And that was what made her tongue and chest both loosen up. Not quite all the way, but enough.
“I don’t know.” She inched her hand a little farther up the bed until her knuckles grazed the hem of his boxers. The solid, lightly haired skin underneath. “Not a whole lot left you haven’t heard already.”
She’d told him more than she’d ever told anyone else.
“Tell me again, then. If you want to.”
Where to even start? A darkness rumbled inside of her. The beginning was probably the most logical. Her throat tried to constrict against the words, but she pushed through it, an old pain mixing with the story she always told herself.
But when the confession came out, it was flat. Lifeless. “I killed my mother.”
His fingertips didn’t even pause against her scalp. “No, you didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
Bastard. “Fine.” She turned her head to the side, looking at his leg because it was easier than looking at anything else. “‘Complications due to childbirth.’ Or at least that’s what my dad told me.”
“I’m so sorry, Jo.”
She shrugged. What was she supposed to say? “I try to be cool about it. Rationalize it. But I don’t know if my dad never got over her, or if he was just always that way. If I was just—” She cut herself off, because it was bullshit. Self-indulgent ridiculous bullshit, but she was so worn out, it was hard to censor.
If I was just that disappointing.
She picked back up again once the lump had passed from her throat. “He wasn’t around much, and when he was, he didn’t want a whole lot to do with me. I spent all this time trying to do things to get his attention. I got the nannies to dress me up pretty before he came home, but he’d be late or he wouldn’t notice.” She’d seen the pictures, and she’d been fucking adorable. How the hell could he not have noticed? “Then when I was seven, I got it into my head… You see, he always said he’d wanted a son.” When Adam’s whole body went tense beside her, she clarified. “He never said he didn’t want a daughter. And maybe it was just that ‘a man is the king of his castle’ crap that guys from that generation like to say. But he talked about a son like…” Like it would have made him happy.
She frowned, tracing a series of birthmarks across his thigh. “And he had these graduate students. He’d have them over for parties he threw at the house a couple of times a year. The nanny tried to keep me away, but I always found a way to sneak down, because he was different with them, you know? All those guys. He’d laugh. Pat them on the back.” All the things he never did around her. “I decided maybe if I were a boy… maybe everything would be better somehow.”
“That’s a terrible thing for a kid to have to decide.”
“You’re telling me.” The worst of it was, it had almost worked. Sort of. Cutting her hair off had gotten some attention, and her math and science tests ended up on the fridge the way her drawings never had. But at its heart, she’d still been the same lonely girl, rattling around an empty house. Wishing her dad would give her a hug for once. She swiped her wrist across her eyes, but they were dry. Apparently there weren’t going to be any more hysterics tonight. Thank God. “It actually helped a little, but not enough.” Underneath it all, she’d still been the thing he’d never wanted.
The child who had killed his wife. The error of genetics that had robbed him of a son.
“I took it so far, too,” she said. Past junior high, going into high school and beyond, and it had been good, hadn’t it? Her short hair and her ugly boots and the clothes that covered all her curves. They’d kept people exactly where she’d wanted them.
Because after growing up alone, she hadn’t known how to be anything else.
To make matters worse, she’d been good at it, too. Being the bitch, the tomboy, the one that nobody could ever get close to. Science had started as a desperate ploy for her father’s attention, but her first trip to an observatory with a program after school and she’d fallen in love. With the stars. The sky. This vast universe where she could just be.
A quiet place in the night that was just for her.
Adam trailed his fingers down her cheek, caressing the edge of her jaw. “Did you ever talk about it with him?”
She couldn’t help it. She laughed out loud.
Frowning at her, he gave her leg a nudging kick. “I’m being serious.”
“So am I.” She caught his hand in hers and interwove their fingers. “I barely managed to get a ‘How was your day?’ out of him most of the time. You really think we were ever going to have that kind of conversation?”
“I don’t think he’s ever going to start it. But maybe you could. It might… make you feel better about things, you know?”
Now he was being obtuse. “I doubt it.”
“I don’t know.” The lines around his mouth had gone strangely somber. “I mean, I don’t want to overstep or anything here. But earlier…” Right. When she’d completely freaked out on him. “It seemed like maybe you’d been bottling some stuff up. If that’s how you deal with things, okay. But it doesn’t seem healthy.” Determination flooded his eyes. “It doesn’t seem like it’s been making you happy.”
Happy. Until this week, here with Adam, she hadn’t even known it was something she could aspire to.
This week when she’d made herself open. Let him peel down her barricades, inch by painful inch.
He must have seen her resolve faltering. He sat up straighter and pulled at her hand until she sat up, too. She folded her legs underneath her, trying not to flash him too much when the edge of the towel rode up her thigh.
“Come on,” he said. “Try it. Pretend I’m your dad.”
“Oh God, no.” She shook her head. “Role-playing is a hard limit for me. I mean, maybe if one of us is a naughty schoolgirl or something, but—”
“I’m not joking around.”
She dropped his hand. “Neither am I.” Her voice went small, and she hated it. “I can’t.”
“You can. Please?” His gaze had an earnestness to it that had her resistance yearning to melt, only—
The very idea that this was a conversation she could have, one that she should. It was hot and uncomfortable inside her throat and behind her eyes.
He put his hand on her bare shoulder, warm and broad. “Just try it. Here, I’ll start you out. ‘Dad, I feel like…’”
“Fucking hell.” She wanted to cover her face. “We’re both almost naked and you want me to call you Dad?”
“Jo…”
It was the same way he’d said her name out on that street. The same way he’d said it the night at the observatory when she’d told him about her mom.
It wasn’t sexy. It was real.
“Try. ‘Dad, I’”—he hesitated, but then went ahead—“‘I wish you would’ve…’”
And wasn’t that cutting a little too close to the bone?
For a second, she closed her eyes. What if her father really were here? What if she could tell him, ask him, anything she wanted to?
She took a deep breath. She couldn’t look at Adam, so she focused on a point to the right of him. A smudge on the plaster of the wall.
Dad, why didn’t you love me?
Dad, why did you leave me all alone?
Dad, I…
Her chest felt like it was cracking open. “Dad, why were you so disappointed in me?”
Adam’s palm on her shoulder went heavier, his grip tighter. He dipped his head, putting his eyes right in her field of vision, fierce and beautiful and real.
“I wasn’t. I never, ever, ever was.” With that, their role-playing session was apparently over, thank God. He drew her up in a crushing hug, and she let him, curling herself into his strength and his heat. Trying to pretend she wasn’t shaking. Rocking her back and forth, he murmured in her ear, “And if he doesn’t tell you that, you just point me at him.”