Benjamin’s gaze darted between Izzy and me. Questions played out in those keen eyes.
Kid reading deeper.
Between the lines.
Clearly catching onto the fact that there was a whole lot more to this thing than some weird guy standing antsy off to the side.
Wondered if he knew that for me, everything was hanging in this precarious balance.
Time to suck it up.
I pushed out the strain and forced my heavy feet in the direction of the table. “How about I sit between both of you, then you both can sit by me?”
“Aren’t you the good guy,” Mr. Lane grumbled.
“Daddy,” Izzy chastised again.
“Fine, fine,” he mumbled, shooting me daggers before he sent his daughter a winning smile.
“Oh, great idea! See, Mom, we can totally share,” Dillon said, all too quick to vacate the middle chair so I could sit next to him.
I waited until Benjamin climbed into the chair on the left before I slipped into the seat in the middle.
Izzy took the seat directly across the table from me, hands shaking with her nerves, girl clearly feeling just as frazzled as me.
“I’m sorry,” she mouthed.
My head shook.
I wasn’t sorry at all.
She smiled. Smiled a soft smile that might as well have been an embrace. Her presence sure. Like fingertips tracing my skin.
My muscles ticked, flexing with ripples of need.
Hardening with want.
Desire fisted my guts while my mind whirled with questions and worry and possibilities.
Heart game but not quite prepared for this.
Scrambling to catch up, rushing double-time and somehow permanently lagging behind.
Mrs. Lane set a platter piled high with roast and potatoes and carrots in the middle of the table, following it by a big bowl of gravy.
Clearly, she didn’t want to send Dillon into a tailspin.
“There we go.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Eat up . . . blueberry pie is for dessert.”
“Bluuueberry pie is my favvvorite,” Benjamin said, shifting in his seat so he could grin up at his grandmother.
Emotion pulsed, and I was struggling to breathe, to make sense of all of this, trying to process how it was possible that I was there.
Right in the middle of something so amazing.
And again, I was feeling like an outsider, someone who didn’t quite fit in.
Desperate to be a part of a family but remaining an outlier.
Too fucked up to really belong.
Mrs. Lane eyed me, nothing but knowing. “Huh, what do you know, Benjamin. It’s Maxon’s, too.”
Seventeen
Mack
Nine Years Old
Mack heard something shatter inside the house. His spine stiffened, and anger came at him like one of those storms that hit from out of nowhere.
Full force.
“Where do you think you’re goin’, bitch?”
Prickles of hate crawled across his skin as he tuned his ear that direction, and he dropped the stick he was carving out over by the shed and tucked the switchblade in his pocket.
This building with the big padlock on it was where his mama grumbled that his daddy did all of his dirty work.
Mack didn’t agree.
He thought there were plenty dirtier things happening inside those shabby walls.
Sucking in a breath, he forced down the tremors of fear that made him want to run and hide in the forest.
He was no coward.
His daddy called him that all the time.
This time, he was going to prove him wrong.
He inched beneath the shimmery rays of light that streaked through the breaks in the dense trees toward the rickety cabin he called home.
Planks on the porch rotted, trash littering the yard that was almost completely closed in by overgrown shrubs and trees.
Ugly.
Inside and out.
His insides rolled with sickness.
That ugliness didn’t have a thing to do with what it looked like.
His old shoes scuffed on the dirt, and he heard a scuffle, his mama’s gasps of surprise and fear.
But that was the way it always was. They never knew what they were gonna get. A good guy or a bad guy.
His mama told him everyone was made up of a little bit of both, but Mack knew for certain he didn’t want to be made up of any of that.
“To work. Where I go every Wednesday,” he heard his mama say, though it was close to a cry, and Mack slipped up the wobbly step onto the tiny porch, hoping the wood didn’t creak beneath his feet.
Beside the front door, Mack pressed his back to the wall. He held his breath when he leaned around so he could peek through the mesh of the screen door.
His mama was in the kitchen, and his daddy was looming over her, wearing no shirt and his jeans ripped, hair matted from staying up all night. Beer cans littered the living room floor, and Mack could smell the stench of it coming at him like a warnin’.
Dread knotted through him, tightening his chest and closing off his throat.
He tried to swallow it down. To blink it away. He didn’t want to be afraid the way he used to be.