Page 30 of Skin Deep

I had told him I was afraid of nothing, but that wasn’t true. I was terrified. I had been since that day when I was eighteen, always looking over my shoulder, knowing that if I ever truly cared about anyone again, they’d be a target.

That’s why Ken had been so damn perfect. I’d never cared about him, and he’d never asked me to. He’d been rich and mentally stable, as boring as they came, which made him attractive to the adoption agencies we were working with. He also had almost never been around, which meant I didn’t have to pretend to care. I could say I was dating a pro golfer and never have to show up to prove it.

And if my grandfather decided to sic his goons after Ken to teach me a lesson about being gay, I wouldn’t lose a night’s sleep if they killed him.

But it wasn’t like that with Paxton. Somehow, he’d wormed his way into my heart. He was right. I liked him. I didn’t want him to die. Deep down, I knew that no matter how many lives Paxton took, he’d never be safe. Not as long as Simeon the Immortal lived.

I hit the delete button and a prompt came up asking me if I was sure. I wasn’t sure of anything, least of all when it came to Paxton Cooper. With a sigh, I selected no and put the phone back down without deleting his number.

Whenyou’rebroke,figuringout dating could get complicated. Luckily, I’d been broke all my life. I’d won the heart of one hard-to-get beauty queen, so I was relatively sure I had the charm to win War too.

If only I could figure out what to wear.

The pants were the easy part. Couldn’t go wrong with a nice pair of black slacks. It was the shirt that was proving problematic. I stood in front of the mirror in my white tank and black slacks, holding up two different colored button ups.

“I’m going to look like a pretentious asshole no matter which one of these I wear,” I told Lettie with a sigh.

She kicked her feet against the floor, sitting on my bed. “I still like the pink.”

Because of course she did. She was in her pink phase. Everything was pink with her. I’d tried on the pink polo to make her happy, but it’d made me look like I was a golf caddy at a Barbie resort. No thank you.

I went back to my closet and grabbed one of my favorite shirts, a nice black Henley. It clung to my chest and arms perfectly, showing off the guns, which I knew War liked.

“You can’t wear black,” Lettie said, hopping down from the bed. “You’ll look like you’re going to a funeral.”

She was right. Dammit.

Digging further back, I found the same shirt in red and pulled it on, turning around to get her approval. “What do you think, Punkin? Think he’ll like it?”

She scrutinized my choices, rubbing her chin like she was choosing life or death. Then she walked over and unbuttoned the top two buttons. “You gotta show ‘em some skin, Daddy.”

I frowned. “Girl, where do you hear all this?”

Lettie rolled her eyes. “The Kardashians. Duh.”

I sighed and turned back to adjust how the chains were sitting under my collar.

“You saidhe,” she said after a while. “Are you going on a date with a boy?”

I hesitated and bit the inside of my lip. It wasn’t that I was trying to hide it from her. I wasn’t. I didn’t want to tell her too much in case War canceled on me.

I turned away from the mirror. “You know how we talked about how sometimes boys love boys and girls love girls?”

She nodded. “Gays and lesbians.”

“Sort of. Those are words for people who only love others who are the same gender as them, right? Some people, like me, like all kinds of people. I like men and women, and some people who are non-binary and all kinds of different sorts of people in between all that. They call that being pansexual. Means I don’t care about what parts people got. I like the person.”

Lettie chewed her bottom lip, thinking hard. “Does this mean you don’t love Mom anymore?”

“Oh, sweetie, no,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed with her. “Your mamma’s always going to have a special place in my heart. Of course I still love her. How could I not when she gave me you and Charlie?”

“If you still love her, then how come you’re going on a date with someone else?”

I sighed and tried to find the right words, but maybe there weren’t any right words for this situation. I still had to try. I grabbed the Squishmallow she’d brought in with her, a cat with a unicorn horn I’d gotten her for Easter last year. “You remember Mrs. Bunny?”

She arched an eyebrow. “My favorite toy when I was like five?”

“You slept with her every night. Dragged her everywhere, even to school when you weren’t supposed to.”

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