildly and blinding me. Cody stopped us, and then his hand was there at my wrist, slipping off his elastic as he guided me to face away from him.
He combed his fingers through my hair and then gathered it as he started talking.
“To answer your earlier question, Bree Faust is fine, and yes, I did text her earlier. Nothing new to report from Bay Springs.” He swatted my ass once more and then started fussing with my hair again. “The woman from whose womb I was created and ejected is a different matter. She lives in Louisiana. You remember I went to visit her recently?”
“Yes, the morning after the parade.”
“After the parade,” he confirmed, still brushing out my hair with his fingers. A favorite activity of his which I was swiftly becoming addicted to.
“When I arrived, she wasn’t there. At our house. But another family was. She’d sold it without me knowing, the house I raised myself in.”
He seemed to get lost in his own thoughts until I said softly, “Tell me.”
His deep breath was thick, the exhale tickling my shoulder. “She left me at that house when I was twelve,” he said quietly as his fingers moved through my hair. “For three days.”
I forced my breaths to come even as they wanted to halt, listening keenly to every word.
“She would do that. Leave without warning. You’d think that with the money and resources she had, I would’ve had a babysitter or some kind of nanny, but no. Every time she walked out the door, I never knew when she’d be back. For as long as I could remember.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my hand into my stomach, taking in his pain as my own. He parted my hair into sections and then tugged lightly before he planted a kiss on my neck. Then another. Then a row of them along the curve of my shoulder, but when I tried to turn to him, he stopped me.
“I don’t think I can say this with you looking at me, LL. Not yet.”
Swallowing against my suddenly dry throat, I nodded lightly so I wouldn’t free my hair from his grip. A few seconds later, he started braiding my hair, the feeling so familiar that I recognized it easily enough to know that it wasn’t a French braid but a simpler one with my hair woven from three large sections. Over, under, over, under.
“I’ve lied to Bree three times that I can remember, though all three were lies to myself too. So, I guess you could say they were truths with expiration dates. When we graduated high school, she wanted to rent an apartment together. I found a place by myself instead, and when she asked if she could live with me, even offering to sleep on the fucking floor, the diva, I lied. I told her it wasn’t safe, which to be fair, it wasn’t, but that wasn’t the real reason.”
He released my hair, let the braid unfurl, and then gathered the strands and restarted.
“The truth was that I knew she was going places, and one day, she’d walk out the door and wouldn’t come back. And I couldn’t fucking tolerate that. Not even the idea of it. I cannot stand it when people leave.”
A pause, then over, under, over, under.
