Page 109 of Come Break My Heart Again

I sit up, grabbing his T-shirt from the end of the bed and slipping it over my head.

He’s lighting a cigarette, the scent of smoke mixing with the perfume of fresh rain and the smell of sex wrapped around me.

I raise an eyebrow. “So, you didn’t quit.”

Ryder rests one shoulder against the window frame, blowing a stream of smoke outside. “It’s my last day of rebellion.”

“Meaning youareturning eighteen tomorrow?”

He nods. “You have a good memory.”

“Sometimes.” I walk over to the window, mirroring his posture and leaning one shoulder against the opposite side of the window so I’m facing him. “Can I try?”

He holds out the cigarette. I pinch it carefully and lift it to my mouth gingerly, imitating the action I’ve seen others do before. Imagining the horrified look on my mom’s face if she saw this makes me smile as I suck on the unlit end and then blow out a smoky breath. Immediately, I start coughing.

“Ugh.” I cough again, trying to expel the ashy taste. “That’s terrible.”

“Takes some getting used to,” Ryder tells me.

Eyes watering, I hand the cigarette back to him. “Why would you want to?”

Ryder is silent, staring out the window at the rain. He flicks the glowing tip, a few black flecks falling onto the sill. “My mom smokes. Whenever I got up in the middle of the night as a kid, she’d be sitting at the kitchen table with a cigarette. Just … sitting there. Not watching TV or reading or cleaning. She called it her thinking time. And so, whenever I was feeling stressed or overwhelmed, I’d do the same thing. Probably got ahold of these younger than I should’ve, but …” He shrugs a shoulder. “It’ll be legal tomorrow.”

“It looks sexy,” I say. “Not that I want you to keep smoking. But it looks sexy … when you do it.”

Ryder grins, his abs clenching as he rests more of his weight on the wall. “Why didn’t you … with Hathaway?”

“I just didn’t.”

It’s a cop-out of an answer, but Ryder nods, accepting it.

“Have you heard from your dad lately?”

“He’s texted a few times, yeah.”

“Have you answered?” I ask.

“No.” He extinguishes the cigarette in a puddle on the sill.

“Why not?”

“Because he feels guilty about kicking me out. He’s not reaching out because he actually cares.”

“Do he and your mom keep in touch?”

“Depends on the year,” he replies. “When she was back with Rory—Cormac’s dad—not really. That’s part of why Dax split. She started calling him again, asking about me. He didn’t want her to have that excuse anymore.”

“How-how long were they together?”

I keep waiting for Ryder to stop answering. To shut this topic down. He shared a few snippets of his childhood with me before—enough to illustrate how different our upbringings were—but not this much.

“Four years. I don’t remember much of it. They had me pretty early on.” He shrugs, shoving his hands in his pockets, then refocuses on me. “What are your parents like?”

“My parents?”

He nods.

We’ve talked about our families before. But that was more as kids, swapping complaints that felt monumental at the time.

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