***
I haven’t seen Star since I got here. She refused to come back to the apartment, and she has been away the three days I’ve been here. But Wren has been here. All it took was some reminiscing. Bam. Got her.
“Do you remember the yellow house on Chestnut Street?” I ask her.
Wren blinks her eyes furiously. “Yes, I remember.”
It was the house we lived in when Mom and Dad died. “Dad taught you how to ride that old pink bike on the sidewalk out front.”
“I remember.” Her voice is thick and tight. “That was before…”
“Before they died,” I finish quietly. I force out a laugh. “You scraped your knee when you fell off the bike and you wanted to quit, but Dad wouldn’t let you.”
She chuckles. It’s a watery sound. “He made me get back on it and stay on it until I could ride it around the block.”
“Then they couldn’t get you to come inside for supper,” I remind her. My breath catches at the look of devastation on her face. But I push on. “You wanted to stay outside all night.”
“The streetlights came on and I wanted to keep riding.”
“Dad sat on the porch and counted your laps around the block.”
A tear finally falls over her lashes and my gut twists. “I miss them,” she whispers.
“You got a good family,” I remind her. Not like the one I got.
“We didn’t at first,” she blurts out. Then she looks like she wants to take it back.
I drop the fork I’m holding and it clatters to the tabletop. “What?”
“Our first foster family…” She shakes her head. “Never mind.”
“Tell me,” I say.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do.” It can’t be as bad as the hell I went through. “Tell me.”
“He was a pedophile, and she was clueless.” She closes her eyes. “Star bore the brunt of it.”
I suddenly want to throw up. “What?”
She nods. It’s a quick jerk. “Social Services took us out of there and we went to a group home. It was better.” She smiles at me. “Then we met Marta and Emilio and they adopted all of us.”
“I didn’t know,” I manage to respond. I can barely breathe, much less speak. No wonder she hates me.
“Star wrote to you all the time. She kept thinking you were going to come and rescue us.” She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. None at all. “That’s why she’s not here. She’s still a little sore over it.”
“If I had known–”
But she holds up a hand and waves it to stop me. “You were a kid.”
“I was glad you didn’t end up where I went,” I blurt out. I want to bite it back as soon as it comes out of my mouth. But it hangs there in the air between us.
She blinks her big brown eyes at me. “Why?”
“It wasn’t good.” I cough into my fist. “He wasn’t good.”
“He was family,” she rushes to remind me.
“There was a reason why Dad didn’t talk to him. Think back. Do you remember Dad ever having anything nice to say about him?”
She shakes her head. “Not really. But there’s a lot I don’t remember.”
“He wasn’t nice or good or kind. And he’s no family of mine. Or yours, for that matter.” I get up and start to clear the table. “Just thinking about him makes me sick.”
“What happened?” she asks from behind me.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
I take a deep breath. “He got paid by the state to keep me.” I don’t say more, hoping she’ll draw her own awful conclusions. “I was like their servant. I took care of their younger kids and kept their house clean.” And I took the beatings for the ones who were smaller than me.
“You weren’t an only child, at least,” she prompts. She’s looking for a happy ending, but I can assure her there isn’t one. Not in my uncle’s house.
She sounds so optimistic I almost hate to shatter her illusions. “I took care of everyone. I cooked and cleaned and changed diapers and put the kids on the bus. I nursed fevers and soothed nightmares.” I shiver at the thought of it. “And then they sent me to my room, when my chores were done, while they were a family and I had no one.”
“We didn’t know…”
“No one did.” I shrug and force out a laugh I don’t feel. Just going back to those days in my head makes my skin crawl. “When I was nineteen, I met a man who worked at a church. He had a daughter, and she made everything better. She helped me. We were the same age. Julia.” Just the thought of Julia makes my heart speed up a beat. She’s why I have to go back. She’s why I’m here at all.
“That’s good,” Wren says.
I force my own memories to the back of my mind. “Do you remember the time that you and Star decided to build a tree house?” I ask. I force her to slip back into the memories, and I go with her. And I’m happy for a little while, as I bask in the glow that is my family.
Suddenly, I realize that I’ve had too much to drink. My emotions are sitting directly below the surface of my skin. They’re not hidden down deep in my soul where I usually keep them. They’re floating just below my sanity, and they’re peeking through.
“I need to go to bed,” Wren says. She presses her beer toward me. She cracked it open but never drank any of it.
I have already had a six pack or so. I’m not drunk, but I’m losing my inhibitions and I’m sober enough to know it. I push the beer back toward her.
“I can’t,” she says on a laugh. “Not possible.” She narrows her eyes at me though, and I immediately worry. Did I say something I shouldn’t have said? Did I lie? Does she know it? “I want to give you something,” she says. She digs into her purse and pulls out a blue faux-leather bank book. She slides it toward me. “I set this up for you today.”
“What is it?” I ask. But inside my heart is leaping.
She winces. “I kind of went through your wallet to get your information for the account.”
“Oh.” I immediately wonder what else she found.
“I wasn’t really snooping. Just trying to figure out how to set this up for you.”
