Ryan (Mallick Brothers 2)

"Oh no no no," I cut him off. "You can't just drop a bomb like your brother being a cheerleader and move on from it," I said, laughing.

"You'd have to meet Mark to understand fully. He's ah... there's not a nice way to say slut so I'll just go ahead and use that. He has and always did really fucking love women. All his friends outside of us and maybe Colt were female. He dated a different girl every week in high school. And when he was forced into a sport, well, why wouldn't he pick one where he got to pick up and throw around a bunch of hot girls all day?"

"Smart guy," I agreed, deciding that Mark was definitely a brother I wanted to meet. "What did you do?"

"Fucking track," he admitted with a snort. "I have no idea what I was thinking. I quit after I don't know... two weeks. That was more than e-fucking-nough for me. But then Ma found out. And my mother, aside from being a strict believer in manners, family obligation, respect for elders, and treating women right, well, she fucking hates quitters. If we signed up, we finished. No excuses."

His mother was everything my mother wasn't. I think I learned manners despite her, not because of her. "What did she do?"

"She came and picked me up every single day from school, made me change into gym clothes, and then drove beside me as I ran through the neighborhoods for however long practice would have been. Every goddamn day. Even on days when it poured and actual track was cancelled, there I was running in it with her driving beside me so I couldn't get away with not doing it."

"Your mom sounds awesome," I admitted.

"What was yours like?" he asked, making my smile fall.

My mother was never a good topic for me. One, because we currently had a bad relationship. Two, because of the way I had been raised. And three, because she saw nothing wrong with how she raised me.

I was an only child, obviously. The product of a short-term affair with a man many years her senior when she was all but eighteen. When I had asked about him, all she had told me was that he was tall and blond, his hair dreadlocked and with a beard he oiled with rosehips and lavender and he spent eight hours a day meditating and doing yoga and was as close to a living, breathing second-coming as you could get.

She never even gave me a name.

It wasn't until I was much, much older that I realized... maybe she didn't even have one herself.

There was no nice way to say your mother was, well, a bit slutty. But that was exactly what she was, by almost any standard of the word. One-night stands, weekend flings, short dalliances. I spent more time in men I didn't know's apartments than I did in ones where my stuff belonged. And she had no moral compass about it either. She dated young, old, married, engaged. She didn't care.

Monogamy is a religious concept, not a human normalcy.

And while that might have been correct, it didn't excuse dragging a little, impressionable girl around and putting her in the homes of people she didn't know she could trust. I was lucky to have never been abused in the situations she put herself and me in.

She liked to call herself a hippie, big on free love and the more-than-occasional ingestion of acid for 'spiritual' purposes.

I didn't ever have a bedtime. I ate whatever the hell I wanted, even if that meant an entire box of sugar cereal for dinner. I didn't even know what a dentist was until I was ten and my uncle had brief care of me and did those normal things with me- doctor, dentist, eye exam, the works. I never learned anything about basic human civility when I was at her side.

And, well, the fact that she would breeze into Navesink Bank, drop me off and then leave without me only to show up weeks or months or years later said a hell of a lot about her.

"She was a piece of work," Ryan agreed when I finished telling him all of that. "You were lucky you had your uncle."

Truer words had never been spoken.

I didn't want to think about what I might have turned out like had he never been a part of my life.

A huge part of me thought that maybe I would have turned out just like my mother. And that, well, was the worst possible thing that could have happened. I'd happily take my agoraphobia over that any day.

"Can I ask you something," he started, but went on before I could say anything. "And it's alright if you're not ready to talk about it."

I felt my belly tense, my heart fluttering in a way that was hinting at panic, but not taking the leap yet. "Sure."