He shakes his head. “I can’t talk about that. Not yet. But I can tell you I understand what it feels like to be lied to and treated like a fool.”
I’m doing the same thing to him now.
“Sometimes, the person doesn’t mean to, and I get that. It doesn’t make it right, but it’s the other kind of liar I don’t like. The vindictive ones who simply want to use and abuse you.”
I feel like a combination of both, but perhaps I can agree I’m not vindictive.
“I don’t like that kind either. They seem to come after you when you’re at your weakest. With me, it was months after my brother died. I couldn’t see sense and believed everything I was told because I wanted to escape the grief. I wanted to feel something different than the pain. When I realized it wasn’t real, I…” My voice trails off. I can’t tell him the rest. The rest of that story is about the drugs and the trouble I landed my father in.
He reaches out and touches my face.
“What happened?”
“I lost myself in the worst way possible and dragged everyone else under with me. I guess I just wanted to mean something more to him. Something more than what I turned out to be.” Which was nothing. James threw me out of his home when his wife and kids walked in on us in their bed. I barely had my clothes on, barely registered what was happening.
“I wanted it to be real because I needed that at the time, but in the end, it just broke me more than I already was,” I add.
A tear runs down my cheek and I quickly wipe it away.
His gaze clings to mine, and I find I’m lost in him again. Lost in the way he’s looking at me and lost in the way he makes me feel.
I said too much, and I must sound so lame baring my soul.
He brushes the underside of my jaw and leans forward to kiss me.
“You mean something more to me,” he whispers against my lips, and that’s the moment I truly fall for him. “Something more than you were supposed to be, something more than I wanted you to be, and I can’t stop myself from being besotted with you.”
I touch his face, too, falling under the spell that keep bewitching me, making me succumb to what I feel for him.
“Besotted with me?”
“Yeah. It’s something someone said.”
“I’m besotted with you, too.”
“Well, that works, then. I want you in my bed when we get back. My bed in my room.”
“You can have me.”
We fall into a kiss that promises forever, and I allow myself to get sucked into the blissful happiness that pulls me in.
The feeling stays with me right through the rest of the day and the night as I lie beneath Alejandro while he pounds into me.
I’m still on cloud nine the next day when he takes me and Mia out to lunch at a family restaurant.
I was right about the women ogling Alejandro. They start the moment he steps through the door with Mia in his arms. But with me on his other arm, they quickly look away.
When we get seated, I think we look like a family again. That’s when reality pokes its head in and the fog of bliss starts clearing from my eyes.
I try to hold on to it, but the more I do, the more my conscience whispers the truth to me. It hurts because this is what I want. The man with the little girl.
He looks at me after he finishes giving Mia a cheese stick and narrows his eyes.
“What’s up with you? You’re quiet,” he says.
“I’m okay, just watching the two of you, Papa Uncle.” I chuckle at the nick name Mia has given him, and she smiles.
“Papa Uncle,” she bubbles, rubbing his beard.