LAURA

God, he was so hot. But it wasn’t just his hotness that drew her to him. It was something else. Laura had had too many relationships back home that had ended with a guy trying to force her into more than she was ready for. Suddenly, she was having fantasies of having a relationship with Ashton.

Oh, not marriage! God no. She still didn’t want, that but she did want to see him again. That last guy she had dated had been such a jerk and the casual dates/hookups had not been meaningful to her. But the weird breakup and his words had somehow dropped her self-esteem a few inches anyway.

Maybe because she had had no idea of how to answer a guy who thought he was breaking off a real relationship, one she had had no idea that she was even in with him.

Was there something wrong with me, she wondered as she got into her slightly battered and older car and cranked the engine. How could she not have seen that her…what was he exactly? Ex-boyfriend? She had not thought of him that way, but it had been clear he had thought of himself that way. It didn’t matter really, she decided as she pulled out of the parking garage and headed down the bustling city streets. She had to have been blind not to see that he felt that way.

Or maybe he was blind not to see she didn’t.

Sighing with impatience, she took the exit that would lead her to the apartment. She would have really liked some company. Holly was working like a fiend lately, and Lexie had all but disappeared from Laura’s life. Sure, she still paid her rent on the apartment, but she was rarely there since she was, for all intents and purposes, living with Dawson.

Letting Ashton be that company had been a tempting thing, but she knew she had to get up early and be clear-headed. That promotion could mean the world of difference when Lexie decided to make her living with Dawson official and pulled out of paying her share of the very expensive rent.

Laura’s spirits flattened. She felt alone and lonely so much of the time lately. Everything seemed to have lost its luster. Everything she had come to the city for she had gotten, but she was restless and bored and emptied out.

After she’d parked and unlocked the door to her apartment, her cell rang. Hoping it might be Ashton, Laura answered without looking at the screen, and immediately wished she hadn’t as her mother’s disembodied voice came across the line.

“Hello, Laura.”

Laura’s shoulders tensed. That was the last thing she needed! “Hi, mom. How are you?” She managed to keep her voice pleasant, but her belly dropped as she took a seat on the sofa and stared at the wall with unseeing eyes. All it took was a few words to drop her right back into the past and all its grief.

“We’re fine. I just wanted to check in on you. It’s Matthew’s birthday, you know. I just wanted to make sure you remembered him.”

Laura wanted to weep. Her thoughts jumbled and tangled, and all the old resentments came flooding back in. Her birthday was nearly always forgotten. She could remember exactly four birthdays that she had been remembered and celebrated, if buying her a cake from a bakery and tying a few balloons to the kitchen chair she sat at could be called being celebrated.

Matthew’s birthday was never forgotten, however. Her mother spent hours in the kitchen, whipping up a cake and all the foods he had loved most. She cleaned his room for hours, too, lovingly caressing all his clothes, which she washed and refolded and hung again then as well. They’d have that dinner and eat that cake, and there would be a present added to the growing pile of unopened gifts in his bedroom.

“How could I forget?” Laura couldn’t keep the anger from her voice. “You know, I don’t care. I really don’t care that today was his birthday. You can care if you want to, but I don’t, and I don’t ever want you to call me again to remind me. Tell dad not to call me to remind me that it’s the anniversary of his death either. In fact, don’t bother ever calling me ever again – either of you – until you decide that you actually want to know what is going on in my life.”

A long gasp whooshed through the line. Panic and pain and a sense of freedom all hit at once, leaving Laura dizzy as her mother choked out, “How dare you?”

“How dare I what?” What are you doing? Laura’s brain went into hyper-drive, trying to quell her runaway tongue, but her mouth was having none of it and just kept moving. “How dare I what, mom? Demand that you finally stop seeing me as the kid who should have died in his place? Demand that you see me as more than a collection of body parts and organs that were supposed to go to him so he could live? Tell me, when you came up with the grand scheme to have me, did it ever, even once, occur to you that I’d be a real person? Have you ever even noticed that I’m a real person and not some walking donor for your precious son?”

Her mother cried out, “I can’t believe you’re saying this to me!”

“I can’t believe I didn’t say it sooner.” Laura’s eyes closed. Tears streaked down her face. “I really can’t believe I didn’t. Here’s something else I should have said a long time ago. You are a shitty mother. Dad was a shitty dad. To me. You might have been great to Mathew, but you were horrible parents to me. In fact, you weren’t parents at all, you were just bitter people who hated me for ever having been born and not having the right stuff to give to a dying kid you actually loved.”

