Page 41 of The Naughty List
Tomorrow.
Every second until she runs screaming from me.
The magnetic pull I feel toward her isn’t just physical, though damn if she’s isn’t even more enticing than the sugary confections surrounding us.
Every foster home they sent me to as a kid, I fucked something up and they always sent me back to Miss Nancy.
Every single one.
Sometimes it was an accident and sometimes it was intentional because I felt safer at the group home.
But being rejected, being a repeated screw up, it messes with your mind. Probably why I started communicating primarily with my fists.
Hollis resumes decorating happily as I watch her work, but I can’t forget the way she treated those kids tonight, the way she handled my icing fuck up just now.
Hollis is kindness and love and compassion rolled into the sexiest possible package.
She would never send a kid back like a defective gift.
I don’t know where the thought comes from, but I can’t shake it.
Somewhere deep and isolated inside me, in a drawer I thought I’d locked forever, a small voice reminds me of little boy me.
I vowed to show them. All of the families that rejected me. I would have a big, fancy place to live some day. Nicer than any of their homes.
And here I am.
I told myself I’d find a beautiful wife and we’d adopt all the children no one wanted. We’d never ever send them back no matter what.
Maybe that’s why I adopt strays from the shelter or why I want to protect defenseless animals.
Because I used to be one.
12
HOLLIS
BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE
Something is happening to Jonah.
I have no clue where he’s going in his mind while I’m busy decorating, but it’s somewhere dark.
His brow is furrowed, his hazel eyes are now flat black and he hasn’t commented once on my off-key singing ofBaby It’s Cold Outside.
Lady Gaga I am not.
I desperately want to bring him back to the here and now. A silly and impulse comes over me and I act on it.
After swiping my finger through a large green blob that was almost a tree on the lawn of my latest house, I reach toward his handsome, distracted face.
“Um, Jonah? You got a little something right…” I smear the glob all across his chiseled cheekbone.
“What the hell, Hollis?” He growls at me, wiping the green goo off his cheek. But he only makes it worse.
I can’t help it. I laugh, nearly doubling over at the sight of him.
“Why so serious,” I say in my best Joker voice, adding a red streak to his mouth.
