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  Before saying goodbye, they made plans to work on their project some more over the weekend, and Tria turned back toward me. She looked down at the ground for a minute, then walked up and slowly put her arms around my neck and her cheek against my chest.

  “You smell good,” she told me.

  I laughed.

  “I thought I was supposed to say that to you.”

  She turned her head to look at me and just stood there for a minute and stared. I didn’t want to interrupt her thoughts because I was kind of hoping she was thinking more about her talk with her friend.

  She didn’t say anything about it and was actually pretty damn quiet the rest of the day and into the evening. She made dinner, answered questions if I asked them, but didn’t offer up any conversation. She just seemed to be deep in thought, so I didn’t bug her about it.

  At least when we crawled into bed, she snuggled up close to me.

  Tria’s fingers traced little geometric shapes on my chest, but she didn’t move her hand any lower, and I wasn’t going to press. She’d gotten me off the night before, and I wasn’t about to demand more or complain or anything. When she turned her head up to kiss me, though, I was ready for her.

  I grabbed her by her waist and pulled her up until she was straddling my stomach, making sure she wasn’t low enough to get a big ass boner in her backside. She leaned back down and kissed me, and I stroked my hands slowly up her sides. I touched the undersides of her breasts, and I ran my thumbs slowly over her though the fabric of her T-shirt was in my way.

  I sat up and wrapped my arms around her back. Tria’s hands twisted around in my hair again, and I started kissing down her neck to her shoulder. Though I didn’t move her T-shirt out of the way or anything, I kissed down the front of her chest where her bra strap would be if she was wearing one.

  She placed her hands immediately on my chest, which I took as a signal to back away. Tria blushed, bit at her lip nervously, and crawled off of me.

  I took in a long, slow breath and let it out again as Tria situated herself under the blankets.

  “Are you ever going to tell me why you’re so insecure about this?” I blurted out.

  “I’m not,” she said too quickly.

  “Okay…” I mumbled. “How about, are you ever going to admit you’re insecure about this?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said with a completely unconvincing shrug.

  “Tria, for Christ’s sakes, you curl away from me like I’m going to bite you or something!”

  I hadn’t meant to yell, but the whole thing really was starting to piss me off. Tria cringed a bit, and I grumbled out an apology as she continued to deny anything was wrong.

  “Just tell me,” I begged. “It can’t be all that bad.”

  “It’s nothing.” Tria shrugged and turned away from me with a slight sniff.

  Holy shit, I made her cry.

  My fingers tightened around her elbow as I tried to get her to turn around and face me again.

  “What?” I demanded. “What is it?”

  “I just…I just don’t understand you at all!” Her voice cracked as she spoke. “You could have anyone you want—anyone! Why me?”

  She sat up and pushed me away, and I just watched her, stunned. She moved to leave the bed, but then turned back, her eyes red.

  “Why, Liam? What do you get out of it?”

  “Get out of…? Tria, I have no idea what you are talking about!”

  “No one wants me!” she screamed, and her hands balled into fists, pounding each word into the mattress. “No one, ever! So why are you pretending to?”

  I was never one to contradict a woman in bed, but this was a load of bullshit.

  Chapter 7—Share the Stories

  I was half a second away from completely exploding in rage. Anyone talking about Tria like that made me want to torture unicorns even if the words came from the woman herself. It was probably just the shock of the words that kept me from screaming back at her—I was just too flabbergasted by the accusation.

  “I’m not pretending anything!” I finally said. “I’ve told you before that I want you here.”

  “Why?” she asked, her abrupt anger diminishing quickly. “Because if it really is just for the sex, I would at least understand. I mean, that’s very…male of you.”

  “Goddammit!” I yelled, the anger overtaking me and no longer allowing me to hold back. “If I just wanted someone to fuck, there are dozens of women within a half mile who would make it a hell of a lot easier!”

  I shoved myself off the bed as the tension in my arms caused my hands to start to shake. I grabbed a pack of cigarettes off the makeshift nightstand and fully intended to light up, not fucking caring if I was inside or not. It actually made me feel a little better not to open the window.

  Of course, since I was already so pissed off, I completely smashed the entire soft pack when I grabbed them. There were only four cigarettes left in there anyway, and I managed to crush the lot of them. The next time I was at the store, I was going to smack the guy who gave me a soft pack instead of a hard pack.

  A long string of curses exited my mouth in a fire extinguisher sort of explosion—spraying profanities in every direction. I further smashed the smokes, but it really wasn’t very fulfilling. I was starting to shake with the rage and tension, and ended up pulling back and slamming my fist into the wall, leaving a giant hole above the bed. Tria jumped and squealed.

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  I ran my hand through my hair and tried to calm myself down. Tria wiped at her eyes and cheeks with the back of her hand, and I got pissed off at myself because I was too ticked off to be able to comfort her yet. I turned and yanked open the window without a word, crawled out to the fire escape, and snatched the pack sitting next to Krazy Katie. If she noticed at all, she didn’t seem to care.

