“That was impressive,” said Shee.
He set the bottles on the dresser and grinned. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
He pretended to tackle her onto the bed and she giggled. No, squealed. Squealed with delight. She didn’t remember hearing that noise come out of her mouth before.
Maybe once. A long time ago. Somewhere in Coronado.
She wanted to pull him inside of her—directly through her chest. She wanted to envelop him, melt into him like two candy bars left out on a summer’s day. One big pile of sweet oozy goodness, impossible to tell the Hershey from the Godiva.
“What?”
Shee opened her eyes. “Hm?”
“It sounded like you just said Godiva.”
She shook her head and tussled with her shirt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He took the pause in the action as a chance to rid himself of his own shirt.
She grabbed on to him and twisted until he was beneath her, her palms splayed across his chest. She took a moment to drink in the vision of him, her reoccurring dream turned real. She ran her hands across his massive chest, a man’s chest now, not a boy’s. The bump of the scar on his arm caught her attention and she stroked it with her fingertips, feeling its rugged topography. Something hard sat beneath the surface.
“What happened there?” she asked.
He put a hand on either side of her hips and gazed at her like a hungry wolf. “Bullet.”
His arms were bigger too, darkened by a perma-tan. He had a few more scars, but beneath the new aftershave, he smelled the same. If she closed her eyes she was eighteen again—
“What’s that?”
She opened her eyes to find him pointing at her lower abdomen. She looked down to see the five-inch-wide scar smiling above the waist of her unzipped jeans.
Her mouth went dry.
Oh no. How could I forget?
“Uh—” She wanted to spit out the name of an organ found in that general area, but her mind offered no ideas.
“Did you have an operation?” he asked.
She nodded. “It’s, um, from a long time ago.” The words barely burbled over her lips. She couldn’t push them out. She felt too weak.
Shee rocked back. The moment was over. He was staring at her, his mouth ajar.
He knows.
Her most horrible secret, stuffed so long in the darkest places of her heart, had finally clawed its way to the light. She struggled to find a way to brace for the impending storm.
“It looks like a C-section scar,” he said.
She wanted to laugh, roll her eyes, slap his chest and call him silly, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t lie to him.
Not again.
“You had a kid?” he asked. His voice sounded weak now, too.
Her once-flushed cheeks felt clammy.
She nodded. Something roiled in her stomach.
“You did?” he asked.
She could see he was struggling with a way to process the information.
He had no idea how much worse it was about to get.
No puppy to save you from this bombshell.
She cleared her throat, her hand shaking where it rested on her thigh. She dug her nails into her flesh to hold her fingers still.
“We did,” she said.
“We—?”
“Excuse me.”
Shee rolled sideways off the bed and ran for the bathroom, slinging the door shut behind her.
I am not going to throw up a third time—
She lost half a bottle of a bold, oaky Cabernet Sauvignon into the toilet, chased by a touch of aged bourbon.
When she was done, she sat with her back against the cool tile wall, staring at the closed bathroom door. The room outside was eerily quiet.
She pulled herself to her feet, rinsed, spat a few times and dabbed her mouth dry.
“You have to come out sometime,” said Mason’s voice from the other room. It was a different voice than the one murmuring what he wanted to do to her when they got to the room. This one sounded...
Scared.
She opened the door.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his shirt back on, gripping the sides with curled fingers as if he feared the mattress would try to throw him off.
She closed the bathroom door behind her and leaned against it.
“That’s why you ran away?” he asked.
She nodded.
His lip quivered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She rolled her fingers into fists. “We were too young. You’d fought so hard to get where you were. I wasn’t ready—”
He motioned to the scar. “But you had the child?”
“Yes.”
Mason’s expression twisted into something too complicated to read. Some strange combination of pain, horror, anger—
“You’re telling me I have a son? Daughter?”
“Daughter. Charlotte.”
The tears leapt to his eyes so suddenly Shee raised a hand to cover her mouth, her own eyes welling.
“That was my mother’s name,” he said.
“I know.”
“Where is she?”
“West Coast. Near Tampa.”
He wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. “How could you raise—”
“I didn’t. I gave her to my sister. It was Mick’s idea. She wanted a baby and I wanted—” All the possible words to finish her sentence sounded awful to her now and she let her thought die there.
“You have a sister?”
“Half.”
“And she raised our daughter?”
“Until Charlotte was eleven.”
“What happened then?”
“My sister died. Charlotte went to live with her grandmother.”
“With her—” Mason stood, wobbling a little as he adjusted to his leg. “And you knew? You let that happen?”
Shee shook her head as if it could help her dodge the questions. “It’s complicated. I couldn’t take her. I couldn’t
