Then Alec stirred, his lashes fluttering, his hand reaching out to the empty space beside him on the mattress. He frowned, then opened his eyes, almost instantly catching sight of Lilly.
“Hey,” he said, and flipped the covers back to reveal the place where she had lain. “Come back to bed.” His smile was sleepy and full of boyish appeal. “Let me agitate you some more.”
She jumped to her feet and began pacing instead. “I have to talk to you.”
“It will be much more comfortable when you’re on your back, naked,” he said reasonably. When she didn’t comply, he slowly sat up, the sheet pooling at his waist. “Sugar, have we got a problem?”
She paused at the foot of the bed. “I kept trying to head things off, I did. I thought I made it clear. I thought you understood we do not fit.”
His glance turned wary. “I thought we’d agreed we both don’t want a relationship.”
“We did agree to that.” Glaring at him, she folded her arms over her chest. “But then, ‘You should let me be something to you, Lilly.’ You said that last night. Didn’t you mean it?”
He rubbed his chin with his hand, his whiskers making a scratchy sound against his palm. “I feel like that’s a trick question.”
“It’s an honest one.”
“Okay.” Both hands forked through his hair. “Shit, Lilly. Fine.” He sent her a dark look. “I want to see you more. Again. Upon our return to LA.”
When she didn’t say anything right away, he threw up his hands. “Shoot me. Shoot me, Lilly Durand, because it’s true. My mind changed and I want to give it a try. I think you should let me be something to you. I want you to be something to me.”
She told herself she felt no secret thrill at those words. “That’s because you know nothing about me.”
He groaned. “Lilly—”
“There’s a blank line on my birth certificate where a father should be named. My mother took off with some new loser and left me when I was an infant.” She sucked in a breath. “I’ve never seen her since. I don’t remember her at all.”
His face softened. “Lilly…” He patted the mattress beside him. “Come sit down next to me.”
“I was raised by my uncle and my aunt, if ‘raised’ is a word you can use for sleeping on the living room couch and storing your meager belongings behind it. By five I could make breakfast, by six I did all the laundry, by seven I had learned to lock myself in the closet when my surrogate parents decided to go at each other.”
“Fuck, Lilly.”
“I went to school every morning so I could get away from them and I applied myself in school so I would never be them.”
“And you aren’t, baby. You’re you.”
She shook her head. “But growing up like that alters a person—alters their expectations and priorities. Mine…they can never be the same as yours.”
“No, Lilly.”
“Yes, Alec.” She resumed pacing. “Do you know what will happen if we become somethings to each other?”
“Uh—”
“Love will be next. And I know you didn’t say anything about love, but what if you want that too? Then where will we be?”
He didn’t look as surprised by this thought as she expected he might, more bemused if she had to label his expression. “We’ll be in love?”
“No! We won’t be in love. You’ll feel all that sparkly stuff because you’re just like Audra. Some people get to have that…you do, Audra does, you’re the exceptions or the half or whatever the number is. You, Alec, will have a life that comes up roses. The thorn that was Simon’s terrible tragedy only makes more certain that you’ll experience the full goodness of it.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “Then if I want you, why won’t my full goodness of life mean I get you?”
She stopped again, staring at his expression, unsure of what she read there. “Let me tell you a little story.”
“I’m listening.”
“When I was twelve, I was in summer school and I met a new friend. I didn’t really have friends, because I could never bring anyone home and anyway, all kids can tell the state of another’s kid’s home life by what’s in their lunch bag…or that they don’t have one or the money to buy food at school.”
His expression turned pained. “Please come sit by me, Lilly.”
She shook her head. “So I gathered my courage and told my friend about my aunt and uncle, about the screaming fits and the throwing of plates and bottles and sometimes punches. And she said her parents used to fight all the time but they got a divorce and now everything was much more peaceful.”
Lilly hauled in a breath. “So the next time things went crazy in the apartment and they went at it, after my uncle stomped away in a rage and when I crawled out from the closet, I asked my aunt about it. While she was sweeping up the glass in the kitchen, I asked her why she didn’t divorce my uncle.”
“And what did she say?”
“‘This is how Durands love.’”
He went still. “That’s not love, Lilly.”
She waved a hand. “Of course it’s not. But it’s all I know. It’s all I ever saw outside of TV shows and storybooks until I was eighteen years old. So you see what that makes me?”
“I’m afraid to ask,” he muttered.
“It makes me worthless for a man like you, with the kind of life you were raised in and the kind of future that you’re expecting for yourself. You can’t mean something to me because I don’t know what to do with that. I’ll leave it at the park overnight or forget it on the bus, or worse, hold it too tight until it’s been worn to nothing and you won’t know how
