“Nice try, dipshit, you’re a little late,” I said to the robotic woman’s voice.
When I pulled up to the guard gate, I handed my license over and was immediately waved through. Aha, at least he alerted them that I was coming. When I pulled into his driveway, the first thing that dawned on me was that Sixes and my house could fit inside his home. Good god, what did a single guy need with a house this big? Okay, no one needed a house this big, unless we were talking about the Brady Bunch or Octomom.
I turned off my car and then just sat in his driveway, constantly checking my rearview and side mirrors. Maybe I expected whatever his secret was to jump out at me. When nothing did, I sighed and opened my door. I turned to walk up to his front door and found him standing on his porch, a wide smile on his face. Okay, that was reassuring, at least. How bad could this be if he was happy?
I headed up to him and then was engulfed by everything that was Aaron Skkye, his height, his cologne, his sheer strength.
“You feel so good, thank you for coming out,” he whispered before stepping back, locking eyes with me.
“Well, only the best secrets are worth a drive in the middle of the night to hear.” I was grinning because my nerves had settled, and the heaviness of trepidation had lifted. Then he was kissing the smile away, drinking me in as if he couldn’t get enough. “God, Vivian, I can’t tell you how good it feels to have you here.”
“It feels nice being in your arms.”
“Come on, let’s go inside.”
Beige, the place was beige, which was the only sense that I had of his home, lots of beige walls, ecru window treatments, and walnut-colored accents. I never wanted to give a kid a box of crayons and tell them to brighten the place up more than I did the moment I stepped into Aaron’s some-several-million-dollar home.
“I have some red wine out already for you.” Aaron pulled me over to a deep, plush, dark brown couch and sat. “How are you? You look beautiful, and I can’t believe how much I missed our chats.”
“I missed you too.” I took the glass of wine that Aaron handed me and slowly sipped, watching him over the rim of my glass. I relaxed with my glass and Aaron reached for it, setting both of ours back on the table before he grasped my hands.
“I had a bad childhood, there’s no other way to say it. From as early as I could remember my mom would leave me and go off on some drug bender. It would be days before I saw her again. There were many times she left and there was no food, so I did what anyone would do: I went looking.”
My heart froze, because what kind of mother could leave a child? My god, this meant he was what, three or four?
“Sometimes the police would find me and take me to a foster home, but other times I would find my way back and wait for her to come home. I’m not telling you this to feel sorry for me; I can see it on your face. I’m telling you so that you understand me.”
“Okay.” I bit my lower lip to keep from saying anything else.
“My life was spent being jostled around from my mom to foster homes and back to my mom. I don’t think that I ever felt love until my first real girlfriend. She would tell me that she loved me, and it was such a strange feeling, but I liked it. Her name was Maisy.”
He reached forward and swept a stray strand of hair off my cheek. “She was the first girl I had sex with.”
Hearing about him having sex with someone else bothered me, it was weird, it shouldn’t, because it was a long time ago, but still.
“Uh, Aaron, you don’t need to tell me all of this. It’s okay, really.”
“But I do. Maisy got pregnant. At first, she wanted to have an abortion, and I wanted to keep the baby. I wanted to be different, show a child the love I never got. I thought she had changed her mind, and she was coming to see things my way. But shortly after delivery, when they wheeled the baby off so Maisy could sleep, she got up and snuck out of the hospital. No one has seen or heard from her since.”
I gasped. “What? She just left?”
“Yep, vanished. I had this whole life imagined. I was going to negotiate housing so my family, meaning Maisy and our daughter, could come with me. I would work and play. She could go to school and watch our daughter, when she had class, we could take advantage of the childcare center on campus. I had imagined this perfect world that I hadn’t had. But she left and it left me as a sixteen-year-old single dad.”
“Oh my god, what did you do? Where is the baby now?”
Aaron gave a wry smile. “I was already being scouted by colleges—”
“But you were sixteen, that’s what, tenth grade? You still had two more years.”
“I was in eleventh, but my point is that I knew it wasn’t the best situation or time for me to take care of a baby, she—”
“It was a girl?” Aaron smiled brightly at me and nodded.
“Yep, a girl. I decided at that time
