Page 52 of Conquering Conner

I feel my pulse tick through my jaw. “Okay...” The I’m clean speech is my automatic go-to. It bothers me that she seems to know it. That she finds it amusing. “But I still think we should talk ab—”

“I’m on the pill.”

Her declaration jerks my gaze back to her face.

“You are?” The thought balls itself up in my stomach, hard and heavy. “I thought you and… I mean that’s good, I just…” I let the statement trail off because I don’t know how to finish it without putting my fist through something.

“We don’t,” she says, holding half a sandwich out to me like a peace offering. I take it because I don’t know what else to do. “But we faked a pregnancy scare when I was eighteen. I’ve been on birth control ever since, to keep up the pretense.” She leans against the counter and rolls her eyes, lifting her own sandwich to her mouth. “When I told my mother I wasn’t pregnant, she locked herself in her room and cried for two days.”

I’m sure she did. I’m sure the thought of her only daughter, barely out of high school and knocked-up by the son of a billionaire was the proudest moment of her life.

Instead of saying so, I make an affirmative sound in the back of my throat before taking a bite of my sandwich, chewing and thinking about what it means, this dizzying mess of disappointment a relief that’s tumbling around in my gut.

It means you’re one fucked-up individual, genius.

The sound of clinking glass pulls me out of my own head long enough to focus on what I’m doing. The sandwich is almost gone, and Henley is rooting around in the fridge. She pulls out two bottles of Trillium and offers me one.

I look at the beer she’s holding out to me and shake my head, shoving what’s left of my sandwich into my mouth and chew, my jaw tightening with each revolution.

One of them went to her.

Tess.

My dickface brother.

My can’t-mind-his-own-goddamned-business cousin.

Told her how fucked up I am. That I need the drinking and the fucking more than I like to admit. That I stopped both because she asked me to and that I’ve gone totally banana-balls as a result.

That’s why she’s here.

Guilt.

Holy Christ.

I’m a goddamned pity fuck.

I don’t know if I want to laugh or break something.

The fucked-up part—the part that makes me want to take a baseball bat to every motherfucking thing I own—is that I don’t care.

I don’t care why she’s here.

I don’t care if she came here to fuck and feed me out of some misguided sense of responsibility. I don’t care that she’s looking at me like I’m stray dog, injured and sick. Like I need saving.

I don’t care about any of it.

As long as she’s looking at me.

As long as she’s here.

“It’s okay.” She rolls her eyes when I keep shaking my head and sets her own down before twisting the top off the beer she offered me. “The last time I was here, I saw…” She trails off, her gaze darting to the now empty sink. I know what she saw. What she thought. What she thought about me. That I’m just like her father—a useless drunk. That when I drink, I might get mean. I might hurt her. “Anyway, I’m okay with it. I understand.”

Never mind the fact that, drunk or not, I’d cut off my own arms before I even thought about raising so much as a finger at her. She has no way of knowing that. She doesn’t know me. Not really. Not anymore.

I pick up the beer because she gave it to me and I take a drink because she wants me to. When I lower it, she smiles, twists the top on her own and clinks the mouth of it against mine before she takes a drink.

She makes another sandwich and we spit that one too. We eat in silence, neither of us really looking at each other. Afterward, she starts to clean up, putting the container of chicken salad in the fridge and wiping up crumbs. She doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t try to talk to me. Just quick, nervous movements that give me the feeling she wants to leave but doesn’t know how.

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