Minutes later I’m naked and under Lance on the couch again.
Afterward I lie on his chest again, half asleep, and his phone starts buzzing on the table. The arm around me tightens as we look at the glowing screen. DO NOT FUCKING REPLY has messaged him once while he’s been with me since our dinner date. And just like at dinner, he shuts off his phone.
Mum comes up this time, but that doesn’t ease his tension at all.
“Do you want to get that?” I ask.
“Nope.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”
“I don’t want to talk to her. We don’t get along that well.”
“Oh.” He said his mother wasn’t a good person before, but I never pushed. I’ve always gotten along well with my parents, even during my teen years when hormones made rational thought difficult. I think no matter how much attitude I copped, it didn’t come close to what my sister dished out, so I was still the angel.
Lance watches the phone until it stops ringing.
“Can I ask why you don’t get along?” Conversations about his family have been relatively limited, and his reaction to that phone call makes me question even more all the things he hides.
Lance regards me for a long while before he finally replies. “She has a mean streak.”
I cock my head to the side. “What kind of mean streak?”
He fingers a lock of my hair. “Before we moved to the States, she and my dad used to get into it a lot. Well—” Derision darkens his features. “My mum used to get into it with my dad. She’d get all pissed off and go at him, just fucking lose her shit. He used to laugh. I mean, she was a little thing. Not much taller than you, but she would just blow her lid. He never hit her back, though. Not once. Not that I saw, anyway.”
My stomach dips, thinking about how that would look to the child version of the man in front of me.
“But she wasn’t always like that. She had pills she’d take sometimes, and then she was a lot better, not so angry all the time—nicer but just kind of vacant. It was hard. I don’t know why my dad put up with it, or let her go off the meds or whatever, but he did. She had a lot of issues. Bad childhood and all that shit. Anyway, eventually she turned that mean streak on me.”
I put my fingers to my mouth. “She hit you?”
His eyes are sad. “It wasn’t like she could really hurt me, you know? Not after I got a little older. The words are the things that stick, though.”
When I put my hand on his chest, he picks it up and plays with my fingers.
“I had a younger brother. His name was Quinn.”
I frown at the past tense.
“He was eight when he died.”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
He shakes his head, eyes still on my fingers. “I think it broke her mind. She kind of snapped and was never the same. That’s when she really started to go at me, after Quinn died.”
I want to ask what happened, but I don’t dare interrupt him.
“We came to the States to get away from the memories for her. Or at least that’s what my dad made it seem like we were doing. I think he’d had enough. He left us here, but she didn’t want to go back to the UK. My playing hockey was a good enough reason for her to stay in Chicago.”
He’s silent for a while, maybe lost in a memory.
“I thought it might stop when we moved in with my aunt, and it did for a little while, but she’d get so pissed when I fucked up at practice. After a while it was expected. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, something would set her off.”
My heart aches for him. “Did you tell anyone?”
“What was I gonna say? My mum beats the shit out of me? It was my fault—” He chokes on the words.
“What was your fault?”
He shakes his head taps his temple. “She messed with my head all the time, my mum did. That night I met you for the first time, I wasn’t supposed to be at that party. I’d snuck out of the house through my bedroom window, like teenagers do. Or like I did, anyway. There was some big tryout the next morning for the top league in the city—on my birthday, right? My mum kept telling me she knew I was going to fail, and then we’d have to go back to Scotland. She said I better not dare do that to her.
“I figured what was the point? I was going to screw it up anyway, like I did everything else, so I went out, got drunk, and ended up in that closet with you.” He smiles a little and brushes my fingertips over his lips.
“When I got home, my mum was waiting for me in the garage. She was so pissed. And she was wasted, or high—or both maybe. Like, so fucked up. That was the night my aunt found out what was going on. She walked into the garage right when my mom was in the middle of her smackdown. She had boxing gloves on so she didn’t mess up her nails. Usually she’d keep to areas that weren’t visible, but not that night.”
He pauses, lost within himself for a moment. “Things got real messy after that for a while. And I shut out every single memory I could. All the good ones, all the bad ones. Everything. I buried it all.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It is what it is. I can’t change it now, so I try not to think about it too much. But stuff like that, it doesn’t ever really go away. Even when you try to put it in a box, it finds a way out.” He releases a long, slow breath, his expression pained as he touches my face with shaky fingertips. “I probably shouldn’t have told you any of that.”
I cover his hand with mine and turn my face into his palm to kiss it. “I’m glad you felt safe enough to share that with me.”
“I’m fucked up, Poppy.”
“We all have demons. It makes us human, not fucked up.”
“I tried to have a girlfriend my sophomore year of high school. It didn’t go so well.”
“Why not?”
“I discovered how much I don’t like being touched.”
His aversion makes more sense now. “I touch you.”
“It’s different with you. I don’t know if it’s ’cause of our history or what, but this…closeness, how I am with you, this isn’t how it usually is.”
“And how is it usually?” My stomach knots. The things I want to hide from are too close.
Lance closes his eyes, and his jaw clenches. When he looks back at me, he seems as scared as I feel right now. “I don’t really wanna answer that question.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause then you’ll know exactly how fucked up I am.”
I reach up and touch his cheek. He gathers both of my hands in his and clasps them together, bowing his head and pressing his lips to my exposed knuckles, almost like a prayer. “I don’t deserve this. You. I don’t deserve this kind of goodness. I shouldn’t be here, taking all these things from you when they shouldn’t be mine.”
“Lance.”
He looks up at me through narrowed eyes, and his fear vibrates through him.
“You’re not taking. I’m giving. Our pasts are part of who we are. They may shape us, but they don’t govern our future paths if we don’t want them to.”
“What we’re doing here is different than what I know.”
“Do you want it to be different than it is?”
“No, I want this, but the last time I tried it backfired really bad.”
We’re talking in a circle, skirting the parts of this that could hurt us both. “Because of something you did?”
“Yeah. No. Sort of.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Remember how I told you about that girl I was seeing last year and how it didn’t end well?”
I nod.
“It was a complicated situation. I wanted something she didn’t.”
“Which was what?”
“For it just to be us. Her and me. But she wasn’t interested in that.”
“What did she want?”
“To mess with my head.”
“I won’t play head games. I’m not like that.”
“You don’t strike me as the type.” His smile is almost shy. “I won’t do that to you, either. That’s definitely not what I want.”
“What do you want?” There’s a lot riding on this. I’m already past the point of no return where my heart is concerned, so I have to protect myself as best I can.
“Just you.”