“That was very rude. She was just about to tell me what your name is.”
Lacing his fingers through mine, he pulls me down the stairs.
“My name is PJ.”
“You’re so annoying,” I grumble as we get into the car.
The ride back to my house is silent as I stare out the window, replaying everything that happened at lunch.
“Are you okay? My mom didn’t freak you out too much, did she?” PJ asks.
I shake my head no.
“I envy you,” I whisper a few minutes later, staring out of the window at the passing landscape. “I never had that growing up.”
“Never had what, baby?” he asks, reaching over resting his hand on my thigh, giving me a reassuring squeeze.
The way he calls me baby, his voice so soft and sweet and full of concern for me, is something I don’t know how to handle. No one has ever worried about me before. Not like this. Not like he honestly cares and is not just saying it because he has to. It’s making me emotional, and it’s making me think about things I haven’t thought about in a very long time.
“Someone who loved me unconditionally like that. Someone who would do whatever it took to make sure I was happy and taken care of, even if that meant stripping at some seedy club night after night,” I tell him quietly, finally turning away from the window to stare at him as he drives, glancing over at me every few seconds to check on me as I talk. “My mom died giving birth to me, so I never knew her. I’ve seen pictures of her, and my dad always talked about her, but she was just an idea. Just an image in a photograph who I looked like, but I had no clue what her voice sounded like or what her laugh sounded like. He got remarried when I was ten and I thought, finally! A mom. Someone who will teach me how to cook, take me shopping, show me how to put on makeup and do girly things that my dad stayed far, far away from. She even had two daughters who were a few years older than me, and I thought I hit the jackpot. A mom and siblings.”
I pause, trying to collect my thoughts, wondering why in the hell I’m blurting all of this out to him. Watching him with his mom today just made me sad. It made me wish I’d had what he did. And it made me want him to know everything about me, the good and the bad. Even though I really do want to tell him all of this, I don’t want to see the look on his face when I do, so I turn my head and look back out the window.
“They were amazing for the first few months. We all got along great and it was like something right out of a fairy tale. Then my dad passed away suddenly from a massive heart-attack, and everything went to shit. I became their whipping girl and their slave while they spent every last penny of my father’s savings and his life insurance on themselves. We had to sell our home. It wasn’t a huge mansion or anything, but it was all I’d ever known. All my memories with my dad were wrapped up in that house, and one day, it was just gone. All of our knickknacks, all of my toys, all of the photographs of my dad and my mom, gone, and the four of us were crammed together in a two-bedroom trailer in a trailer park in the worst part of town.”
PJ rubs his palm soothingly against my thigh, and I close my eyes and lean my head back against the headrest.
“They didn’t want me, and they made that perfectly clear every day of my life, but they were stuck with me, since we didn’t have any other family. And my stepmother grew quite fond of the small stipend the state would send her every month to continue taking care of me,” I say, remembering how the minute it came in the mail, that money would be spent on something stupid that we didn’t even need, instead of food or water or electricity. “The minute I turned eighteen and could get the hell out of there, I ran as fast as I could and never looked back. I worked two jobs just to keep a roof over my head in a tiny, shitty apartment, and I knew I would do anything to make sure I never had to live like that again. Then I met Brian a year later, and I got pregnant with Anastasia. And he made me promises. So many promises that a girl from the trailer park latched on to like it was the last cup of water in the desert. I just wanted someone to love me, and I wanted security, and he gave me that. Then I spent the rest of our marriage turning into something I wasn’t just so that love and security never went away.”