“Of coming clean, partly. About my past. And scared of what it all meant—commitment, stepping up. Like, all the fucking way up, when a part of me is terrified if I tried, I’d only find out I was just like my dad. Like I’d let you guys down in the end. Like I’d realize I couldn’t cut it, and run out on you and the baby, and on my family and on Duncan.”
“I can’t imagine you doing that.”
“Well, you haven’t known me all that long. I’m a better man now, since I’ve come home, a better man than I have been for a long, long time. Maybe ever.”
She could say the same about herself, she realized. It had taken Mercy for her to get her act together. Now a year clean, she could look back and realize that the reason she’d gotten addicted to heroin was that she’d woken up each morning and felt nothing. She’d had no reason to get up, nothing in her life worth being awake for. The chemical blank had felt better than all those waking hours of pointlessness. But Mercy had changed all that. There was a focus to her life, a reason to do better, to be better.
“You remember when you asked me what it is I want most?” Casey murmured. “And how I said I didn’t really know yet? Well, I still don’t, but I’m starting to. And it’s because of everything that’s come into my life these past few months. All the responsibilities, even the ones that scare me. It’s feeling like I’m finally becoming a man, and you guys are no small part of that. I want whatever this feeling is that it’s been giving me. Worthiness, maybe.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“I want to be worthy of people’s respect, and faith, and love, maybe. That’s what I want most now.”
“Those are wonderful things to want.”
“Way fucking better than money—that’s for sure . . . I don’t have everything all figured out,” he said softly, his breath finally coming smooth and even. “And I’m still scared. Fucking petrified. But I knew the second I shut your door behind me last night, I’d made a mistake. I’m so scared of becoming my dad, but that’s exactly what I did. I left the second you asked something of me that I was afraid I couldn’t give. But I want to take that back, if you’ll let me.”
And would she? She nearly could, but not yet. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, and plenty you don’t know about me, either.” The former no longer frightened her, but what he might make of her own past still did.
“Of course. And I don’t know if I can be what you need. If I can be something for you that I’ve never been able to be for anyone before, and even though I don’t know if it’s enough . . . I know I’m thirty-three so maybe this sounds really pathetic, but I feel like a man, for the first time,” he said, speaking to her hands or her knees. “Like a grown-ass man who can protect somebody, and take care of them, and cheer them up and crap like that. No woman’s ever made me feel like that. Like you look at me sometimes and suddenly I’m eight feet tall, and that you think I can do anything.” He paused just long enough to take her hand in his. “It makes me want to be better. And to do good. Makes me feel about a thousand things, all stuffed inside my chest, and in my head, and hell, in my dick probably, too. Like, everything, everywhere. I can’t promise forever, or even that I won’t fuck everything up, but I’d like a chance to try. If you wanted to give me one, that is. If you’re ready to swap some skeletons.”
She was already crying, and she stole her hand back to wipe at her cheeks.
Her entire life, she was coming to realize, she’d only ever wanted to be wanted. She’d wanted a father’s love and a mother’s protection, and in the end she’d run off in search of those things in all the wrong places. And now she wanted Casey, so bad it nearly hurt. So, so much rode on how he took her confession.