My body warms at hearing him call me that. It’s one of the ways I know we’re fine. “Can we talk when we get to your place?”
Brayden tenses. Those green eyes stare at me hard. “Yeah.” His voice is gruffer than usual and his unease is clearly conveyed.
I g
uess it’s never good when someone says they want to talk. I slide my hands up to grab his neck. “I just want to clear the air some more.”
“Okay. Let’s go; I’m starving.” His hand reaches out to open the door, but his eyes remain locked on mine.
Lifting up, I kiss him softly. “Thank you,” I whisper as I pull away.
“For what?”
“Everything.”
Brayden seems at a loss for words, so he opens my door and closes me in once I slide inside. I run by the house to get Otis and pack a bag. The only way to trust Brayden is to do what I did on our run earlier today: tell him more about my past. He knows the brief recaps, but if I tell him more, I have to trust him more and he’ll also understand why I’m an idiot sometimes. Right?
Maybe he’ll open up more, too. My end game is us working. That’s it. All I want is to be with him. The trick will be doing what it takes to make it work. Hopefully, I’m on the right track. At this point, I can’t imagine being with anyone but Brayden. Those few days at my grandma’s house were torture while I tried to figure out what the hell was going on in my head and how I would move forward.
Since I walked Otis at my house, I head straight inside once I get to Brayden’s. He’s lying on the couch, the TV on, but muted. Otis is next to him in seconds. I take my bag up to his room before coming back downstairs to find Otis lying on Brayden. I roll my eyes.
“He’s in my spot.”
Brayden grins. “He loves me; can you blame him?”
“No, but he’s still in my spot. Otis, down.”
Otis huffs as he moves to the foot of the couch instead and I take his place. He huffs again, making Brayden laugh, but I ignore them both. Brayden slides his hands up and down my back once before resting them on my the lowest part of my back so his fingers are on my ass.
“You know,” Brayden says, “I never met my father.” I’m so shocked by him speaking first and by what he says, that my brain freezes. “Mom says he left town a few days after she told him she was pregnant. She never saw or heard from him again.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Yeah. I’ve never been inclined to find him, though. Between my mom and my coaches growing up, I know he’s not the kind of man I ever want to meet. Besides, he knows how to find my mom if he wanted to meet me and he’s never done it.”
“Does it bother you?” I ask.
“No. I never thought I was missing something from my life. Mom did too good of a job raising me.”
We fall into silence and I soon realize that’s all he has to share for the moment. Everything I planned to tell him left my mind like they crept out the back door while he was talking so I wouldn’t notice. “I want to be with you.”
“I know.”
“Obviously, I have some issues. I want to get over them.” I lift my head to look at him. “Can we?”
“It’s a tough pill to swallow that you walked because you thought you were pregnant.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
His eyes harden. “I don’t care about the specifics or any elaborations, Deanna. It boils down to that, doesn’t it?”
I refuse to answer his question. The specifics and elaborations matter to me. It adds to the big picture instead of narrowing it down. “It’s not like I was closing you out for good, no matter how the situation would’ve turned out. I just needed a few days to clear my head.”
“Without telling me that,” he points out.
I sigh and plant my face into his chest. His hands move up to my hair, and they dive in, massaging in soothing motions. “I’m all in,” I mumble into his chest, causing his hands to freeze. “As stupid as it sounds, I ran for a few days because I’m in this with you completely. That’s scary as fuck, especially when I don’t always know if I can trust my decisions or when your mom tells me more about something than you did. I was scared out of my mind and you weren’t here. It was the second best place I could run to until you got back, even though I had my doubts.”
Brayden’s heart beats steadily, but loudly under my forehead. “So, if I was here...” He lets the question trail off.