Page 22 of Teach Me to Laugh

“What do you have in mind?” Both Maddy and I were giving her wary looks. Both of us had experienced the wilder side of Raina’s advice.

“I don’t know,” she lifted her spoon to wave it in the air. “Give him a night off being the student. Take him out. Get him wasted and just have fun. Remind him that he’s twenty-three years old.”

“Get him wasted? That’s your grand advice?”

“Yep,” she popped her lips. “That’s it.”

I considered. Then to my surprise, I agreed. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Her eyes got huge and then she reached over to slap a hand on Maddy’s thigh. “Baby cakes, will you come?”

Maddy rolled her eyes at the nickname. Honestly, I’d roll my eyes too. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on!” Raina bounced excitedly. “It’ll be fun. We’ll all go out together.”

I watched Maddy a little hopefully. It was when her eyes came to me that she sighed and relented. “Fine. I’ll come.”

“Yay!” Raina clapped. “I’ll text Kai. He’s with Beck now.”

“He is?” I was surprised to find Beckett wasn’t planted at the island counter with his books.

“Yeah, they’re at the gym. It’s like the only time Kai sees Beck anymore.”

“I’m glad he’s out. He’s been at the counter so much it’s starting to look like an extension of him.”

This wasn’t a lie. Beckett studied all the time. I understood and tried to make things easier on him by doing the simple things I could. I tried to make dinner diligently, because if I didn’t, he ate a banana or a bag of Cheetos, and I couldn’t imagine that was enough food for a man as large as Beckett. So I cooked. I didn’t hate cooking, so it wasn’t a big deal. I’d cooked for Raina when I lived with her, but cooking for Beckett felt way different than cooking for Raina. It felt almost intimate in an odd way.

Besides, I had to eat too. I might be sassy, but I wasn’t cruel. Cooking for myself and ignoring Beckett would be rude. So I cooked for him as much and as often as I could. I’d even started making eggs and toast before class each day. He appreciated the effort and let me know it. So I continued doing it.

This had been going on for nearly a month. I’d been living with Beckett now for nearly three months. It was going well. Really well. But I was beginning to feel almost couple-ish even though Beckett had basically stopped hitting on me as he had when I’d first met him the weekend of Raina’s birthday. We’d moved past the entirely inappropriate comments to an easy friendship where teasing banter and feel-good words were exchanged in place of sardonic quips. I liked it. I never expected to, but damn, I did.

If someone would have told me a few months ago that I would feel this way about a man I lived with, I would have laughed. I would have laughed at the thought of living with a man, and I would have laughed at the thought of feeling any kind of trust towards any man at all.

It was shortly after I lost my parents in a car accident with the city transit that I’d learned just how untrustworthy men were. A little girl learns quickly that her daddy is her white knight and her mommy is her queen. A little girl who loses both at four years old learns that the world isn’t a fairytale and life isn’t easy.

It wasn’t easy for me.

I never got adopted. After the accident, I’d stopped talking. People might want a pretty child, and I was a very pretty child as I’d so often been told, but no one wants a child so touched by grief that they stop talking.

So I’d moved from foster home to foster home until I turned eleven. I lived with more kids than I could count—and a lot of kids who weren’t kids at all, but demons in the night. The boys in particular were bad with their mean comments, threats, and tricks. It only became worse the older I got. Kids in care are defensive. Their bark is really all the protection they’ve got andI know, being in care myself, that sometimes a vicious bark can invoke a whole lot of terror.

But not all the homes I was sent to were bad. I had one really good one. Emmie Roberts was a beautiful woman both inside and out. She was single and had a daughter, Gracelyn, who was kind. I was eleven years old when I moved in with the Roberts family. They quickly made me one of them, and for the first time since I’d lost my white knight and queen, I felt like I had a mother and sister. And then my sister was diagnosed with cancer. It came out of nowhere and it obliterated not only my life, but also Gracelyn’s.

Emmie lost it after that. I still remember the day she sat me down and told me she couldn’t do it anymore. I remember the terror that spilled free inside of me as I assured her I’d be fine. I’d loved Emmie and Gracelyn, but it was when I packed my bags and moved into a new home with a new family that wasn’t quite so nice, that I decided I’d never love again. I was fourteen and with only four more years in the system it seemed like my best course of action.

I’d been right; especially considering the next three and a half years of my life I lived with Jayden.

“What do you think, Mar?” Raina waved her hand in my face. “Earth to Mar . . .”

“What?” I blinked. Then I blushed.

Okay, so it’s rare, but it happens. Sometimes when I think about my past, I space out. That’s why I didn’t think about it. I didn’t deal with it. I’d shoved it under the rug a long time ago, and no matter how long I lived, I didn’t ever intend to lift that rug. Not for anything.

But lately the thoughts had been slipping free from their prison regardless of my effort to keep them locked away.

She lifted her brows and repeated, “Saturday night work for you?”

“For what?”

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