“I didn’t ask you to buy me another one.”
“Cut the attitude, Josh. Now. Talk to me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Too bad,” I told him as I watched him avert his eyes to the wall at his right. Fucking Anita. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to kick her ass, mother of my nephew or not. But I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. I had to be a role model and role models didn’t go around tasering people. “You can tell me anything, you know that.”
He said nothing.
“If you don’t want to talk, then listen. No one is perfect, J. No one. We’ve all made stupid mistakes in our lives, and when you get older, you’re going to make a ton of them yourself, but that’s what I want you to understand—you have to learn from what you do, the good and the bad. I will never forgive Anita for what she did when you were a baby, but I don’t know what it must have been like to be so young and get pregnant either, okay? Neither one of us will ever understand that. And God knows, every time I see her, I want to smack her in the face for getting into so much trouble after you were born, but that’s the thing: I remember your dad telling me she wasn’t close to her parents. She didn’t have anyone to love her the way that Abuelito and Abuelita loved me, much less the way that I love you and Louie. You know I would do anything for you. I’m going to be here for you for the rest of my life, J. You’ll always have options in your life, and I won’t let you fuck up, do you understand me?
“I’ve told you before, you don’t ever have to do anything with her if you don’t want to, but maybe one day you will. I’ve told her before that, if she wants a chance of getting to know you, she’d have to get her life together.”
“I don’t want to know her!” he screamed, high and sounding so young the sound was like acid to my soul. “Not today! Not tomorrow! Never! She’s a bitch!” Before I knew it, he was off the carpet and throwing himself on his bed. He yanked his pillow from where it had been sitting and smashed it against his face, screaming into it for several long seconds until he tapered off. His chest started doing that puffing thing again, and I was 99 percent sure he was crying. It killed me. And what he finally said next, slid the knife in even deeper. “Don’t make me go with her. Please. You promised me—you promised me you would always take care of me.”
“Don’t call her a bitch,” I told him calmly, even though I felt anything but that. One of the worst things in the world was watching someone you love fall apart. “I told you, if you don’t want to see her, that’s fine. I’m not going to force you to, but maybe one day when you’re older you might want to. Maybe. I don’t blame you, but I want you to understand that you’re mine. You’re not going anywhere. I didn’t carry you around inside of me for nine months, but that doesn’t mean anything to me. You’re mine, Josh. You’re my Joshy Poo and you always will be. I’ll fight anybody for you who tries to say otherwise. But just because you’re mine doesn’t mean one day—if you want—she can’t be in your life, too. Some people don’t have even one person who cares about them, and you’ve had Mandy, too.”
He was silent. His back was bowed over his pillow, and he was shaking. I had never, ever wanted to kill a person more than I did in that moment. This was what Anita had done to unbendable, resilient Josh. I’d never forgive her for it. His question came out like a croak, muffled and raw. “You promise I’m yours?”
“Josh, you really believe you’re not?” I asked him as I got to my feet and sat on the edge of the bed with him, scooting back until I was lying alongside him, my head resting next to his chest. “I’ve wiped your butt. You’ve thrown up on me. I’ve spent my weekends at your games screaming my voice sore. I’ve hugged you and loved you even when you haven’t been very nice. You’re my d-o-double-g. You’re the peanut butter to my jelly. The pain to my ass—”
I was pretty sure he snorted even with the pillow covering his mouth, but it sounded watered down and hurt.
My own eyes started to get teary. “One day when you’re way older, you’re going to get a girlfriend and I’m going to want to kill the little b-i-t-c-h. I’m going to hate her guts. But you know what? I know at the end of the day, I’m still going to be your number one girl.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because she will never know what it’s like to have put a thermometer in your butt.”
That time, his laugh reached his chest.
“Josh, I love you and Louie, and nothing and no one will ever replace you two losers. I swear on my life. I will lie, cheat, and steal for you, and I always, always will.” I scooted my head closer to him, so the side of my face rested on his rib cage. “You hear me?”
His face was still covered. “Yeah, I guess.”
I’d have to take it. “You better.”
Neither one of us said anything for a while, but eventually the pillow on top of his face fell away, and his hand went to my hair. “Promise, we’ll always be family?”
“Kid, you couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”
“Even if you have kids one day?”
I wasn’t stupid. I knew where this was coming from, and I’d messed up by not addressing it with him. So I made sure to wrap my arm around his forearm and kiss the soft skin there. “If I ever decide to pop out a baby, he or she is going to be your brother or sister. If you think of them as your cousins, it would break my heart and I’d give you a wedgie until you said otherwise. We’re family. There’s nothing tighter than blood.” I paused, needing to make him laugh. “And vomit. There’s no going back once you’ve been thrown up on.”
He sniffled, and I could sense him nod his agreement.
I swallowed and decided to take advantage of the moment. “I need to tell you something that has nothing to do about what just happened, but about our family, okay?”
“What?” he croaked suspiciously.
“Dallas—”
“Oh.”