  After a couple of minutes of slowly inhaling smoke and nicotine, I crawled back inside.

  Tria was still sitting in the middle of the bed, and her eyes were wide and staring as she watched me come back in. She clenched her fingers around the top of the blanket resting on her stomach. As soon as I looked at her, she looked away.

  “Tell me,” I said, my voice insistent. I sat down on the edge of the bed and angled myself toward her. “Tell me why you think like this.”

  “Nothing…really…”

  “Tria!” I snapped, the anger quickly returning. It was so easy to tell she was hiding something the way she wouldn’t look me in the eye and kept trying to practically hide under the blanket. I reached out and grazed the top of her arm.

  “Fine!” she said suddenly. She sat up and pushed my arm away before turning toward the outside of the bed. She dangled one foot over the edge as she started to talk. “I know I can be a…a burden.”

  “A burden?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded. “My mom used that word a lot. She didn’t really want a child, and she made it abundantly clear that I didn’t live up to her expectations.”

  “I thought you lived with your dad,” I said.

  “That was later.”

  “Later? Weren’t you six when he died?”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “But I only lived with him for about a year before he was killed.”

  None of this shit was making sense to me, so I figured I ought to just let her say what she wanted to say, get it all out, and then ask questions later.

  “Dana wasn’t into parenting,” Tria said.

  “Dana is your mom’s name?”

  “Yeah,” Tria said with a nod. “She was a lot more interested in going out with her friends, and I was just in the way because she was supposed to be taking care of me. I was kind of…left on my own a lot. Sometimes I’d wake up, and she wouldn’t have come home from the night before.”

  “Who watched you when she was gone?” I asked, totally forgetting my plan to ask questions later.

  “No one,” she shrugged.

  “What do you mean no one
?” I growled. “How old were you?”

  “I was taken away when I was four.”

  “Taken away? Ugh! Four? Shit!” I shook my head, sat up a little straighter in the bed, and looked over to her. “How about I shut up, and you just tell me all of it?”

  “That’s probably easier,” she agreed. “I’ll keep it short. Mom didn’t want me, and as soon as I was old enough to go to the morning daycare the church down the street provided, she would drop me off there as much as possible. I think she was supposed to come in and help with all the kids sometimes as a co-op or something, but I don’t think she ever did. Anyway, I woke up one day and she wasn’t there. It wasn’t so unusual, so I just made myself breakfast and—”

  “You made yourself breakfast?” I interrupted. “A four-year-old?”

  “I was hungry,” she said, her voice small. “It was just cereal. The milk had gone bad.”

  I gripped my hands into fists and wondered if I was ever going to get the chance to meet Tria’s mother.

  “She didn’t come back,” Tria continued. “It got dark, and I just kind of watched TV and looked for food in the kitchen. I remember I had to pull one of the chairs over to get in the cupboard up high where she kept the cereal. I had a hard time opening any of the canned stuff and cut my hand trying to do it with a knife.”

  She rubbed at a tiny scar on her palm, and my stomach clenched as a vision of a little girl in a green dress, sitting on the floor in the kitchen, came into my head. There was a knife in one hand and a can of soup in the other. I shook my head to clear the thoughts.

  “I didn’t really know at the time, but I remember hearing later that they thought I had been alone for four days when the church called child protective services because they hadn’t seen me. The police and a bunch of other people came, and I was so scared I hid under the bed. They still found me, though.”

  Tria looked over to me briefly before going on.

  “I went into foster care,” she said. “I’m not sure how long—maybe a few months. I was moved around a lot. There were always other kids, and the foster parents…well, they never really seemed interested in having me around. I…I cried a lot. They didn’t like me.”

  My teeth ground together, and I was glad she had moved to the other side of the bed because if I had still been holding her, she might have been crushed by the tension in my arms. I was pretty sure there would be marks in my palms from my fingernails.

  I kept quiet so she could continue.

  “I had to go and talk to a judge,” she said. “I remember that part because his big, black robe scared me. I don’t know if they were trying to get my mom to shape up and take care of me or what. They didn’t tell me much of what was happening, but I overheard some of it. It was pretty clear she was refusing to take me back and told the courts to just keep me. Her sister—I can’t remember her name—said she didn’t want to take care of me either.”

  Tria twisted her fingers in her lap.

  “I was in another foster home for a while and then in a home with a bunch of kids—a group home, I guess. Modern-day orphanage. There were kids there that got adopted, but…well, no one wanted me. I heard some of the workers there talking once, and they were saying how hard it was to get homes for the older kids. There was this other girl there, though, and she was older than me. I remember thinking at the time that since she was the oldest, I would find a home first.”

  She took a long, shuddering breath.

  “That’s not what happened, though,” she said. “She was…she was so pretty. She had beautiful, long, blonde hair, and I was just…me. She was adopted, but I was still there.”

  My muscles tightened again as images of a tiny Tria, thinking she wasn’t pretty enough to be adopted, clambered around in my head. I couldn’t grasp the notion of no one wanting her, and all my visions turned into Annie song and dance routines.

