Page 59 of Rowdy Hearts

Down, boy.

“I really should think about getting back to your parents’.” A few seconds passed. “And wow, that sounded really weird. Not as weird as it’s going to be facing your mom tomorrow morning, but still…”

I tightened my arms around her. “Mom won’t say a word. She’s not going to be waiting up for you in a chair by the door. She’s not going to make you feel like you did anything wrong. Or that she’s entitled to know what you’re doing. And, contrary to popular opinion, she can’t read minds. You’re allowed to be an adult, Princess. I mean, she manages to stay out of her kids’ sex lives, so she’s definitely not going to stick her nose in yours.”

She stilled, like she was thinking really hard about something. I didn’t push, knew it wouldn’t work with her. Tressy didn’t give up anything easily or willingly. I’d learned in the two days I’d known her that, if she didn’t want to tell you something, she wouldn’t. She had walls.

And that was okay. I was pretty decent at tearing down walls. You didn’t always have to use brute force. Sometimes, they just needed a little encouragement to fall on their own.

So I waited. Tightened my arm around her and made sure she knew I wasn’t one of those guys who shoved a girl out of bed after sex. Hell, I actually liked to snuggle.

“My mom’s not like that.”

Is that who she was running from? Not everyone was lucky enough to have the family I did. What had her mom done?

“So, what’s she like?”

A deep breath then a long exhale, cool against my chest. She was debating what to tell me, how much to tell me. Damn it, I wanted to know everything about her, but I’d rein myself in because I sensed she needed to get this off her chest. Or at least, get some of it out.

“Demanding. Driven. Tough. Always working an angle.”

“Your dad in the picture?”

Another pause, thinking through her response. “No. My mom left him when she was pregnant with my younger sister. He was…abusive. Mainly to my mom, but when he gave me a black eye when I was five, she packed up and left. She had three hundred dollars in cash and pawned her wedding and engagement rings for another couple hundred. We drove from Tampa to L.A. and crashed on an old friend’s couch. The old friend turned out to be a sound technician for a television production company, and he got my mom a job in craft services. Gerry was a good guy. Had a good heart. My mom broke it, of course, but that’s my mom. I cried for days when we got our own apartment.”

“Your mom didn’t stay in craft services for long, did she?”

She shook her head. “She wanted more. And she wanted to do it on her own. Luckily, she had two really photogenic daughters. My sister started doing print ads almost from birth. I booked a few, but mostly I did tv spots.”

“And what’d your mom do?”

I had a clue where this was going, but I wanted her to keep talking. Wanted her to know I was listening.

“She managed. Our careers, our lives. Everything.”

“Did you like it?”

“At first. Yeah. Then it became a job.”

“How old were you then?”

She shrugged, and I felt every inch of her skin pressed against me like a hot iron.

“Eleven. I started to realize how much I was missing. I wanted to go to school with other kids my age. I wanted to do normal things like skateboard, but I couldn’t because, what if I fell? What if I broke an arm or skinned my knees and I had to shoot that week?”

“So what’d you do?”

“Nothing. I did nothing. Because my mom and sister relied on my income.”

“You were a kid. That shouldn’t have been on you.”

She rose up on an elbow and looked down at me, her smile twisted. “I know that now. But I felt guilty that my mom had to leave my dad because he hit me.”

My mouth dropped open. “What the fuck?—”

She shook her head. “I was a kid, Rowdy. Sometimes, that’s how kid’s brains work. At least, that’s what one of my many therapists told me. My mom never made it my fault. She isn’t a monster. She’s just…driven. She wants us to succeed, probably because she thinks she never did. She’s never had a successful relationship with a man because she could never trust them enough. Especially around her kids. And honestly, she has the worst taste in men. We used to be able to laugh about it. Then she just stopped looking, and it became all about us. Me and Tiff.”

“That’s your sister?”

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