Page 102 of Last Chance Love

He cracked one eye open, narrowing it. “It’s too early to be sarcastic.”

“Not for me.”

“Well, it’s too early for me to be dealing with it.”

I snorted. “Well, it sucks to be you right now because I’m more than capable of dishing out plenty of sarcasm when the situation calls for it.”

He sighed heavily, managing an impressive amount of self-pity in that one sound. “I couldn’t touch you back then because it would have just been weird. A hug here and there would have been fine, but anything more? Or lingering on it? That would have driven me crazy. The less I touched you, the less likely I was to start entertaining a fantasy in my head, and I’d already had those.”

I raised a brow. “We’ll circle back to those fantasies in a moment, but do continue.”

He snorted. “And then we got together. I never saw it coming, and afterward, even taking things slow like we did, I didn’t know what to do. That first time we laid in your bed together was like heaven. It wasn’t the first time I messed around with someone else?—”

“Mmm, who was it again? Brett?”

“Brent Donnelly. Lived in the same apartment complex as me. Always liked to act like he wasn’t hanging around me for a bit of fun, yet that’s pretty much all we did after that first time when I stole a bottle of my parents' cheap as shit vodka. He wasn’t fooling me. Yours was…Ben wasn’t it?”

“Your memory needs work,” I said with a small laugh. “It was Bennett. From that summer I spent with my parents in Colorado, in some sleepy little town in the mountains.”

“Okay, South Park.”

“Har har. It was just a summer fling, one of those things that happens only when the stars decide to align and give you something you weren’t even looking for. He was sweet, reminded me a bit of Riley and Elliot, actually. Just a sweet guy, but he was always getting up to some shit. We bonded over having a best friend that we had the hots for.”

“I remember you telling me that,” he said with a laugh. “Now you say his name, I remember thinking it was another rich kid who happened to be vacationing there. It just sounded like a rich kid name.”

“Not him,” I said with a light shrug. “Pretty down to earth when you got down to it. Pretty much all the guys I had a relationship with or something that wasn’t quite that but more than a fling were down to earth. I seem to have a type.”

“Not physical, though. I remember that one guy you were dating. As blond as they came.”

“Yeah, Bennett was too. I tend to like them blond. Except for the first guy I ever loved.”

“Sappy,” he said, even as he smiled gently. “I’ll be honest with you. Being affectionate or intimate with you was never difficult. I never got anything like that from Brent. And even before we started dating, I always felt like you would be different. You wouldn’t be the type to pump and go.”

“You know, I regretted you weren’t my first.”

“You weren’t mine either.”

“I know, but that never bothered me.”

“Huh, and here I never thought about either of them. Honestly, I was happy we figured things out when we were a little older. Taking on more responsibility for Ian and Ray, juggling jobs and school, made me a little calmer and more responsible. I wasn’t there yet when I was fourteen.”

“Who the hell is at fourteen?”

“I needed to be.”

To that, I could do nothing but sigh sadly as I gave his side a light squeeze, trying to say with the gesture what my mouth couldn’t. I didn’t want to run into the ground that he should have never had to do that in the first place because he already knew. We both knew he should have been able to have a childhood, arealone, and it had been wrongfully stolen from him by his piece-of-shit parents, who couldn’t be bothered to take care of the life they had so carelessly created.

Yet that past created the man lying beside me, his body warming mine and his presence warming something deeper inside me. The things that had happened to him that never should have in a decent world were the things that made him the person I loved so dearly. Even when we were younger, the responsibility shoved upon him had honed him into a man I had respected but someone I had envied in my own way.

It had always been my belief that he had been a special person from the start. He could have easily ignored the help his brothers had needed not to go through the things Leon had gone through, and who would have blamed him? He had been a kid the first time he’d stepped up to take care of Ian, and he wasn’t that much older when he’d done the same with Ray, doubling his workload.

His life could have been his own, with responsibility only for himself, and that would have been his right. Yet, as far as I knew, he never hesitated when he realized what needed to be done. Those boys needed someone to take care of them, and he had sacrificed what little care he could have provided himself to do right by them when no one had ever done the same for him.

“You’ve gottenrealquiet,” he said, opening his eyes again, his gaze far less groggy than before as he focused on my face. “And you’ve got that sappy look on your face.”

“Don’t mind me,” I said with a small smile. “It’s just me admiring the kind of person you are, who you’ve grown up to be. It’s no surprise you never really needed me. You’re great at standing on your own two feet, even when the world pulls at you from every angle imaginable.”

His wary expression hardened into a scowl as he gave me a light push. “Stop. I’ve always needed you. I was the idiot who decided to take everything on their shoulders, and I paid dearly for it, alright? All that stuff is just…it feels like window dressing, I guess, things to throw in front of the world and pretend like I’ve got a handle on things.”

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