“And what’s your father’s—Lynn’s—end of the story?” she asked.
I sighed.
“Well.” I paused. “From what I can tell, my real father’s—Lynn’s—life didn’t go all that well, either. When he knocked my mom up, she didn’t tell Lynn, and her and my dad’s father worked together to hide it from Lynn. Lynn didn’t find out he even had a kid on the way until I was already given up for adoption. By the time he even found me—his father had a lot of money, by the way. He was able to hide my trail really well—I was ‘supposedly’ doing great with the foster home that I was in. Which I wasn’t. But I was really, really good at hiding it by that point. If I brought attention to the fact that I was beaten and hurt, then shit always sucked worse when things returned back to normal. I learned to hide pain and my feelings really well.”
She looked at me. “You seemed to show your fear okay the day that I was shot.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“It’s probably because you’re a girl,” I admitted.
She snorted, her steps faltering a bit as she came to an uneven patch of ground.
I steered us into the opposite direction that we’d headed in and turned us so that we were facing the cabin again.
We hadn’t gone far at all.
Maybe a couple hundred yards or so.
Surprisingly, Al stayed right with me, keeping pace while also keeping his distance, but staying close enough that not once did his leash tug.
He knew just how far to go to be almost too far for me to correct.
She tripped again, and I knew I’d made the right decision in turning around.
“Ready to head back?” I asked.
She didn’t argue, which let me know that she was putting on a brave face.
“Shoulder okay?” I asked, my gut tightening.
“Are you asking because I’m a girl?” she teased, giving me a small smile. “Would you ask your buddy this?”
I thought about that for a long moment before I answered. “I would ask if he was okay, then I’d take him at his word. But women are notorious for not saying what they mean, so I wouldn’t know whether to trust you or not.”
She snickered at my candidness. “I like that. Your bluntness. It’s refreshing. Thor was an absolute nightmare. I swear, like you said, sometimes it felt like I was dating a woman with how indecisive, cagey, and outright annoying he was. If it wasn’t for Harlow and Trent, I wouldn’t have even stuck it out as long as I did.”
We were at the house when I told her to go inside, which she did without complaint.
CHAPTER 9
Just saw a TikTok challenge of ‘try to write your name without picking the pen up.’ Congrats, losers. You just discovered cursive handwriting.
-Laric’s secret thoughts
LARIC
When I found her again after getting Al settled, she was laying out on the couch, her feet up on the armrest, and her braided pigtails spread out wide on the cushion.
“I feel so much better,” she admitted. “But my head feels fuzzy now. Do you think that’s normal?”
I picked up my phone and texted Zach, explaining what she was feeling.
Zach: normal. She might also be a little loopy. Sometimes the dizziness and the loopy thoughts go hand in hand.
Grinning, I went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, following that up by microwaving the burritos and bringing them out on paper plates.
Once I had both ready, I walked back out to the living room to find her staring at the ceiling.
“Hungry?”
She immediately held her hand out for the burrito.
“You know how much I love burritos?” she asked. “They are soooo good. And underrated. Nobody talks about how awesome burritos are. Tacos? Yes. Burritos? No.”
I grinned at that.
“I also love the little balls of dough that they sprinkle with cinnamon sugar,” she continued. “Did you happen to put any of those in your pocket?”
She looked at said pocket with very intense eyes.
I covered my dick—which had been hard for some time now—and snorted in laughter before taking the seat next to her.
In about five minutes, I knew that she was very much loopy. There was no ‘questioning’ it now.
She was a giggling machine as she leaned into the couch and told me all of her secrets.
“When I was eighteen.” She snuggled farther into the couch. “I decided that I was going to lose my virginity.”
My brows rose at that. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “So I went to the hottest guy in school, offered him my hand, and asked him if he had any experience with virgins.”
I winced. “And did he?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. He laughed at me, and I think he seriously thought I was joking. News flash, I wasn’t. I was so far from ‘joking’ that I might as well been on the opposite hemisphere. Anyway, he started laughing, I walked away, and then found the first nice guy I could that I found attractive. Which happened to be a fellow student’s brother who was bringing him his homework or something. We met up, he broke my hymen, and I realized that older men were the way to go. I’ve been dating up ever since.”