“Well, they’re not stars, either.” He immediately wanted to smack himself upside the head. He was making light of something that obviously held meaning for her. He wouldn’t like it if she made fun of him for inking his body with flowers.
To his surprise, though, she let out a short giggle and a, “Touché,” yet again keeping him on his toes. Every time he thought he knew what to expect, she proved him wrong. He liked that.
“So what’s the story?” he asked.
“Why does there have to be one?”
“Every tattoo has a story. Even if it’s, ‘I got bored, walked into a parlor, and pointed at the first pretty thing I saw.’”
She didn’t respond for five back and forths of the hammock. He figured it was another topic not up for discussion.
“In high school, we had a unit on ocean life in science. The teacher talked about all different types of sea creatures. So many of them had features that were truly remarkable, but when she got to the sea stars I became fascinated with them.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’re small with soft, vulnerable underbellies, so the tops are tough with tiny spines that protect them from predators. And if that isn’t enough, they’re able to drop one of their arms—literally leave a piece of them behind—so they can escape. It takes a long time, but eventually they grow a new arm to replace the one they lost.”
She’d only listed facts. No different than reading a paragraph out of a National Geographic article. And yet, it wasn’t hard for him to read between the lines. “You relate to them.”
Jax felt her tense briefly, and then relax herself piece by piece, like it was an exercise she practiced often. “Yes,” she answered. “I do.”
He thought as much. Her admission was a crack in her resolve to push him away. But he didn’t want a hairline fissure. He wanted her to open to him completely. To trust him with her secrets so that maybe she could unload some of them and feel a little lighter for doing so.
Who the fuck are you kidding? You’re the pot to her kettle.
Taking a deep breath, Jax said something he’d sworn to himself he’d never say to anyone for as long as he lived.
“I was adopted. It’s the reason I moved here—to find my birth parents. It took several years, but eventually I learned that my birth mother got pregnant by a man staying on the island for business for several months. He left somewhere in her third trimester and never came back. So she gave me up for adoption. I found out she died from some sort of infection the year before I came here.”
“Jackson, I’m so sorry. Lucie never told me.”
“That’s because she doesn’t know. No one does.”
Her head angled up so she could look at him, but he didn’t meet her eyes. He couldn’t. A deafening silence surrounded them. Even the waves seemed to pause and the palms above them no longer swayed as Vanessa processed the fact that his own sister didn’t know the most vital piece of information about him. The sound of his heart beat in his ears, its tempo increasing the longer she failed to respond in some way.
“I don’t understand. Why would your parents have kept it a secret from her?”
“They kept it a secret from both of us. I didn’t find out until after the accident when I found the adoption paperwork.” He let out a mirthless chuckle. “Of course, how I didn’t come to the conclusion on my own I’ll never know. Physically speaking, I’m nothing like them and Lucie.”
Her brow furrowed. “After all these years, why haven’t you told Lucie?”
“In the beginning, I didn’t want to add more to the pile of crap she already had to deal with. She’d just lost both of her parents at a crucial age and wound up being raised by her barely legal older brother. Saying, ‘Oh by the way, I’m not really your brother,’ didn’t feel right. I mean, I couldn’t even wrap my head around it, so how could I expect her to?”
“But it’s been more than fifteen years since your parents died, so why not tell her later?”
Jax scrubbed his free hand over his face and then shoved it under his head as he let out a heavy exhale. “I don’t know. Every time I thought about telling her I just…couldn’t.”
His throat closed up and the stars began to blur. Swallowing hard to get past the lump, he blinked a few times until the world came back into focus. He hated talking about this. Hated how weak it made him sound. But he couldn’t expect Vanessa to let him in if he stayed locked down like Fort Knox. So he sucked it up and continued to verbalize the things that until now had only lived in his head.
“I guess I felt like I’d already lost my status as a son to my parents. Lucie’s all I’ve got left in the world. She means everything to me. I couldn’t handle it if she didn’t think of me as her brother anymore.”