Page 21 of Last Chance Love

I opened my mouth, a clicking sound coming out as I unclenched my throat and croaked out a thin, “What?”

“I mean,” he said with that smile that always came so easily to him and a casual shrug. “I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been thinking about it for a while now.”

“When?” I managed to get out, heart beginning to thump in earnest.

“I mean, pretty much every day.”

“No, like, when did it?—”

“Start?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Well, remember when you showed up for my birthday?”

His birthday was still a month away, so he had to mean last year. “Oh. Yeah, after my shift.”

“Yeah, after you’d worked almost thirty hours at two jobs you aren’t supposed to have. On top of all the other shit you do, like making sure your brothers are eating, doing their homework, showering, and making sure you guys don’t lose power or your roof. On top of doing school shit.”

It was weird, having someone lay all that out in front of me, and I couldn’t help the uncomfortable shuffling of my feet. “Yeah, I’m familiar.”

A strange expression passed over his face, pulling at my chest. “Sixteen, and you just?—”

I knew where he was going with this, and I didn’t want to hear it, not from him. How many times had I seen that same mixture of sadness and frustration on a teacher’s face, on a good-natured neighbor’s face? Too many times to count, and far too many for me to tolerate anymore. I knew people meant well, and I’d probably be just as concerned if I were in their shoes, but that didn’t change reality or the necessity of what I did.

Ray and Ian weren’t old enough to take care of things around the house. I mean, I was doing a lot more at ten than Ray had ever done, and I’d been earning money and started to run the house at twelve, unlike Ian, but that wasn’t their fault. If doing all this kept them under a roof with power, food, and the clothes I could scrape together, then so be it. They didn’t need to deal with working all the time, being responsible for themselves and others at an age no kid should have to be that responsible, and they shouldn’t have to wrangle our useless parents into making sure there was at least some money left over from government checks for the household.

“Don’t,” I told him, looking away again. It was just one of those things we didn’t talk about. He wanted to, I knew that, but he also respected how much I didn’t want to talk about it.

He sighed, rolling his eyes toward the sky. “Yeah, sure. Anyway. You’d put in God knows how many hours between work, school, and running your damn house, you were exhausted. You should have just gone home, but no, you rolled up here at eleven instead of going to bed, with fried chicken and a brownie you pocketed from work as a gift.”

I’d never told him I’d paid for the meal because he would have lost his mind that I’d spent the money on him. It was messed up that he was more willing to accept a stolen gift than a bought one, but that’s how it was. “It was your birthday, man. I had to do something.”

“This coming from the guy who refuses to tell people his birthday.”

“I don’t know why I bother. You tell them for me.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why you bother,” he said with a laugh. “But you do anyway. Just something else I still need to figure out about you.”

Usually, I didn’t like it when people tried to figure me out. The less prying into my business, the better, as far as I was concerned. But this was Reed, who I’d known since I was a little kid and was easily the one person who could claim to know the most about me. Hell, sometimes I wondered if he might not know more about me than I did about myself.

“I don’t know what there is to figure out about me,” I said with a shrug. “Nothing all that special hidden away in there.”

He sighed heavily, shoving his hands into the pockets of his shorts and shaking his head. “My point was, you didn’t have to do any of that. I wouldn’t have cared if you waited until the next day to say something about my birthday. But no, you rode the bus and walked here to drop that stuff off.”

“And then fell asleep on your back deck,” I said with a little laugh at the sudden surge of memory. “I was trying so hard to stay awake, and then I passed out.”

“Yeah. Passed out on the deck lounger. So there you were, where you really shouldn’t have been in the first place, smelling of grease and chicken, snoring away on my back deck.”

“Wow, what a memorable image. A great image.”

“It was. Because it showed me that even with too much on your plate, you still did something for me. And I remember sitting there, nibbling on that brownie and watching you snore while still managing to hold onto a chicken leg, and I just?—”

I stared at him. “You what?”

His hands came out of his pockets, and he stepped closer, holding my hip and dragging me toward him. If my kiss had been hurried and desperate, his was patient and slow. What I felt the first time had been a flicker, a spark in the dark compared to the fire that quickly grew into an inferno when he kissed me. What I felt before had been the faintest tingle compared to the electric storm that filled me as his fingers squeezed my hip and his lips pressed tighter to mine.

I had always known there would be no chance for me when it came to him, but that just cemented it in my mind. There was no resistance, no chance, and I was immediately helpless in the face of his sweet kiss.

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