I freeze out of pure shock. “Have you lost your mind? You want me to come in where she is?”
“No.” He rubs an eye with the heel of his hand. “Look. Fuck. I didn’t want to do it this way. It’s so damn complicated.”
“Do what?”
“It’s my daughter. She’s inside. Sleeping.”
“Your . . . what?” I’m not breathing. My brain, fuzzy from the alcohol, takes a few seconds to catch up. “You have a daughter?”
“Yes, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but she’s in my life, and I was afraid you’d freak out. I planned to say something eventually, but that plus an ex-wife? I didn’t think you were ready for all that.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fuck, that’s a lie. I’m the one who wasn’t ready.”
I go to him. “Oh, God. I-I’m sorry. We’ve only known each other a couple weeks, of course I don’t expect you to spill your life story right away.”
His forehead wrinkles, his eyes darting over my face. “Really?”
“Yes, really. God. I’m so embarrassed.”
He half smiles, the lines in his face easing, a dimple denting his cheek. “I wasn’t going to tell you over a text. Plus, I felt like a huge ass because I forgot I had Marissa tonight. What kind of dad does that?”
“Marissa?” I ask.
He nods. “She’s eight. It’s not my usual weekend with her, but my ex went to a concert in the city, so I said I’d watch her tonight. It slipped my mind because . . . well, you know.”
“I do?”
“You,” he says. “You’ve stolen all my sense since I met you. You’ve dominated my thoughts.”
I melt a little. He must notice, because he slips an arm around my waist to pull me against his body. “You look good tonight.”
“I’m wearing practically the same outfit I was last night.”
“That’s why I like it.” He runs the tip of his nose along the bridge of mine. “I can’t let the door shut. It locks automatically. Come in.”
As good as it feels to be back in his embrace, he was right when he said his personal life is complicated. This is the last thing I expected to find tonight. “I should’ve respected what you said. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. My friends convinced me to come here.”
“Who are these friends?” he asks. “You haven’t mentioned any yet.”
“Oh, they’re not really friends. It’s just Benny, my assistant, and a friend of hers.”
“Well, I’m glad that—Benny?”
“Short for Benedicta.”
“I’m glad Benny talked you into it. I really did want to see you, I just didn’t think it’d be a good idea to explain things like this.”
“I understand.” I tilt my head up, angling for a goodbye kiss I probably don’t deserve. “I’ll let you get back to her.”
He just tucks some of my hair behind my ear, distinctly not kissing me. “Kendra’s picking Marissa up first thing in the morning. God forbid she lets me have her for longer than twelve hours during her weekend.”
I’m not sure how to respond. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. Stay tonight. You can sleep late while I hang with Marissa. She’ll be gone by the time you get up.”
“No. I’m not here to butt into your life.”
He looks at me thoughtfully. “I think I like your butt in my life.”
“I can’t—”
“I insist.”
I chew the inside of my cheek. It’s tempting, and thankfully, I know how persistent he can be. Otherwise we wouldn’t be standing here. “Are you sure?”
He nods. “It’s probably too soon for . . . all of this. But you’re here, and I don’t want you to leave.”
Crossing paths with Marissa sounds terrifying—for all of us—but I showed up because I wanted to spend time with Finn. That hasn’t changed. I smile. “All right. I’ll stay.”
He glances over his shoulder. “She’s asleep.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
He takes my hand and leads me through the apartment. It’s dark and still, as if they’ve been snoozing a while. Jenga blocks are scattered on the coffee table. We pass through the hallway and I remember the other closed door that isn’t his studio or his bedroom. It must be hers.
When we’re in the master, he gently closes the door behind us. “You’re probably not even tired.”
“I’ll be fine. I’m a good sleeper.”
“I know you are.” He grins, walking over to his dresser. “You wear a men’s large, right?”
“Excuse me?”
He laughs, holding up a gray t-shirt. It’s several sizes too big, but he tosses it to me. “It’s all I got.”
