“That’s it?”
Her forehead furrowed. “That’s it, what?”
“You’re not going to bust my balls for telling you where not to work? Or call me a dick for ordering you around?” Thea or Hazel would have told me to fuck off if I’d told them they couldn’t work somewhere.
But Willa just smiled. “I can’t get mad at you for wanting me to be safe. If you had another reason, then maybe I would disagree. But being concerned for my well-being is, well . . . sweet.”
Sweet? Well, shit. Was this woman for real?
Ever since Saturday night, something had shifted between us. She’d dropped her hand and wasn’t keeping me at arm’s length.
Instead, she’d just pulled me straight into her world.
On Sunday, the morning after she’d told me about our real first kiss, I’d gone to the camp with a double vanilla chai latte—her favorite, according to the owner of the coffee hut. Since I’d been the one to keep her up late, I figured she’d need an extra dose of sugar and caffeine.
What I hadn’t realized was that she’d be thriving on organized chaos. The parking lot had been full of parents collecting their happy kids. Willa had been running around like crazy when I’d gotten there, and I’d half expected her to shoo me away.
But instead, she’d thanked me for her coffee with a kiss and ordered me to follow her and “talk as we walk.”
So as she said good-bye to campers and coordinated the clean out of the bunkhouses in preparation for the next batch of kids, I’d been right there by her side. Whenever she took a sip of her coffee, she smiled up at me. Whenever she ran into a counselor, she introduced me without delay.
The smile on her face never faltered.
Maybe the campers would forget that smile, but I never would.
Sunday night, after she’d made sure the new group of kids were settled at the camp, she came to the bar for a late dinner. By then, the exhaustion had finally settled in, so I’d gotten her a Coke and made her a pizza. After she’d eaten, I’d sent her home early to get some sleep.
Yesterday had been more of the same. Coffee. Work. Pizza. And a kiss at the bar before I sent her on her way before dark.
And now I was finally getting my date. It was just her and me, off to do something together.
“How is Thea doing?” Willa asked.
“Okay. Sad, like Charlie. I think she’s glad to be home, but they both miss Logan.”
“I hope they can work it out. Do you think Thea would ever move to the city?”
I shrugged. “I doubt it. Neither of us have a ton of fond memories from that place.” Though as hard as it would be to see them go, I’d rather have Thea happy in the city with Logan than brokenhearted in Montana.
Willa hummed but didn’t push for more.
I could have left it at that, but for once, I felt the need to explain. I wanted to offer Willa something more than a blanket, closed-off statement. “Did you know that’s where we met? Me and Thea and Hazel?”
She shook her head. “No. I guess I’ve never heard the story of how you all found one another.”
Hardly anyone had. Thea and I didn’t share a lot about the past with patrons at the bar, just like we didn’t gossip about people around town. We were probably seen as a bit of a mystery, and honestly, we liked it that way.
But for Willa, I’d spill it all. I felt safe telling her anything in the world. I hadn’t a clue why, but I was trusting my gut.
“Do you want to know?”
She smiled, pressing her palm deeper into mine. “Only if you want to share.”
I took a deep breath, kept my eyes on the road, and started at the beginning.
“My mom was shit. Or is. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in over twenty years. When I was nine, she packed up our stuff, shoved it in our car and drove us from Pennsylvania to New York. Then she dropped me off at my aunt’s place and I never saw her again.”
Willa’s gasp was barely audible over the whirl of the truck tires against the pavement.
“My aunt kept me for about a week before she turned me over to the state. I don’t know why because I never saw her again either. All she left me with was the backpack my mom had packed full of clothes and a few wrinkled papers.”
One of which had been my birth certificate. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I guess that was Mom’s way of saying she wasn’t ever coming back.
I’d wanted to go after her for years. A couple of times, I’d tried to run away from my foster homes and hitchhike back to the small Pennsylvania town where we’d lived. According to my birth certificate, it was where I’d been born. But every time I’d tried to run, I’d gotten caught by the authorities and hauled back into the system.
By the time I was old enough to make a successful runaway attempt, I hadn’t bothered. I’d found Thea and Hazel by then, and I’d written off my mother.
“Then what?” Willa asked.
“Foster care. I bounced around a lot.”
Families didn’t want an older kid with abandonment and attitude issues, so I’d moved from home to home until my freshman year. “The longest I stayed in a home was during high school. And it wasn’t because of the home. It was because of Thea and Hazel.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“How much of Thea’s history do you know?”
She shrugged. “Not much. She’s a private person.”
I chuckled. That was the truth. We both were. But like I trusted Willa with my story, she could be trusted with Thea’s. And since our stories were intertwined, I couldn’t tell one without the other.
“Thea doesn’t have parents either, but she didn’t grow up in foster care. She lived in this orphanage.”
“They still have those?” Willa asked.
“I doubt they do now, but at the time, yeah. It was one of the last in the city, from what I remember. I think after Thea graduated and moved out, it closed down. For a while during our senior year, she was the only kid that lived there.”
“I bet that was lonely.”
“Yeah, it was.”
Though at the time, I’d always envied her. Thea didn’t have to share a room or house with others. I’d been just as lonely as she had been, even with a foster home full of people and hardly any personal space.
I shifted a bit in my seat, never letting go of Willa’s hand. “Thea and I went to the same high school, but we didn’t meet there. I actually met Hazel first. I was at the grocery store trying to shoplift a candy bar. She caught me before the clerk did.”
“Uh-oh.” Willa winced, proving she knew Hazel well. “I bet she was pissed.”
I chuckled. “You could say that. She grabbed the Snickers and hauled my ass up to the checkout line. I thought for sure she was going to turn me in, but instead she just added it to her basket of groceries. After she bought it, she told me I could eat it but only after dinner.”
To this day, I wasn’t sure why I’d gone with her back to the orphanage. I’d been fifteen years old and had just topped six feet. I hadn’t been quite as tall or brawny as I was now, but it wouldn’t have taken much to escape Hazel.
I never even tried. I just followed her through our Brooklyn neighborhood without question.
“Hazel worked as a part-time cook at the orphanage, so she took me there. Then she sat me down at the kitchen table, told me to get started on my homework while she put the groceries away and whipped up dinner.”
Hazel had also shoved a bag of frozen peas on the black eye my foster father had given me, but I didn’t want to share that with Willa. She didn’t need to know that he was a mean bastard who loved a good fistfight. He’d put up a makeshift boxing ring in the garage, then paired us foster boys off with one another, jumping in and taking over a fight when we weren’t “taking it seriously.”