Page 60 of Pinkie Promise

She’s twiddling anxiously with her fingers. I try to keep my breathing steady.

“Connell told me that Dr. Ward was a bad choice, and I should have listened to him. But I’m just so not used to getting good help, good advice, that I got defensive with him when he brought it up at the condo yesterday. We had an argument – well,Ihad an argument, he listened and then told me that he’d talk to me again when I’d cooled off. Obviously, I then got evenmoreangry. So when he left the condo post-argument, Ash sat me down and talked it all through with me.

“I feel horrible for snapping at him, but also lucky, and then feeling lucky makes me feel even worse. Because I can’t believe that I have someone in my life who is actually good enough to be let down.” She presses her fingers into the centre of her brow and says, “And now I’m talking to you about another guy, and now you’re going to be pissed off with me too, even though I only see Connell like he’s my brother. I’m literally just the worst person in the world right now.”

Her trembling shoulders are the final straw.

“Hey,” I say, my voice a command for her to look up at me. I wrap my forearms firmly around her belly and try not to enjoy how goddamn sexy she looks in her outfit while pressed up against my abdomen.

Not the time. Definitely not the right time.

She meets my eyes in the mirror and I press a kiss to her soft cheek. Her beautiful eyes grow shimmery with tears.

“What’re you crying for?” I ask quietly, even though she hasn’t let her tears overspill yet. “If some piece of work is bailing out on all of your hard sloggin’ then we’ll find you a different referee–”

She shakes her head. “The deadline is January, it’s way too close.”

“You have time, Fallon. I’ll help you get all the staff’s email addresses and then we’ll send a request to each of them.”

“But what if Dr. Ward finds out?” she says, panic seeping into her voice.

“To hell with Ward,” I growl. “She missed her chance. You’re gonna get a reference that’s a fucking billion times better than hers would ever have been.”

Fallon gnaws anxiously on her bottom lip, looking away from me with an unsure expression. “I have…everythingriding on this.”

I rub my jaw gently over her cheek and her lashes flutter closed as I scrape her up with my stubble. She’s been hinting at the significance of getting this grant since the first time that she told me about it, and I can’t hold back any longer to find out why she needs it so bad.

“Fallon.” She peeks up at me like a scolded schoolgirl and it makes me feel guilty as hell for using my hockey captain voice on her. To balance it out, I nuzzle warmly against her temple and murmur, “Why’s the grant so important to you, baby? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t wanna, but if you do…”

She watches me without blinking for a good ten seconds before dropping her eyes and muttering to her toes, “I wanna.”

It’s the first time that I’ve caught a hint of her accent sounding remotely country and it’s so cute that I huff out a laugh against her cheek. But then she slowly lifts her hands to cover her eyes and they’re shaking so badly that I immediately spin her around in my arms.

“Fallon,” I say frantically, frowning as I hunch down so that we’re at a more even level. I keep one arm around the back of her shoulders and I use my other hand to hold onto one of her wrists. I want to ease her hands away from her face so that we can look at each other but, as soon as I see two big silent tears streaking down her pink cheeks, I release my hold on her wrist and stroke my fingers through her ponytail instead.

The fact that she’s crying soundlessly, as if she doesn’t want me to notice, makes my heart hurt even harder.

She nods, her fingers still pressed into the space between her eyebrows. “Sorry,” she whispers. “Give me a moment, and then I’ll explain.”

“Fallon,I’msorry, you don’t have to–”

She removes her fingers from her face and lowers her trembling hands to hold her belly.

“Um, okay,” she says quietly. “So, I’ll understand if you don’t get it when I explain this, because I think that a lot of people might not be exposed to, uh, certain types of… parenting when they’re growing up, so they might not realise that some…stylesactually exist. Which is fine, I won’t be offended if you think that I’m being dramatic, or if you think that it couldn’t have really been as bad as I’m making it out to be, but…”

She takes a deep breath, avoiding my eyes by looking at my chest instead.

“I didn’t exactly have the happiest start growing up. I feel like it’s pretty obvious but, in case my total fear over communication didn’t make it clear enough, my parents weren’t exactly the nicest people. They’re ex-Olympians with three daughters and their sole goal with all of us was to make us follow in their footsteps. And that would have been fine, except for the fact that they were really…brutalwith forcing us into it. There was a lot of over-exerting us, a lot of unfair diet regimens. We had to stay on top of our homework or they’d make us skip meals – that kind of thing. I mean, I actually didn’t mind the schoolwork side of things because getting praise from my teachers was the only positive enforcement that I was exposed to, but having to physically train that hard, as a kid? It wasn’t the easiest thing. It was alright for a while, up until around the age of thirteen. They wanted to keep my sisters and I competitive so they didn’t let us sit together, and we were pretty non-verbal growing up because we were all ostracised from one another. We just kept our heads down, got good grades, and basically tried not to piss our parents off.

“Then I started high school and I thought that maybe things would be different now. When I was in the middle of my junior year there was this guy – literally no-one important, just a guy in my class who was nice to me – and I remember him asking me out and I felt so…wanted, for the first time ever. So I waslike, ‘hell yeah’,” she says, laughing wetly before her expression crumbles and she shields her eyes with her hands again. “I told my parents that I was maybe gonna go out with this guy and they… they lost their shit. Like, my dad chased me up the stairs and broke the door down when I tried to lock myself in the bathroom. I hadn’t even gone out with the guy, and they were acting like I’d… I don’t even know what. I’m pretty sure that very little in the world would have merited the reaction that they gave me but, long story short, it was a really long, really terrifying night, and then they ended up grounding me for, uh” – she swallows hard – “a really long time.”

My voice is nothing but gravel when I ask her, “How long did they ground you for, Fallon?”

“Until I graduated from my class,” she says, her voice light and strained as she lowers her hands from where they’re swiping at her cheeks. She waits a moment before finally meeting my eyes. “Until I graduated from, uh, my senior class.”

It takes a few seconds for the words to register, but as soon as they do I feel anger begin to course and spread through my veins.

“You’re telling me,” I grit out quietly, “that your parents grounded you… for your entire senior year?”

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