Page 46 of Escaping Our Reality

Ry leans past me, into my car, and turns the heater up as far as it will go. He drove it out of the garage bay a couple of minutes ago, and it’s idling in the parking lot, waiting on me to drive home.

He softly kisses my lips. “Today was a good day. I got a phone, some chocolate cake, and a girlfriend.” He sighs in contentment. “That was some really good chocolate cake.”

Laughing, I slap his arm, and then use the opportunity to snake my hands up his shoulders and around his neck. I tug on his hair just the way he likes, the harder the better.

My whisper gets caught in my throat. “Tell me something.”

“Tell you something? Tell you what?”

“Tell me something no one else knows.”

He shakes his head. He’s about to tell me no. I know he is. But then he changes his mind. How can he deny me such a simple request? A perfectly complex, yet simple request. He closes his eyes, thinking.

“I stole something once. It was before I lived with my grandparents. My parents had been on a bender and hadn’t really fed me anything for a few days. I was with my dad in the grocery store. He was buying beer. All of this food was just calling to me. I was so hungry, people in Idaho could probablyhear my stomach growling. I took a candy bar. Just grabbed it and put it in my shorts. When I was walking out the door, I looked back and saw the cashier. She knew I took the candy bar. I just kept waiting on her to stop me, to call out. She didn’t, though. She just smiled. I spent the next several weeks terrified that I was gonna go to jail. My mom and dad had both already spent time in jail by then, and I knew it was a place I didn’t wanna be.

“The summer before my senior year of high school, I saw that same cashier at the nursing home when Grandpa and me were visiting Grandma. I saw her talking to some nurses when we walked by. I heard them whispering about her mother, saying she would be passing at any minute. It was the end. When Grandpa was with Grandma, I went back to see her. I bought a candy bar at the vending machine and went into the room with the cashier and her mom.”

Ry tilts his head to the side, his vision clouds with memories. “She looked up at me. With these tears streaming down her face. She noticed the candy bar in my hand and just smiled. She remembered me. Just like I remembered her. I gave her the candy bar and just sat with her. Neither of us said a word. Three hours and fourteen minutes later, her mother took her last breath. She died. The lady wiped her tears, took the candy bar from the table and walked out the door.”

He turns his focus back to me, rubbing his hands up the outside of my thighs. He doesn’t touch my legs often, but when he does, he lights my insides on fire. “And I never saw her again.”

This man. Who is this man in front of me?

Technically, I knew it the first second I saw him on the back porch of that trailer, but now, I can actually admit it to myself. I love him.

I’m in love with him.

My compass. My rock. My calm before the storm.

And… my raging hurricane in the middle of the ocean.

“You wanna tell me where that came from, Lulu? What made you ask that?”

“It’s something Carrie and I used to do.”

“So, someday you’ll tell me something you’ve never told anyone else?”

My frozen lips reach up to find his warmth. “All you have to do is ask.”

Chapter 21

ELLA

The sound of her acrylic nails tapping on the granite kitchen island is about to drive me to the brink of utter insanity. How the universe thinks the two of us fit together like mother and daughter is beyond me.

“How could you embarrass me like that, Ella? You made me seem like a complete imbecile. A mother who doesn’t even know her own child.”

Well, you don’t know me. What do you expect me to say?

“And then to tell a lie on top of it all,” she continues.

“It’s not a lie. I do have a boyfriend, Mom.” I stuff my laptop in my backpack and zip it.

“How can you have a boyfriend? You always said you were too busy to date.”

“No, I said I was too busy to date the boys you tried to fix me up with. Including Hudson.”

She fans herself with her hand and straightens a pillow on the couch. “I just don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. What will your father say? We don’t even know this boy, where he’s from, his pedigree…”

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