Sex defined me as a person and as a woman, and I was okay with that;
I didn’t want, have, or need a purpose in life;
My secrets would stay secret forever, because I could not and would not ever trust anyone enough to reveal them.
But Myles was eroding my belief in my pretenses.
Chipping away at my ability to hold on to them.
Good thing I’m the stubbornest woman alive. He could chip away forever, but he’d get tired of it eventually. He’d said so himself. I just had to outlast him and eventually he’d give up.
And that was what I wanted.
I dared not admit to myself that that was yet another pretense, because that one was rooted way down deep, way under the rest, hidden under the others.
That week was, honestly, one of the best of my life. Myles and I had very little time alone, what with Mom and Lucas being up at the crack of dawn every day, and being hauled all over Ketchikan for day trips with Mom, and hiking with Lucas, and impromptu recording sessions for Myles and Crow at the twins’ record label/studio, where Myles and Crow put down acoustic stripped-down recordings of their favorite songs as well as a few Myles North originals, including a handful of songs Myles and Crow had written on the spot. A surprise release, Myles was calling it, but it wasn’t a Myles North album, it was a one-off: Myles & Crow Unplugged.
Damned Myles and damned Crow—they sweet-talked, bribed, threatened, and coerced me into playing on two songs with my ukulele and sing harmony.
And damn, damn, and double damn if the songs on which I appeared didn’t sound…fucking amazing.
Despite me, my insecurities shouted.
Because of me, my newly reborn dreams whispered.
I was both dreading and anticipating the resumption of Myles’s tour. It was going to be a whirlwind, and I’d get to see places I probably never would have otherwise. It’d be just me and him again, mostly. Close quarters, lots of alone time. But that also meant more time for Myles to sink his hooks into me. More emotional attachments for me to pretend I wasn’t forming.
I was in denial, and I knew it.
I had shit to face, and I knew it.
But I had every intention of avoiding as much as I could for as long as I could. Because deep down, despite the bluster and bravado of my personality, I’m a coward. Afraid of being hurt even worse. Of being rejected. Of being used. Of being betrayed. Of putting my heart in someone’s grip and being crushed.
Of baring my secrets, because to put them out there would make them real all over again and I’d spent years forming a nice hard calcareous exoskeleton of emotionless armor to keep the dark agony contained. To bring them up and out, to really deal with them meant breaking open that shell, and once the shell was compromised, my tender, sensitive insides would bared to the vagaries of what life had taught me was a cruel, wicked world.
And if the world was cruel and wicked, it seemed like a good strategy was to be cruel and wicked in the name of self-preservation.
Myles disagreed, clearly, because he kept teasing little nuggets of sweetness and tenderness out of me, damn the conniving asshole.
Like when we spent an afternoon with Zane and Mara—Zane was a former Navy SEAL, and exuded calm, deadly confidence underneath a hard-ass veneer, a demeanor that his wife seemed to have made it her mission to soften. Mara was every bit as tough and capable as Zane, and I discovered she was a former combat medic, which made sense. That afternoon, Myles and Zane decided to head off to the docks to do some shore fishing, leaving me with Mara…and their two kids, one of whom was a little baby girl.
And I, being a twenty-one-year-old single girl prone to sexual misadventure and hard partying, with little to no exposure to young children, had absolutely no clue what to do when Mara plopped the little girl into my lap.
“Here,” Mara said. “Play with her. My boys are way too quiet, which means they’re doing something apocalyptically destructive.”
I gaped, mouth flapping. “Wait, I—I don’t know the first thing about babies!”
Mara laughed. “Don’t drop her, and don’t let her swallow anything. Let her sit on your lap and be slobbery. It’s not as hard as you think.”
And then she was gone, and a few minutes later I heard her bellowing angrily—apparently her assumption had been correct. And there I was with a baby. How old, I couldn’t have said. Old enough to sit up on her own but not walk, old enough to eat mushy food but still need formula. Old enough to gum and slobber and slurp all over my fingers and my necklace and my shirt. She was cute, but…what did I do with her?
“Um.” I held her on my lap, hands around her waist, making sure she didn’t topple over suddenly. “Hi.”
“Ba. Ba-ba-ba.” She whacked me on the cheek, laughing.
“It’s not nice to hit, you know.”
“Dad-da-da.”
“I don’t know where your dad is. I don’t even know for sure who your dad is, because I’m relatively certain you’re not Zane and Mara’s.”
“Mama.”
“Mama is upstairs dealing with those two boys, who seem to each have the destructive capacity of a category four hurricane.”
“Ma, ma, ma, ma.” She grabbed my necklace, a choker with a dangly chain and clover pendant, and stuck in her mouth.
“I don’t think you should chew on that, kiddo.” I looked around for something to give her to play with, and spotted a giant plastic key ring with giant plastic keys in bright primary colors. “Here, chew on this, Gummy the Slobber Queen.”
She took it, stared at it intently as if deciding what to do with it. And then promptly began assaulting me with it, cackling hysterically.
“Why you little bitch! Wait––I can’t call a baby a bitch, can I? Not nice, Lexie. Be nice to the baby. If your
