I didn’t know what to do or say. I was in his space, everything about this moment intimate, and I stared out the window to avoid looking at him.
“You want to watch a movie?” He pushed my hair over my shoulder to bare my neck to him, and he laid a gentle kiss against my skin. It shouldn’t have had the impact that it did.
“Yeah.”
He intertwined his fingers with mine and walked back toward his bed. My heart raced as I let him lead me. He felt different tonight. He wasn’t rushed or angry or overwhelmed with need. It was just me and him, and something about that seemed far scarier than the rest.
Normally I didn’t have time to think. He never allowed me room to second-guess.
He climbed onto the bed, and I followed him. He leaned against his headboard and opened his legs before he pulled me between them. My back was pressed to the front of him, and he wrapped his arms around me as he relaxed.
I was stiff as a board.
“Relax, Josie.” He chuckled and grabbed a remote. “I’m not going to bite you.” He nipped my ear between his teeth as soon as the lie passed his lips, and I felt the move all the way to my core.
I didn’t know how he expected me to relax when he was doing things like that. There was no way in hell.
I let my body fall into his, and I pressed my thighs together to try to curb the ache he had started. We hadn’t even been alone in his room for five minutes, and already that was all I could think about.
“What do you want to watch?” He was clicking through different apps, but it all felt like a blur. All I could concentrate on was the way his chest rose and fell beneath me and the way his thighs surrounded mine.
“I don’t care.”
He clicked on some movie I had never heard of and pressed Play before tossing the remote to the foot of the bed. I felt so hyperaware of his attention on me that I couldn’t focus on a single thing that was happening on the TV.
His fingers trailed up and down my forearm. They were gentle and innocent and made me feel like I was losing my mind.
“What was your mom like?” His question was so out of the blue and so unlike him that I thought I was hearing things.
“What?” I looked over my shoulder at him, but his fingers still moved.
“Your mom. What was she like?” His eyes were soft and pleading. He looked like he truly wanted to know. Like he needed to know something real about me as desperately as I did him.
I faced back toward the TV and thought of what to say. My mother was a million different things, and it was hard to describe her in conversation. “She was incredible.” I gripped the edge of my shorts and dug my fingernails into the fabric. “She was fun and always smiling, and she always had a way to make me feel better.”
“You miss her.” It wasn’t a question, but I nodded my head anyway.
“Like crazy.” I bit down on my lip and told myself I wouldn’t cry. “But I miss who she was before she got sick. That’s fucked up. Isn’t it?”
“That’s not fucked up.”
He was wrong though. I didn’t regret a single moment I had with my mother, but the last few years with her had been hard. I had to watch her die a little bit every day, right before my eyes, and it ate away at me like nothing else ever would.
If I could go back, I would go back to the mom whose smile wasn’t clouded with pain. I wanted her back. I desperately wanted to see her again. To feel her.
“I can’t imagine what you had to go through.”
We were both quiet for a moment. I didn’t trust myself to say more about her. Not without crying and ruining our entire night. I wished my mom could have met Beck. She would have liked him, but she would have warned me that he was trouble.
That was what she had always said about my dad. He was handsome, but he was trouble. She knew it from the moment she met him, but it hadn’t mattered. According to her, she hadn’t even had time to look up before she fell. It was instant and unstoppable, and I couldn’t imagine how someone like her could have ever loved someone like him.
“My dad’s sick.”
I turned to look at him again, but this time he tightened his arms and held me still.
“It’s why I’m at the club so much. He’s trying to train me to take over while he still can.”
“I’m sorry, Beck. I didn’t know.”
His arms tightened, then loosened again as if he couldn’t control it. “No one does, really. Only Olly and Carson and a few others.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked him the question I used to hate when others asked me. As if a teenager had any idea whether or not their parent would be okay. As if we could possibly know if anything would ever be okay again.
“He thinks so. He’s just getting weaker and weaker, and he hates relying on others for anything. He’s a workaholic, and he’s never known anything but that.”
I nodded my head because I understood. My mother hated when I had to start taking things over for her. When the simplest daily task became too hard. “But he has you.”
He was quiet for a long moment, then his head hit my shoulder. “I don’t know that
