Page 43 of The White Picket Fence

She exhaled quietly. “Thank you, Tino. I don’t deserve your kindness, but I’m so grateful for it.”

“Hush. You deserve kindness.” On an impulse, he held his arm wide. “Come here. Let me hold you. Maybe it’ll help both of us sleep.”

She moved closer until her head was on his shoulder, her hand on his chest, her body burrowing into his side. She was soft and warm, and she smelled like lemons. Her murmur of contentment made something within him settle.

He hadn’t been able to hold her like this often when they’d been young. Their parents had been eagle-eyed, not giving them opportunities to “get into trouble.”

Of course, their parents hadn’t known everything. They’d had a few stolen moments, holding each other just like this. Those, however, had usually been preceded by sex.

Which he was not going to think about. He was going to enjoy holding her until sleep took him and then he’d wake up and go to the prison with Vito to get some answers about Kevin Hale and the nature of his endgame.

“I felt like I was going to suffocate,” Charlotte murmured, completely out of the blue.

Tino tightened his hold on her. “What? When? Now?”

“No. When I was eighteen.”

Ah.This would be the explanation he’d been hoping for. He considered turning on a light, but it might be easier for her to explain in the dark.

It might be easier for him to hear, too.

“Why?”

She sighed, her breath warm against his shoulder. “My parents fought all the time when I was in high school. Dad hit my mother once. They stayed together for me. I’d lie awake at night and hear them screaming at each other, and it was awful.”

“I didn’t know it was that bad.” His own parents’ relationship had been okay at that point in his life. His mother had been critical of all her children, but if his parents had fought back then, he hadn’t known about it. It wasn’t until later that they’d discovered the lies his mother had told. Their family had never been the same afterward.

“It was. When they divorced a few years after I left for college, I was kind of relieved. I found ways not to visit home on the holidays. I mostly went home with friends. Anything to avoid my folks.”

“I don’t understand why you felt like you were suffocating.”

She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just that every time I thought about marriage, I’d get anxious. I didn’t want marriage. I didn’t want what they had, being stuck together while hating each other. My mother would scream at him that she could have had a career if he hadn’t knocked her up. With me. She wanted to be a dancer, but she had to give that up when I came along. Then she was married and living in a house with a white picket fence and having meatloaf on Wednesdays.”

Which was what Tino had told her he’d wanted for their life together. “You didn’t want to be trapped with me.”

“No.I wanted to be with you. But I was afraid that if I let myself have that, that I’d become my mother. You wanted babies right away and...I didn’t. I wanted to experience independence. My mother moved from her parents’ house right into my father’s house and she hated him for that. I loved you so much, but I was afraid of the life that you said you wanted.”

“I would have let you do whatever you wanted,” Tino said, then grimaced. “That came out wrong. I wouldn’t haveletyou do anything. You could have made the rules, and I would have done whatever you wanted. I just wanted you.”

“I know. But I still wanted to be on my own, for a little while. I look back now and see how foolish I was. I gave you up for what I thought was my dream, and I missed you from the moment I walked away.”

“But you couldn’t change your mind,” Tino said, hoping he understood and trying not to take her words too personally. “Because then you’d be trapped.”

“I guess. Like I said, I can’t explain it well.”

“Could you breathe? After you left?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, and he had to draw a deep breath because the single word hurt him. “But it didn’t last long. There were responsibilities wherever I went. Always someone who needed something. Friends, teachers. My parents. I thought I’d be free and everything would be easy when I was on my own, and in some ways, Iwasfree, but...I missed you. I hated myself for hurting you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me how you felt?”

“Because you were Tino Ciccotelli. You were prom king.”

“You were prom queen.”

“I was a dinghy, floating in your wake.”

He flinched then. He couldn’t help it. “Oh.”

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