  “I don’t know how long it was between the time that girl was adopted and the time someone came for me,” she continued. “Maybe a few weeks? That’s when this man showed up.”

  She smiled then, and her eyes glistened with tears.

  “He was so tall.” Her face took on a faraway look as she remembered. “And he had long sideburns that made me laugh. He played with me for a while. Then the lady who I guess was my social worker came in and told me he was my dad and that I was going to go home with him. Apparently, he didn’t even know he had a daughter before then, but my mom must have told the courts to contact him.”

  Tears fell over her lashes and down her face as she focused on me with a sad smile.

  “It was the best time of my life,” she told me. “I had this pretty room with a pink blanket on the bed, and the trees around the house were so huge, and my dad said he’d build a tree house in the summer. I would get up early in the morning so I could watch the fishing boats head out into the water. The only thing I didn’t like was that he wouldn’t let me touch the stove.”

  She looked down at her hands, and I reached over to cover them with mine.

  “He didn’t want me to get hurt,” she said quietly. “So he gave me a kid’s book on how to cook in the microwave and showed me how to use that instead. He said as soon as I was tall enough to reach the dials on the back of the stove, he’d teach me how to use it, too.”

  She took in a long breath and then blew it out slowly.

  “I was only with him for a little under a year when he died,” she said. Tears welled up in her eyes. “I went back into the system in Maine, which was much the same as the others had been. They tried to reach my mom and my aunt again, but my mom had signed over her parental rights. My father had an elderly aunt and uncle, but they were in failing health and unable to take me, either. I was in foster care for a few weeks, and then Leo came and told me he had it all worked out. I was going to come and live with them.”

  Underneath my palm, I felt her hands begin to shake.

  “No one else wanted me,” she whispered. “No one. I thought Leo’s family wanted me—really wanted me. But as I got older, I realized it was more about the community than me, and what I wanted or needed wasn’t important. They didn’t really want me, either, but at least they were willing to put up with me.”

  “I knew that douchebag was a fucking idiot,” I mumbled.

  “No one ever really wanted me,” she repeated as her voice cracked and tears began to cascade down her face. She turned to me again, and I wasn’t sure if it was her expression or my own thoughts about what she had told me, but she suddenly looked very young.

  “Why not?” she whispered. “What’s wrong me with?”

  I moved quickly, gathering her up in my arms as wailing sobs shook her body.

  I started to panic as she started practically screaming with each cry. Her whole body quaked as she collapsed against me, her cries making it sound like someone just chopped off a major limb. I attempted to calm myself as much as possible as I pulled her against me.

  I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t much better prepared than when she had thrown herself at me—sobbing at that time, too—when Keith had first shown up at her apartment last summer. With nothing else popping into my brain as a magic answer, I just held her and spoke the only words in my mind.

  “I want you,” I said into her ear. “Since the first day I met you, I wanted you.”

  She clung to me, her crying echoing throughout the room as I just keep repeating that I wanted her. I wrapped my arms around her tightly as I held her body against mine and tried to make sense of it all.

  My parents had thrown me out but not without reason. I had gone against their wishes, fully understanding the consequences of my own actions. What had happened to Tria was completely different. How could a parent do that to their own flesh and blood? How could anyone willingly give up a little kid, deciding they just didn’t feel like taking care of them, regardless of obligation? Didn’t they know there were some people who got denied parenthood altogether?

  The pangs of regret that curled int
o my stomach were ones I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

  “I want you,” I said again into her hair, fighting back the sting in my own eyes as she continued to quiver and quake in my grasp.

  “Why?” she cried. “I don’t understand…it doesn’t make sense.”

  I lifted her up and turned her in my lap so she was facing me. I grabbed both sides of her face in my hands and forced her to look at me.

  “I want you,” I told her again as I stared into her eyes. “I want you here because you’re smart, and you always think of other people before yourself. I want you because you are the kind of person who feels obligated to pay me back for shit you don’t really owe me. I want you because you are willing to take a psycho grocery shopping to make sure she has good food to eat. I want you because you don’t mind laundry, and you’re an awesome cook, and you put up with me being a slob.”

  I brushed my thumbs over her cheeks and wiped away the tears there.

  “I want you because you are beautiful,” I told her, “inside and out. You’re putting yourself through school and trying to do something with your life. Everything about you is admirable, and I don’t even deserve to be in your company.”

  She tried to shake her head, but I held her still.

  “I’ve spent a long time not feeling anything because all I felt was…bad. I was only happy when I was fighting, but you…”

  I tightened my grip on her a little and brought my forehead to touch hers.

  “You changed all of that,” I told her. “For the first time in a decade, I have a reason to be outside the cage.”

  Tria went quiet, and for a long time, I just held her in my arms. Eventually, she calmed and grabbed some tissues out of the Swirling Vortex of Doom.

  “You haven’t told me how all of this relates to sex, you know.”

  Tria dropped her head to my shoulder and sniffed again. She clung to the cheap box of tissues, and bits of white fluff practically covered the room.