“Okay.” My heart is pounding. She just made all my dreams come true and she doesn’t even know it. She thinks she just did a good deed.
“I want you to stay. I want you to stay long enough for Star to get to talk to you at least, once she gets over the hurt. But I understand if you can’t.” Her voice is quiet but strong. “No matter what, I want you to be taken care of. I want you to know you’re loved.”
My heart leaps into my throat. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I was supposed to trick them into loving me. They weren’t supposed to just do it. I push the bank book back toward her. “No, I can’t take it,” I say.
“It’s not much. Just a nest egg.” She comes toward me and lays her hand on the top of my head. She gives my head a shove and kisses my forehead just like our mom used to do. It was more like getting assaulted with affection when Mom did it, and we all loved it so much. So having her do it brings tears to my eyes. “I’m glad you’re here,” she whispers to me. Then she goes into her room and closes the door softly behind her.
I drop my head to the tabletop and bite back a sob. I can’t cry. I can’t. I haven’t shed a tear since I went to live with him—at least not where anyone could see me. I open up the bank book and see a blank set of checks with my name on them. And there’s a total written at the top of the register.
She put fifty thousand dollars into an account for me.
For me. Holy shit. Fifty thousand dollars…
I lay my head on the cool tabletop and roll my forehead across the surface. If I were a better man, I wouldn’t take it. But I’m not. I’m desperate.
A key jangles on the other side of the door and I lift my head, swipe beneath my eyes, and try to pretend like my emotions aren’t slapping me in the face like lightning in a summer storm. I’m probably failing a
t it, but I do try.
The door opens and Fin comes in. She’s wearing a pair of black jeans that hug her ass and a black leather jacket. She’s bad-ass. And beautiful. And I’m a little bit drunk.
She trips over the doormat and grabs hold of the wall. She giggles. Oh, hell. She’s tipsy too.
“Hey,” she says as she tosses her keys onto the counter with a clatter.
“Hey,” I mutter back. I roll the bank book in my hand, trying to figure out if I can take it.
“Where is everybody?”
I nod toward Wren’s room. “Wren just went to bed. Lark’s not home yet. And Star is at Josh’s apartment, still.”
She nods and shrugs out of her leather jacket. She’s wearing a thin camisole and no bra. Her nipples press hard against the sheer fabric and I have to force myself not to look. She bends over and looks into the fridge. “What happened to all the beer?”
I pick up my can and drain the last of it. “Drank it,” I murmur.
She gets a bottle of water and sits down across from me. “Bad night?”
I shake my head. “Good night. You?” I arch an eyebrow at her.
She shrugs. “Good as any other. I’m a little bit drunk.” She holds up her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.
I laugh. “Oh, good. Me too.”
She goes into her room and comes back with a guitar. I watch her as she goes to the couch and plops down on it. She settles the acoustic guitar in her lap so that it’s facing up and she starts to pluck at the strings. A melody jumps into the air and dances in front of me.
“That’s really good,” I say. I’m drawn to the music almost as much as I’m drawn to the girl. I get up and go into the living room. “Can I sit?”
She shrugs. I plop down on the other end of the couch and watch her. She plucks and hums and plucks some more and then she stops and writes something down.
“Are you writing music?” I ask.
“Something like that,” she murmurs.
“It’s really good. Does it have words?”
“Yeah,” she says, as she chews on the tip of her pen. A lock of dark hair falls into her face and she blows it to the side. I reach over and brush it back when it falls again. She startles, jerked out of her musical trance, and she stares at me. “You want to hear the words?” she asks, her voice quiet, almost fearful.
“Yes.” I can’t think of anything I’d like more.
She starts to sing. It’s tentative and wary and so fucking beautiful that she steals my breath. She sings about heartbreak and shame and lust and love and hurt, and under it all…there’s beauty. Just…sheer beauty.
When she stops playing, I realize that I haven’t even breathed, so I take in a breath and fill my aching lungs. “That was amazing.” I sigh.
“How drunk are you?”
I shake my head. “Not very.”
“You should drink another.” She nods her head toward the kitchen.
“Why?”
She stares hard at me. “Because I want to find out what makes you tick.”
I’m not even sure I do tick. I kind of just exist. Ever since I got the call from Julia that she didn’t want our baby, that she wanted out, I’ve felt like someone pushed the pause button on my life.
“What makes you tick, Finny?” I ask.
She snorts. But it’s an adorable sound and I find myself grinning. And it’s not just because I’m drunk. “Sex,” she says. “Sex makes me tick.”
I choke on my own spittle. “Beg your pardon?”
She laughs. “I like to have sex, Tag. Lots of sex.”
“Okay…” I say slowly.
“You’re going to go all gospel on me and tell me that good girls don’t have sex with random strangers, right?” She shakes her head and points her finger at me. “But I have news for you. I can do whatever I want with my body. I can fuck anybody I want.”
I cringe at her choice of words.
“Oh, you just gave me the look,” she says.
“What look?”
“The I’m-judging-you look.”
“I did not.”
“Yes, you did. You think it’s wrong for a woman to like sex.”