“Oh, what?”
“I know about Mr. Dallas already,” he announced.
I sat up and set an elbow under me, watching his puffy, red face as he stared up at the ceiling. “What do you know?”
“He loves you. You love him,” he muttered with an eye roll, glancing down at me briefly before focusing up again. “You know, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Aunt Di with a baby carriage.”
Uhh, where the hell had that come from? “How… did you know?”
“I have eyes?”
This fucking smart-ass.
“And he told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
He glanced at me from his spot still lying flat on the mattress. “Remember when Jonathan’s mom yelled at you during the tournament and you cried?” How could I forget? “He told me.”
What the hell? “What did he say?”
Josh rolled his eyes, sliding his elbows underneath his shoulders to sit up, bored with this conversation. “I don’t know. He said he liked you—yuck.” I blinked at him. “One day during practice when we saw that dad talking to you, I told him I didn’t like you talking to him, and he said he didn’t either. So I asked him what we should do, and he said nothing because you were never gonna do anything with him and that one day soon, between me and him, none of those jackasses—he said it, not me, don’t get mad—would never bother you again.”
Was my heart about to burst or was I imagining it? “And what did you tell him?”
“I told him okay as long as he didn’t make me go live with Grandma and Grandpa—”
“I would never make you go live somewhere else!”
“That’s what he said! Jeez. He said he knew I already have a dad, and he told me that his dad died too and that he knew that if his mom had got married again when he was young, that he would never call anybody else Dad. So, he said we could be friends and he could show me how to do stuff and we could be a family, that I didn’t have to call him anything but Dallas if I didn’t want to.”
I was not going to cry. I was not going to cry. “And what did you tell him?”
/>
“I said okay.”
“Okay? That’s it?”
He grinned. “What did you want me to do? Ask him for money?”
I burst out laughing. “You’re the man of the house. You can’t just give me up like that.”
He shrugged and said, “You know how many Xbox games he has?”
My mouth fell open and I shook my head at him. “You traded me for Xbox games. I cannot believe it.”
“Believe it.”
Where the hell had this monster come from? Had I created this?
I had. I really had.
“Just don’t kiss in front of me. That’s gross,” he added with a shudder.
“Your face is gross.”
“Not as gross as yours.”
I grinned at him, and he grinned right back.
“You really don’t care if I…” What word was I supposed to use? Date? It seemed like so much more than that already. “See Dallas all the time? If he comes over a lot and stuff?”
Josh shrugged as he sat up completely, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hands. “I don’t care, Aunt Di. I like him, and Louie likes him, and he likes you a lot. That’s why he’s always doing stuff for us. Just… don’t kiss, and close the door to your room. I don’t wanna see anything. Dean told me about stuff he’s seen his dad do, and that’s nasty.”
His words made me pause. That’s why he’s always doing stuff for us. Had Josh seen this before me?
And what the hell was Dean telling him? I needed to talk to Trip.
He pushed his knee against mine, grabbing my attention. “Are you gonna tell Abuelita you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
Shit. “I have to. One day.”
Josh smirked. “She’s gonna be mad.”
“Too bad for her, huh?” I smiled at him and reached over to pinch his nose. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Yeah,” he said a little softer than a moment before, his expression turning just slightly grim.
“Good.” I dropped my legs off the bed. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”
“I’m just…” He patted his pillow. “I’m gonna play some games and go to bed.”
Standing up, I nodded. “Okay. I love you with all my heart.”
“I know. Love you too.”
With two exchanged smiles, I left his room, closing the door behind me just as he called for Mac to join him on the bed. I could see the light in the living room on, the sound of voices from the TV drifting down the hall, but first, I headed to Louie’s room. The door had been left cracked, and I peeked in to find the small body face down under the covers.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to wake him up to get him into pajamas. He wasn’t going to die sleeping in his clothes. From how much he’d played with the other kids on the playground, he was going to sleep all night.
Backing out, I headed the few feet down the hall, keeping weight off my ankle that was all of a sudden reminding me that I’d twisted it. When I got to the living room, I found Dallas on the couch with the television on. His thighs were spread wide and he had a hand on one, the other was draped across the back of the sofa.
“Hey,” I whispered to him, limping over.
“What happened?” he asked, watching me carefully.
“I rolled my ankle outside. It hurts.”
He frowned as I stopped beside his knees on the couch and plopped down. Before I could even sit back, he leaned over and swung my legs onto his lap, my knees bent over the middle of him, feet on the couch on his other side.
“Josh okay?” he asked as his hand went straight for my foot, his thumb sweeping gently over the bone.
“He was pretty upset, but he’ll be fine,” I explained, watching his fingers move over me. “She left I’m guessing?”
He hummed. “She’s gone, I made sure.”
“Thanks.”
His palm went down to cup my heel. “Will you tell me about the situation with the boys’ moms? I get that Louie and Josh don’t share the same one.”
