Page 44 of Can't Get Enough

I screw up my mouth and narrow one eye. “Maybe twelve years old?”

“Twelve?” Her laugh is incredulous. “Are you shitting me?”

“Nope. I was the kid with the lemonade stand and the lawn-mowing business and a constant hustle. I even shined shoes for guys on my dad’s team. They didn’t actually need it. They just indulged me, but I didn’t care. Money was money.”

“I guess I thought you being the kid of a professional basketball player, you’d have been kind of spoiled.”

I take a sip of my drink and lean against the balcony rail.

“My mom wasn’t having that. I got an allowance, had chores. She kept life as normal as possible for me, even though I saw my dad on television more than at home for years.”

She pinches her brows together and reaches to cover my hand.

“I can’t imagine how hard it was losing your mom soon after your grandfather. I’m sorry.”

“It could have been a decade and I wouldn’t have been ready. My father never could have been. They had one of those great loves.”

She lifts her hand, and I miss the contact right away. Have to stop myself from grabbing it back.

“My parents had that, too,” she says.

“For real? How’d they get together?”

“In the eighth grade,” she says with a grin. “If you can believe it. Well, at least that was when they first met. My father used to say he knew right away Mama was supposed to be his wife.”

“She was feeling him, too?”

“Nope. She made him work for it.” Amusement lights her dark eyes and her smile is so pretty I almost forget what the hell I asked. “They didn’t start dating until the tenth grade, but that was it. They went off to college together. Got married as soon as they graduated. No looking back.”

“Based on what you’ve said, with your aunt taking care of your mom… is your father not—”

“He died six years ago.” She draws a breath in sharply through her nose. “Drunk driver.”

“Fuck.” This time I reach for her hand on the railing. She doesn’t pull away, but returns the squeeze. “I’m so sorry, Hendrix.”

“It was the most painful day of my life.” She shoots me a wry look. “Only the day my mom was diagnosed came close. It’s like you said. The difference between someone being snatched away unexpectedly and someone falling away a little every day like sand.”

“Both ways suck. It feels like my father will grieve forever.”

“Same. My mother… she’ll get this look in her eyes. She gets kindof stuck in earlier seasons of life, and it’s nostalgic, but this is different. This is a longing. She does have hallucinations occasionally, and I wonder if she’s seeing my dad because she looks so happy. I hate that she’s happiest when she’s hallucinating and that real life feels bleak and disorienting to her sometimes. It’s so hard to see her this way and to know it’s only going to…”

A lone tear streaks down her cheek.

“Shit.” Hendrix swipes under her eyes with the hand I’m not holding and leaks a watery laugh. “This is a morbid-ass conversation, Mav.”

I enjoy the simple intimacy of her abbreviating my name. This whole encounter feels like we’ve fallen into a well, and the rest of the world is above ground, completely oblivious that down here, we’re getting to know each other. It shouldn’t be this easy to bare your soul, but I could stay at the bottom of this well all night learning Hendrix’s secrets, her fears. Sharing mine.

“Sorry about that,” Bolt says, striding back onto the balcony.

Hendrix does jerk her hand away then as if the touch she’d forgotten about suddenly burns.

Bolt lifts his brows, inspecting the spot on the balcony rail where our hands were joined seconds ago. “Am I interrupting?”

“Why is your bow tie upside down?” I demand, diverting the suspicion back to him. “And you have lipstick on your collar.”

He glares at me and parts his lips to reply, I’m sure with something rude and insubordinate, but Skipper comes up behind him, equally disheveled. Her locs, earlier tamed into an elegant style, now hang around her shoulders, half up, half down. The buttons on her blouse are misaligned like she’s tried to hastily restore her appearance to some semblance of order.

“I think your, um, shirt is…” Hendrix gestures vaguely toward Skipper’s torso where her bra is playing peekaboo through a small tear in the blouse.

---