I sneak a sniff while his back is turned. Freshly-laundered Finn. “Can I, um . . . use your bathroom?”
“I’ve seen you naked,” he teases. “Not a fraction of the times I plan to, but still.”
Sure, right after I’d gotten him good and horny with my mouth. Now, we’re just standing here in the moonlight, and I’m supposed to get naked without any reservations? “I’m still a little shy.”
He gestures for me. “Come here.”
Gripping the t-shirt, I close the small space between us.
“I like you shy. And not shy.” He drops a smooth, lingering kiss on my lips. “And everything else you are or are not.”
I smile against his mouth. “For a photographer, you’re not half bad with the words.”
“I’m not half good, either. I’ll leave that to you.” He turns me by my shoulders to the bathroom. As if I could forget where the shower is after this morning’s peep show.
I change quickly, folding my clothes on the counter. I fix my hair and squeeze his toothpaste onto my finger before running it through my mouth. Instead of drinks with Benny, I’d been planning to run home and grab some things before coming here for the night. Change of plans, though.
A daughter. An eight-year-old daughter. Finn must’ve had her young. Younger than I am now. By my age, he would’ve had a toddler at home. I widen my eyes at myself in the mirror. A toddler!
I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that he’s a dad. He’s had a history, a marriage, and a baby with another woman. It’s too soon for me to decide if it means anything to me, which is just as well. I don’t have time to process it now.
I come out of the bathroom in nothing but Finn’s t-shirt and a thong. I’m glad the hem sits well down my thighs. If I’d known I’d be here tonight, I would’ve worn booty shorts to hide the dimples in my ass.
Finn is splayed on the mattress, his arm behind his head. He takes one look at me, rolls his eyes, and looks away.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, stopping at the foot of his bed.
“That’s the kind of thing you’d wear right after we’d, you know. So it makes me think of . . .” He turns on his side, away from me. “I don’t want to have sex while she’s in the apartment.”
“No, of course not,” I say quickly. “I didn’t expect that. At all.”
“Good.” He doesn’t look back at me. “Get under the covers and pull them up to your chin.”
I laugh.
“I’m not joking. If I see a sliver of skin, I can’t be held responsible for breaking my own rules. Again.”
With what’s beginning to feel like a permanent smile on my face, I pull back the bedspread. Finn shifts over until there’s enough space to fit Canada between us.
“Are you decent?” he asks.
“Not yet.” I tent the covers over us and mirror his position, folding my arm under my head as I turn onto my side. Except that I can actually see him.
Finn’s still in his sweatpants.
Still shirtless.
There’s an adorably sexy smattering of freckles on his shoulders. I trace some with my finger, skimming my hand across his back and then down toward his waistband. “My mom used to do this when I couldn’t sleep,” I tell the space between us.
He doesn’t respond, but I hear him breathing. A car pass
es outside.
I graze my nails up and down his skin. “I never told Rich that. Or anyone, I guess.”
“You’ve never mentioned her.”
My instinct is to shut down the topic, but Finn shared with me tonight. Now it’s my turn. What’s more—I want him to know. This is an enormous part of who I am. “She died when I was fifteen.”
“That’s when you went on the antidepressants?”
“Yes.”
When I graze his shoulder again, Finn reaches back and scoops my hand into his. He brings it to his mouth, kisses my palm, and releases it. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Is that what your tattoo means?”
My ears warm. “Yes. I wanted to memorialize her life, not her death. She loved birds.”
“Is it a certain kind of feather?”
“No—that’s the thing. She had birds growing up, all different kinds. She named them after colors. Baby Blue, Pink Polly, Lily Lavender. That’s why the feather’s colored in pastels. But she didn’t care about species or even their actual colors—she just loved them all.”
I resume scratching his back. I can’t believe I’m going here with him. I don’t like talking about it for a number of reasons, and I usually only do it when I have to. I could blame the alcohol for my loose lips, but I’ve already lost my buzz.