“You’re going too far.”

Or not far enough. All the years of hurt and loss and being ignored and disregarded bubbled out of Laura just then. “I’m alive, and you don’t give three fucks for that fact. Mathew’s dead and has been for a long time. You might not want it to be that way, either of you, but that is how it is, and I’m alive. But you’re dead to me. Dead, do you hear me? I was never alive to you, and I know that. So, stop using me as a gap between your loss. Stop trying to force me to celebrate a boy who’s been dead for all these years because all it does is make sure I know just how little you ever cared for me.”

She hung up. Her hands shook. There was a large, trembling panic closing in, threatening to sweep her away. Her body folded in on itself and she let it. Doubled over, unable to stem or stop the tide of anguish, Laura wept. Ugly sobs tore themselves from her throat and wrenched her chest wide open.

Her cheeks were raw and her eyes swollen from crying. Her nose was clogged and her body curled up in abject misery, but still she wept. She was unlovable. Always had been. Always would be. No way was she ever having kids, and no way was she ever going to let her parents back into her life. She’d stay alone forever before she fucked up some poor innocent kid the way her parents had fucked her up.

The doorbell rang, startling her. She went to the door, her spirits sunk low. Maybe it was Lexie. Maybe she’d come home and realized she had forgotten her keys or something. Laura hoped it was Lexie. Lexie didn’t know all of what happened in Laura’s childhood, but she knew enough to comfort her a little.

Laura peeked through the peephole to see Ashton standing there, holding a bouquet of flowers and a small box.

What the hell? Laura swung the door open, prepared to tell him now was not a good time, but as soon as he took one look at her face he dropped both the box and the flowers on the hallway floor and moved forward, gathering her into his arms.

“What is it? Are you okay?’

His strong arms enfolded her. His body pressed against hers. Laura was grateful for the sheer strength of him just then. “No,” she whispered, “Not at all. Why are you here?’

“I…I figured a little…I mean…” He gestured toward the fallen gifts. “I was just going to leave these with you as a sort of positive whatchamacallit, you know, for your promotion…”

He leaned back slightly, his eyes surveying her face. “Jesus, what happened? Do I need to kick someone’s ass?”

She should tell him to go. She was a raving mess and heartbroken. She was raw and vulnerable, and now was not the time. “No. I mean it’s just my folks.” Her eyes went to the box. “What’s in there?”

“Chocolate cupcakes.” He gave the box another glance. “Um, they might be ruined.”

Laura stepped out of his arms. “It’s impossible to ruin cupcakes.” She leaned over and picked up the box and the flowers. She held them like a shield. “Do you want to come in?”

“Do you want me to?”

She knew it was stupid and foolish. She had too much to handle as it was, and Ashton just might turn out to be the guy who totally broke whatever was left of the fractured pieces of her heart if she let him get too close. Still, she said, “Yes.”

He followed her inside as he had done the last time he had been there. She set the box on the coffee table. “I’m sorry. I’m a huge mess right now. I don’t really know what to…” Her arms crossed over her chest and she stood there, biting her lips.

Ashton took her hand and sat her down on the sofa, settling himself next to her. He reached into the box and produced a few paper napkins, now liberally smeared with chocolate. He sorted through them until he found one that would do and handed it to her. Laura wiped her eyes and blew her nose, smiling weakly. “Thanks.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“It’s my brother’s birthday.”

Ashton looked confused. She didn’t blame him. She sighed. “He died years ago, back when I was still an infant. He was really sick and…and my parents had me to possibly supply him with organs and tissue that he needed to stay alive. Only, I was born with the wrong blood type.”

His mouth fell open. His words went to the very heart of the problem. “Jesus, what were they going to do with you after they harvested your organs? Put you to sleep or something? I’m sorry…I mean…how you could have lived if they had managed to…”

The look of shock and horror on his face mirrored her thoughts and the feelings that had haunted her entire life since she had been old enough to understand why her parents did not love her.

Her fingers twisted, shredding the napkin. “The plan was to use my bone marrow and liver, one of my kidneys, and maybe a few other things, too, to save my brother’s life. All of what they would have taken from me…well it would not have killed me. People can live with one kidney and the liver grows back or something. It must have sounded like a great plan when they cooked it up.

Ashton’s face went dead pale. “And a doctor agreed to that?’

“Yes. It’s not so unusual and like I said, it was nothing that could or would have killed me.”

Ashton wheezed out, “Holy fucking Christ. No wonder you’re so upset.”