I shake my head. “I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, you did. Your body language said it.” She starts to pluck at the guitar again.
“Really, I don’t care who you have sex with.” I worry a loose thread on my jeans. I don’t like this conversation. “I think I’m going to bed.” I set my hands on my knees and start to push myself up.
“Want some company?” she asks.
I freeze. “What?”
“I have two rules,” she states. She starts to tick items off on her fingers. “One, I don’t sleep with anyone more than once. And two, you have to get out of my bed when we’re done.”
I frown. “Where’s the fun in that?”
“Um, your dick…my vagina…lots of pounding. Fun. There’s the fun in that.”
I shake my head. I’ve only been with one woman in my life, and she dumped me months ago. But being with her forged a connection. And the connection wasn’t necessarily in the dick-to-vagina pounding sessions, as Finny so unromantically put it. It was in the quiet moments after the sex. It was when she laid her head on my chest and dragged her fingers back and forth through the sparse dusting of hair. It was when we woke up stuck together with sweat between us. It was the beat of her heart while she lay on top of me. It was the way she wrapped around me, encompassing my heart with the same kind of heat she wrapped around my dick when I was inside her.
“You’re thinking about sex, aren’t you?” Finny asks.
“Not really,” I admit. “I was thinking about intimacy.”
She snorts again. “Sex is so much better than intimacy.”
I shake my head. “I don’t believe you.”
“I’ll prove it to you.” She sets the guitar to the side and gets up on her knees. She nibbles on her lower lip as she walks on her hands and knees across the few inches of sofa between us.
I fall back against the couch as she climbs into my lap. “What are you doing?”
“If you have to ask, I’m doing it wrong,” she says. She grins, and it makes me want to grin with her.
I take her shoulders and push her back. “What about my sisters?”
“What about them?” She nips my lower lip between her teeth. Then she sucks it into her mouth to ease the sting, and it shoots straight to my dick. “I don’t usually ask their permission when I want to fuck somebody.”
I point to my chest. “You want to fuck me?”
She laughs and grinds her pussy against me. “I think that part is obvious.”
“Why?” I ask. I hold her face so I can keep her from kissing me, and stare into her eyes.
She straddles me and presses her breasts against me. “Because you’re here,” she replies.
“Oh,” I say. That’s her only requirement?
She sits back. “I thought I was getting a vibe from you…” she says doubtfully, searching my face. “Was I wrong?”
“Hell no!” She’s right. She has already intrigued me. And she’s beautiful. So beautiful. But this can’t happen. It just can’t.
She grins. “So you do want to fuck me.”
Damn. The heat of her words shoots straight to my dick.
I kiss her. I can’t help it. Her pussy is hot and it’s just on the other side of my zipper and she smells so damn good. My head is a little swimmy, but my dick isn’t. He’s ready.
I jerk my head back when a thought comes into my head. “Is it weird that you’re my sisters’ sister?”
“Dude, we are so not related,” she says. “But if you feel weird about it…” She sits back, and I feel the loss of her immediately. She scoots back to her side of the couch.
“Don’t go,” I protest.
She smiles and runs her thumbs below the straps of her camisole, then suddenly pulls it down beneath her breasts. She looks toward Wren’s room and chews on her lower
lip. But I can’t look at her face. All I see is tits. Beautiful, perfect round tits with perfect hard nipples. I lick my lips. I want to taste them.
“I’m going to bed,” she says. She gives me a look over her shoulder as she walks away from me. She goes into her room and leaves the door cracked.
I drag a hand through my hair. Holy shit. I adjust my junk because I’m so hard that I can barely stand it.
She comes back to her doorway and leans on the doorjamb. She’s naked. Completely stark fucking naked. “You coming?” she asks quietly.
I nod. I get up and go to her, because I feel like she’s a magnet and I’m metal and she’s pulling me toward her without even trying.
I step into the room, close the door behind me, and she sits on the edge of the bed. She hooks her fingers in the belt loops of my jeans and pulls me toward her.
“Wait,” I say.
She lays her forehead against my stomach and I can feel her breath against my dick, hot through the fabric. God, she’s turning me on.
I’ve never had casual sex, though.
“So, you don’t cuddle?” I ask. I shouldn’t even be in here, but she’s here and she’s all but kissing the button of my jeans.
“No. No cuddling.”
“What if I want to cuddle?”
“What if I want to just fuck you?” She lifts her face and stares up at me. “It doesn’t have to be more than that. Just one time.”
“Your rules,” I mutter.
“Yes. Are you in or are you out?”
“I’ve never…” I scrub a hand down my face.
“You’ve never…?” She waits for my answer as she pops the button of my jeans.
“I’ve never…had sex with someone I don’t love.” There. I said it. I’ve been with one woman. That’s it. And she is now with someone else.
“There’s a certain joy in sex with no strings,” she says quietly. She lifts the bottom edge of my T-shirt and touches her lips to my tender skin. My dick pulses. I lay my head back and groan. “Finny,” I growl.
“You can say no,” she says quietly. But her hands grab onto my ass and she pulls me toward her, her lips dancing across my skin.