“She must’ve been young,” he says. “Was she sick?”
“Car accident.” I swallow. “I was in the car.”
“Fuck. Were you hurt?”
“The other car. Not hers.” My heart pounds. I’m sure Finn can hear it in the silence that follows.
He turns around to face me. “What?”
“We can stop here,” I warn. “It’s not exactly my finest moment.”
“Were you . . .”
“I wasn’t driving. Thankfully, I guess, although it doesn’t change the outcome. My, I don’t know what he was, my short-lived boyfriend, I guess—he was.”
“Drinking?” Finn asks.
“Yes.” It pains me to say it. I could’ve stopped Bobby from having even one beer. I could’ve spoken up after his second, or when he got his car keys from his pocket. I didn’t want him to see me as childish, though. “I wasn’t that kind of kid,” I say. “I really was good until I wasn’t.”
“I believe you,” he says. “What happened?”
I go back to the beginning. “I grew up in Westchester, where my dad still lives. My parents had high expectations, but I always met them. Usually at the expense of a social life.” That’s putting it mildly, but Finn doesn’t need to know just how unpopular I was. Growing up attending Broadway shows, I’d had it in my head I wanted to be a famous playwright like Samuel Beckett, so I joined the drama club. It was the only hobby my parents hadn’t forced on me, and through middle school, I took it seriously. I wrote plays and practiced my lines alone in the cafeteria at lunch, not caring that people snickered and called me a freak behind my back. “Like I told you, I was a little overweight, and I only had a couple friends. I never got asked out. And then Bobby came along.”
“The driver,” Finn says.
I nod. “He was the ultimate bad boy. Every girl in school wanted him, but oh my God, when he asked me to the winter formal—me—nobody could believe it, least of all me.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Finn says. “I’ll bet you were the perfect package and never knew it.”
“I wasn’t. I was an outcast, Finn. Bobby was the first guy to take me out. We dated a short time before the dance. I even cut one of my semester finals. I didn’t care, but my parents did, and they banned me from the dance. So I snuck out, and Bobby picked me up down the street. It was the craziest night I’d ever had. I lost my virginity to him.”
“While he was drunk?”
“Yes.”
Finn watches me closely. He inches closer until we’re almost touching. “He sounds like a piece of shit.”
“In hindsight, he was. Anyway, he drove me home later that night, or by that time, it was early morning, three thirty-seven to be exact. My mom had found me missing from my room. My dad called the cops and she got in the car to look for me. She was less than a mile from the house when . . .” A lump forms in my throat, and I try to breathe through it. I’ve told the story enough times—to my psychiatrist, Dad, Rich, law enforcement—that I can do it without getting emotional. Just the facts. But it isn’t working at the moment. “Less than a mile when . . .”
“You don’t have to say it.”
“I killed her.”
“You didn’t kill her.”
“I’m the reason she’s dead. Same thing.”
He cups my face. I think I hear a lump in his throat when he says, “You made a mistake. You were a kid.”
I cry. I haven’t cried for my mom in a long time. Too long. I’m not even sure it’s her loss I’m mourning.
Finn strokes my hair. “That’s it. Let it out.”
“It happened the weekend before Christmas. Bobby’s dad was a politician and my parents had been regulars on the social scene. They tried to keep it quiet, but it was too juicy. Some local tabloids picked up the story. They claimed I was an out-of-control, sex-crazed teenager who’d seduced the senator’s son and disgraced her poor, widowed father. That’s part of why I’m adamant about staying anonymous.” My classmates were sensitive to my mom’s death until a certain point. Many of them also believed what they read, as if I’d led some kind of secret life that’d killed my mother and made Bobby into a real live bad boy. “I was institutionalized for depression by mid-January.”
Finn stops playing with my hair. “Like a psych ward? Jesus.”