“I’m upset because after he died, it felt like they didn’t want me, but it would have been unseemly to just ditch me, you know. My folks are nothing if not big on appearances. They never let me forget that I failed to do the one thing they’d expected of me – to keep him alive. I don’t know why, but when my mom called just a few minutes ago, I freaked out on her and I said all kinds of things – mean and hateful things – to her.”

“Were they true?’

The question socked into her solar plexus. “Oh, yeah.”

“Then don’t be sorry for that.”

“I don’t want to be sorry, but I also don’t like feeling like I’m a terrible human being for saying what I said. It was an awful thing to say – all of it – even if it was true.”

Ashton’s hand found hers and squeezed. Laura wiped more tears away. “Don’t you want to know what I said?”

“I already have a pretty good idea, and I do not blame you. If it had been me I would have said the same.”

“You don’t know that.”

Ashton snorted. “You obviously weren’t a fly in the wall when my dad finally decided to crawl out of the woodwork.”

Laura gave him a careful look. “Oh?”

Ashton shifted slightly. His knee pressed into hers for a moment and her heart stuttered in her chest. That she could be so turned on by him and at a time like that was telling. She knew that being near him – as weary and in need of comfort and as turned on by him as she was – could have high consequences, but that didn’t stop her from leaning against him just a little.

Ashton said, “Oh, yeah. You know, he left me when I was a kid, and when I got to be too much of a hassle for my mom, she dumped me into the system. As it turned out, she had a boyfriend who didn’t like kids, and so it was me or him. He won.”

The bitterness in his words was not disguised by the bland way in which he said them. Laura felt his pain. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be. I wasn’t saying that to make you feel sorry for me. I was just saying it because I wanted you to know why, when he finally showed up in my life, I sent him out my door right quick, and with a proverbial boot up his ass, too.”

“Did you say stuff you regretted?”

“Yes.”

That shocked her, she had been so sure that he would say no. His face hardened as he added, “I’m not a total jerk. Of course, I regretted some of what I said, but it didn’t make it any less true. I told him exactly what kind of life he and that mother of mine had consigned me to. I told him what it was like in the system, and how awful my life was a kid.”

Her hand found his knee. “What was it like?”

His face was bleak. “It was …it was a lot of being unwanted. It was a lot of being shipped from place to place and living with people who didn’t give a single shit about me. My only asset was not in myself, but in the check they got for being my foster parents. I was not wanted because they cared or wanted me, not even because they thought I could be somebody one day. I was just wanted for what I could give them, to make their lives better. And their lives didn’t include me beyond that either.”

God, she knew that feeling. Her fingers tightened on his knee, and he gave her a tired smile. “Sound familiar?”

“Too familiar.” She wet her lips with her tongue. “My God, that is exactly what it was like for me. I knew they didn’t want me except for what I might have done for Mathew. I knew I was nothing to them and that they had no use for me. I knew…man did I ever know…that nothing I ever did would make them love me, but it never stopped me from trying, not even long after I figured out exactly how futile that trying to make them love me really was.”

Ashton nodded his head in agreement. “That about sums it up. I kept trying to be the perfect kid for every family I landed in until I was about nine or ten. Then, I figured it out. They had their own kids. I was just the kid they had to tolerate to get the money they were going to use to better their real kids’ lives.”

“The real kid. I get it. For me, it was like I knew they’d trade my life if they thought it would get him back. I really worried for a long time that they wanted me dead. I still do. I honestly think they would have much rather I died than him, and then I worried that after they figured out I was worthless, they’d just leave me one day. They did, too, even if they were right there.”

Ashton sighed. Their hands met again. Their fingers squeezed. They sat there, two people who got each other more than anyone else in the world. Laura finally asked, “You met Dawson in foster, didn’t you?”

“I did. I think we talked about that already.”

“We did. You two seem really tight, and I’m guessing it’s because you had to deal with a lot of bad stuff together.” Talking about his life made hers fade a bit, and she hoped he would not stop now. He shrugged. “Some places were worse than others.”

“How so? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“I don’t mind. I’ll tell you how Dawson and I met, too. Our social worker handled both our cases, and she found a couple that was interested in taking in more than one kid, so Dawson and I went together. It was the first time we’d ever seen each other.

“The couple had four girls. Dawson and I were younger than the girls; we were ten, and they were teenagers. But every single fucking night the parents would lock us up in the bedroom in case we decided to go full on rapist or something. I remember once, one of their daughters was having a party, and there were all these kids there. We were locked into our room of course; they had this great big lock on the door, and our room was up on the third floor, not quite a dark and creepy attic but real close.

