Page 60 of Only Between Us

Siena looks over, and there’s nothing like the satisfaction of having her gaze rake up and down my body. I opted against the T-shirt, and she’s rewarding me for it with that filth in her eyes.

“You expect me to say no to you looking like that?” She shakes her head and puts away her phone. “Ask away, Brooks Attwood.”

“What were you like as a kid?”

She barks a shocked laugh. “Diving right in, huh?”

“I can’t help it. You are… infuriatingly interesting.”

She tips her head. “I can’t decide if that’s a compliment or not.”

“It is. Even after that first day, I wanted to know everything about you. It pissed me off. I didn’t want to wonder.”

Siena’s expression is one of pure amusement. She stares pointedly at the other end of the mattress. “Will you at least get in bed? Make this feel like less of a strip tease gone terribly wrong?”

“Why?” I crawl slowly over to her on the mattress, really playing it up with a growl. “You want more of this, Pippen?”

Laughing, she palms my face and shoves me away. “I gave you the gift of a lifetime down there. Count your blessings.”

Counted them, need more of them.

I slide under the covers and turn to face her. She kills the light and settles in the same way. “Tell me what it was like growing up.”

She hums. “Before my second life? I was an accident they endedup keeping. My birth parents liked to party with friends who weren’t burdened by childcare. Our house was… always full of people I didn’t know. I think I was offered my first joint at eight, and that was the tame stuff.” Siena picks at a spot on the sheets between us. “I started to feed myself at seven years old, when my parents were too hungover one day to get out of bed. They saw me get the hang of it and decided I could take it from there. And they got more and more comfortable leaving me to it, until I guess they decided they didn’t need to be around at all.”

“At thirteen?” I knew the story wasn’t going to be pretty, but I didn’t imagine it hurting so bad, either. All my kids happen to be imaginary, a dream for the future, but I could never fathom doing that to them. “Did you ever look for them after they left?”

She shakes her head but doesn’t look me in the eye. I don’t push it, though, and there’s a beat of silence as we listen to a door slam in the hallway.

“It’s not like they were exceptional parents, even before they took off,” Siena continues once it’s quiet again. “And I had a home where I felt loved for the first time. My new parents helped me go to college. I took over the family business.”

“Ship Happens. It’s a great name.”

“And it was my dad’s pride and joy. I’d work there on weekends and every day in the summer growing up. Except the one day a week when he’d close up shop so that we could borrow a sailboat from our friends at the marina and go fishing on the bay.”

Siena shifts, and the space between our bodies closes further. I can feel the heat rolling off her. Can’t look away from her. I’m near-hypnotized by the sound of her voice. The fact that she’s even telling me any of this.

Every damn thing out of this woman’s mouth has me dying for more.

“Funny, I can’t picture you fishing. Sitting still and quiet for a whole afternoon? Forget it.”

She grins wide at that. “You’d be right—Ihatefishing.”

“But you work at a bait shop?”

“Like I said: Dad’s pride and joy. He left it to me when he died. And my mom’s arthritis makes it impossible for her to work, so… it’s all mine.”

I hesitate. “How did he…”

Her smile turns pinched. “He had issues with his kidneys.”

I fist my pillow, wishing I could hold her and knowing she’d never let me. “Two years. That’s still so recent.” Siena nods, looking like she’d rather talk about anything else, so I say, “Tell me about your joy, then.”

She blinks, caught off guard by the question. Stares back silently a while, and then, “Who said anything about me?”

I prop up on my elbow. “What kind of question is that?” She doesn’t say anything. Just stares back at me, and it might be the effect of the low lighting but she looks almost… nervous. Like I’ve backed her onto a landmine, and she’s calculating the safe way off. “Come on, what’s your joy, Siena Pippen? Other than making me crazy and supergluing your best friend’s face where it doesn’t belong.”

The tension trickles off her face until she’s suppressing a tired smile. “If Dad’s joy was fishing, mine was being behind the wheel of a boat. The wind, the way you sort of feel weightless, cutting through water. No straight lines or hard roads. There’s something so freeing about it, you know? Especially with the way things are—were.” She’s stumbling over words, and I don’t know whether it was a real slipup or the product of fatigue, but it’s so unlike her it makes me uneasy. “Coming out of the situation with my birth parents, where it felt like my life was so… small. Limited.”

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