Page 10 of Dallas

“You haven’t done one of those DNA tests?” he asks.

I huff out a laugh. “People with lives as dysfunctional as mine know better than to do those.”

He makes a speculative noise in the back of his throat. “You don’t want to find people you’re related to?”

I don’t really know what to say to that. Obviously, finding his family has been a great thing for him. But I can’t imagine it being the same for me. Not even remotely. Everything I know about my family suggests they’re nothing more than a bunch of dirtbags, and I can’t really trust that any random person wouldn’t just be… A disappointment at best, dangerous at worst. Because that’s my experience. You can’t trust just anyone.

In fact, you’re better off not trusting anyone at all.

In high school I read that ducklings will imprint the first thing they see move, which means they identify their source of comfort, care and safety, and they never look at anything else with that kind of trust.

That’s me with Dallas.

I’m a fucked-up duckling who imprinted on him when I was eight.

I saw him, and I justknew. I knew that he was my survival, my safety, my comfort, all in one. From that first moment, everything in my soul recognized that he was mine.

Not romantically or anything like that. Just real and true and deep.

But other than that, I don’t trust anyone.

“It’s just right up here,” he says, gesturing to the small roadside motel right off the highway. I should’ve known it wasn’t anything fancy. There are fancy places here, but they’re the sort of place you vacation in with your family, not the kind of places you just crash for a couple of nights.

Sisters is small. Cute, but small.

He pulls his truck to the front of one of the red doors and gets out. I follow him, like the sad little duckling I am.

I have a backpack with me that contains one night’s worth of stuff. Because I’m hopeful in the face of adversity, I guess, and I wouldn’t have said that I was an optimist of any kind, but bringing the bag suggests I might be.

Or maybe I’m just desperate, and I was going to attach myself to him like a rabid raccoon-duckling I am.

“Home sweet home,” I hear him say through the window of the truck, and I smile. I get out and close the door behind me. It locks, and then I walk up to the door, walk inside ahead of him.

There’s only one bed.

A strange memory twists through my stomach. We used to sleep in one bed all the time, but again, I’m pretty sure now that’s weird. And I might be weird, but not so weird that I don’t know that.

“I’ll take the floor,” he says.

He’s a step ahead of me as far as the one-bed weirdness goes.

“No,” I say. “You don’t have to sleep on the floor. This is your room. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

I’m not going to suggest we share a bed.

We’re not kids. Not only that, I don’t actually know him. As he closes the motel room door behind him, I’m struck by how foolish this is on the surface. I knew Dallas when he was fifteen. To say that I know him now is a stretch. I knew him way back then and have a sense that I can trust him based on my own gut feeling, which is probably not the most reliable. Though it does tend to be suspicious, I suppose. So, I have that going for me.

I set my backpack down in the corner, and I look at him. The truth is, I’ve just gone willingly into the motel room of a man I really don’t know.Me. Who literally has every reason to be suspicious of and generally dislike men.

Yet, here I am.

I don’t feel panicked, though. I feel something else. Something I can’t quite define, and don’t necessarily want to.

I feel weak and trembly, but I don’t want to reflect on what that feeling might be.

“You’re ridiculous,” he says. “You’re not sleeping on the floor. I’m a gentleman, Sarah. And that’s simply not something I’m prepared to allow.”

He’s standing there with a cowboy hat on, a button-up shirt, a big belt buckle, and blue jeans, and he does not looklike a gentleman. He looks like a manufactured fantasy of classic masculinity, wrapped in thisprotectiveness, thiscarethat I know for a damn fact you don’t usually find on this kind of man.

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