“Anyway, we’d done something that day. I don’t recall now what it was, but it got us sent to our room without food for the sin. That happened a lot. You see, those girls were – two were twins – all in high school. The oldest was a senior. The twins were juniors. They were all headed off to college, and they had a lot of expenses so...ta da! Foster kids to foot the bills. We were in that room starving to death because it was a weekend…”

“Wait, why were you starving because it was the weekend?” She hoped the question was not too pushy.

It seemed it wasn’t, because Ashton said, “We only got dinner there. If we ate breakfast and lunch, we ate it at school. On weekends, we got dinner because there was no school, but we’d had nothing that whole day. The party was down on the first floor, but they were cooking out for it, and the backyard patio was right below the little window in our room. Dawson got the bright idea of sneaking down the drain and grabbing some food. So, we did. We grabbed a bunch of stuff, whatever they’d left out there, and hauled ass for the drain, but we couldn’t get back up it. So, we ate all that we could standing in the side yard and then we marched right into the house into the middle of the party and announced we were being held prisoner and had escaped by crawling out the window.”

Laura was torn between amusement and despair. “What happened?”

“A parent of one of the younger kids who was there got pissed off and charged upstairs, then came back down screaming that it was true, that we’d been locked in like captives. There was a big hubbub and Dawson and I got hauled out of there and that couple had to handle being called slavers and shit. But in the end, nothing really changed because we, Dawson and I, got the reputation of being difficult to handle because of that. We had to mostly stay in group homes.”

“Shit.”

“It was what it was. We got through it. You’ll get through this. Sometimes you have to get pissed off and say how you feel about all of it to get over it and move on. I’m guessing you never said anything like it that before.”

“You’d be right.” Damn, he was perceptive. She was more grateful than ever that he had come over, even if she had not invited him to come.

Come. The word hovered in her mind. Now that her grief had dimmed, the desire was rushing back, making her painfully aware of just how much she wanted him.

“You need to get some sleep.”

The words jolted her. That desire plucked at her body, making her nipples hard and her panties wet. She wanted him to stay more than anything. She protested, “If you want to stay, I will be fine with that.”

He leaned toward her. Her lips parted as she anticipated the kiss. But he just left a gentle kiss on her forehead and not her lips. He said, “I would never do anything to make you regret anything you did with me. I’m afraid you’d wonder why you slept with me tonight if I stayed.”

“I would never regret it.” The words were soft and yet forceful.

Ashton gave her a lopsided smile. “I’d rather not test that theory. How about a date tomorrow night?”

A date? She asked, “You mean a real date?”

He looked a little self-conscious. “Sure, why not? I’d like to see you again, and I would love to talk to you about that idea you had at the party.”

“What idea?” her brow crimped as she tried to recall what he meant.

“The dating app thing.”

“Oh.” Well why not? It would be a good reason to see him again, and maybe, just maybe he was just using that as a reason to see her, too. After all, it wasn’t like he was used to really dating. “Okay. I’d love to go out with you tomorrow.”

“I’ll pick you up. Say, seven thirty? Or is that too early or late for you?”

“No, that’s perfect.” That time would enable her to get home, shower, and change into something slinky below whatever she wore on their date. “That sounds great in fact.”

Now that she knew he was leaving, she felt a small sense of loss. She still wanted him, but that desire had been tempered by a giant sense of anticipation that tingled along her nerve endings and made a pleasurable little pool well higher deep down in her crotch.

He left and she stood there, her back against the door and a smile on her face. It had been a day of mountainous highs and cavernous lows. She felt slightly better about what she had said to her mother. She had been wrong for being so cruel, but if she had ever been allowed to express her hurt and misery as a child she might never have needed to say those things as harshly as she had.

She headed into the bedroom but stopped again. The flowers sat on the table, and she picked them up and went to the kitchen. She rummaged around until she found a tall glass which she filled with water and sugar, then she took the flowers from the wrapper and arranged them in the vase. She scooped up the flowers and a smashed cupcake, using one finger to swipe a hunk of frosting off the lid of the box then headed for her bedroom.

She hummed as she stepped into her dark and quiet bedroom, licking the chocolate frosting off her finger before disrobing and putting on a thin t-shirt and a pair of pajama shorts.

The anticipation mounted as she lay there, sure that she would never get any sleep at all. Despite both that anticipation and her worry that she wouldn’t, she began to drift away.

Ashton was amazing.

And amazingly wrong for her, too.