I scooted my butt over on the couch until my hip came in contact with his, where I was basically one move away from sitting on his lap. My dress had hiked up pretty high, but I didn’t worry about it. He’d seen more of my legs than this the day of the fire. “My brother was married to Louie’s mom. She’s like you—”
“Tall?”
I snickered and grinned. “No, ding-a-ling. Your skin color. Where do you think he gets his blue eyes from?” I moved over a little more. “When my brother died, Louie’s mom lost her shit. She wasn’t eating, drinking, or sleeping. I had to take the boys because it was obvious she didn’t know she was the one alive and my brother was the one who wasn’t.”
When I sighed, the arm he had over the back of the couch was lowered to rest against my shoulders, his hand going to palm my upper arm.
“She wasn’t dealing with it. We should have—we should have done something about it. We all knew she wasn’t doing well, but…” Oh man, the guilt hit me hard in the solar plexus. “She fell down the stairs, which I think about now and I’m pretty sure she did it on purpose to have an excuse to take painkillers… and six weeks after my brother died, she overdosed.”
There was something stuck in my throat, and for the second time in minutes, I felt my eyes tear up. “I’ll never forgive myself for not saying or doing something. Getting her help. I don’t know. Something. You know, I expected somebody else to do something or maybe thought she would eventually just get it together, but that’s not the way it works.”
“You couldn’t have known,” he said softly.
I shrugged under his arm. “I don’t know. Maybe not. But now Lou’s stuck with me forever. He doesn’t ever want to talk about her or acknowledge she even existed. You saw how he gets when we bring her up. That night in his room was the first time he’d said anything about her in forever. Even Josh, every once in a while, says something about her, but Lou refuses to. The only person he ever wants to talk about is his dad.”
“She’s the lady in the pictures around the house?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s better than nothing.”
I shrugged again and the arm over me tightened, pulling me in closer to him.
“It didn’t click until now that the Larsens aren’t Josh’s real grandparents.”
“Yeah. Only Louie is biologically related. But they met Josh when he was three. They love him so much. I know Mandy, that’s Louie’s mom, loved him, too. She was great with him. I think that’s why they’re so helpful. I like to think she would have wanted them to stick around in his life, and they have.”
“He’s an easy kid to love,” he said. “If I didn’t know he was your brother’s, I’d think he was yours. You two are exactly alike.”
I scoffed. “We are not.”
“You are. Trip and I have talked about it.”
“You talk about me behind my back?”
“All the time.” He smiled. “You two are… savage. You’re honest, and you’re loyal and love the shit out of things. Both of you give everything to what you care about. I love it.”
I pulled my head back and smiled at him. “That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me.”
“When you were about to kick Christy’s ass—”
“I was not going to kick her ass.”
“That’s when I knew, this girl has lost her fucking mind. For a week afterward, all I could think about was how you weren’t going to let anybody—even me—do the wrong thing for Josh, like you’d fight to the death for him. It made me think I’d want someone to feel that way about me.”
This knot formed in my throat, and I couldn’t help but lean forward to kiss his neck as his hand slid up my calf from my foot and settled on the sensitive skin behind my knee. “I threw Hawaiian Punch at your brother, that’s a start.”
Dallas bit his lips and smiled, kissing my cheek once and jawline another.
I tipped my head back to let him trail his mouth down to m
y neck, his lips warm and soft as they pressed closed and then opened, his breath damp on my skin. “I would never let anyone talk about you.”
“I know, baby. I know,” he said, kissing the hollow part on the right side of my throat. “I heard what you told your client that day at the salon.”
“You did?” I asked, staying where I was with my head back as he leaned over to kiss the other side of my neck, making me squirm.
“Mm-hmm,” he answered. “If you wouldn’t have been at work, I would have kissed the hell out of you.”
I moaned in my throat when his mouth latched on to my earlobe and gave it a suck. Shivers spread throughout my upper body, my nipples hardening. “You can make up for it now if you insist,” I told him in a whisper.
“I’m going to,” he said, sounding husky and raw right before he dipped his face lower and kissed me over and over again between my jaw and collarbone.
Shifting on to a hip, his hands roamed as my head stayed where it was, lulled backward to give him all the room he wanted. Those big palms went from my lower back to tangling his fingers in my loose hair, cupping my skull gently. I tried to keep myself from making noises, settling only for low pants as that wonderful mouth opened from time to time for his tongue to swipe at the skin over one tendon or another. He moved me, maneuvered me however he wanted, to get to whatever spot he wanted.
When his lips went low to kiss from the hollow at my throat, down, down, down a straight line to where the V-shape of my dress ended, I arched my back. I was turned-on. More turned-on than I’d been in my entire life. It was like drowning in pudding. I didn’t want it to end, ever.
And when his low voice spoke right into my ear as his nose drew a line over the shell of it, I was pretty much in a trance. “We don’t have to do anything tonight.”
“You don’t want to?”
His chuckle had me pressing myself closer to him. “What did you tell me about stupid questions?”
Somehow I managed to smile.
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