“My dad had to carry me to the car and then into the facility because I couldn’t get out of bed. I was there less than a month, even though I wanted to leave from the moment I stepped in the door. He told everyone I went to stay with relatives.”
“That’s wrong, Halston. You were grieving, not mentally unstable.”
At the time, they were one in the same. At least, that’s how it was put to me. I didn’t get to grieve as hard as my dad, because I’d caused it. Nobody at the institution was compassionate toward me about the accident after they’d heard how I’d been involved.
“My dad didn’t know what to do with me.” I shrug one shoulder, and more wetness leaks from my eyes. “Still doesn’t.”
Finn wipes it from my cheeks with his thumb. “I know what to do with you.”
I can’t help smiling a little. When I look up at him, moonlight and tears make little crystals in my vision. “You do?”
“Mhm.” He pulls the hem of my t-shirt up my belly, just under my breasts. “Turn over and take this off.” Then he adds, sternly, “In that order. Whatever you do, don’t flash me.”
I switch sides so I’m facing his bedroom door, and together, we get the shirt over my head. He smooths my hair out of the way, then begins scratching my back as I’d done for him.
I close my eyes and shudder as I release a few silent sobs. “That feels nice.”
“Just relax,” he murmurs.
I haven’t been touched so lovingly in over ten years.
After what I just confessed, it’s not the reaction I might’ve expected from him.
It confirms what I think we both suspect.
Finn was meant to find that journal. To find me. To be a salve for, and perhaps even heal, a heart I’d worried was destined to ache forever.
16
While I scramble eggs, Marissa makes a case for owning a horse. Thing is, it’s not so far-fetched. She has friends with them. Kendra had one growing up. One of the many reasons I had to get out of that family—horses shouldn’t be standard pets.
“Do you need one to be happy?” I ask her.
“No, Dad, and I knew you’d say that. But a horse would make me more happy.”
“How?”
“I’d get to ride it. You’re always telling me to go outside more. And some girls are so good, they’ll go to college
free.”
“Is that so.” I scrape some eggs from the pan to a dish and try not to think about Halston sleeping down the hall. I want to focus on my time with Marissa. “Where are you going to keep this horse?”
“At grandma and grandpa’s.”
I serve Marissa her breakfast. Without my prompting, she’s already packed, dressed in jeans and a sweater with her blonde hair in a neat ponytail. Sometimes I think she’s got it together better than her mother or me. “Look, you know I’d buy you a pony if I thought it was a good idea.”
“Not a pony, Dad. I’m not five years old.”
“Sorry. My mistake.” I turn back to the stove to make myself a plate. “Pets require a lot of upkeep. Are you going to go straight to Gran’s every day, right after school, to take care of the horse? Then go home and do your homework? You won’t have time for friends or fun or anything else.”
“It won’t be that hard if we’re living there,” she says.
I set my plate on the table and sit across from her. “Where?”
She chews, shrugging. “Gran’s.”
“Why would you be living with your grandparents?”
“Mom said maybe. She hates the apartment.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not news to me that Kendra thinks she’s too good for the place I helped her pick out earlier this year. Moving in with her parents, though? Kendra’s beyond help, but Marissa still has a shot at growing up well-rounded and cultured—not sheltered and spoiled like her mom.
And since Kendra’s family is loaded, any job Kendra’s ever had has been for pleasure. I never cared what Kendra did with her days until the divorce went through and left me paying alimony and child support to a woman who has over a million dollars in her trust fund. Marissa needs a dose of reality, and Kendra obviously isn’t going to give that to her. That’s why I wanted to bring her to the city in the first place. But that was before the divorce.
I pour us each a glass of orange juice as I formulate my argument. “Horses cost money,” I say. “A lot of money.”
She picks up a piece of bacon. “Never mind. I’ll just ask Gran.”
“Why?”
“She has money. You’re broke.”
Yours to Bare Page 14