Page 76 of Someone to Watch Over Me

“I don’t feel pressured. I feel… I mean, I’d be having sex withTom Hammett.” I use my free hand to fan my face. “Fifteen-year-old Lexi is losing her mind over that.”

Still smiling, he says, “How does thirty-five-year-old Lexi feel about it?”

“She feels pretty good whenever you’re around, and she has for quite some time now.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“No way.”

“It is!”

“Before we, you know, take this to the next level,” I say, forcing myself to look at him, “there’re some things you should know.”

“About what?”

“Me.”

He links our fingers as he gazes at me with pure affection and interest. “I want to know everything there is to know about you.”

“Some of it is weird.”

“That’s often the best part of someone. The weird stuff.”

I eye him skeptically. “Said no one ever.”

“No, it’s true. The weird is what makes us different from everyone else.”

“Okay…”

“Tell me, Lex. Tell me anything and everything.”

“All right, then… Remember, I tried to warn you.”

“It’s all good.”

And because I know that’s true, it’s not hard to tell him about the things that hurt me. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an irrational fear of my dad dying. I’m not sure where it came from. There was no inciting event or anything like that. It was just this thing inside me that took over for a while. I remember being very small and creeping into their room in the middle of the night to make sure he was still breathing.”

“Aw, Lex.”

“He was always robustly healthy. That’s the strange thing about it. There wasn’t anything at all wrong with him.”

“Same with my dad until he was dead.”

“What happened to you was my greatest fear. That he’d go off somewhere and never come home. He traveled a lot for work. I wouldn’t sleep for all the time he was gone.”

“Lexi… Seriously?”

“The whole time. A week once.”

“What did your mother say?”

“She doesn’t know any of this. Neither of them does. I’ve hidden it for years.”

“How did you hide the fact that you weren’t sleeping for a whole week from your mom?”

“I’m not sure how I got away with it, but I did.”

“You had severe anxiety.”

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