IT WASN’T A GOOD IDEA.
The realization smacked me in the face when he opened the door to his penthouse in his ridiculously glitzy building that kissed Tobago Beach. One of the only skyscrapers in the city, and a new one at that, the building was two years old, max, and still had that fresh paint smell, with every fountain and plant looking like they were out of a catalog.
Trent wore a white V-neck shirt that clung to his bulging biceps, dark jeans, and outrageously expensive-looking sneakers. He looked like an Armani ad. So ridiculously proportioned, symmetrical, and tan. Soft lips and hard jaw and chin. His eyes scanned me briefly before he took a step back, letting me in. Rather than greeting me, he called, “Hey, Luna, look who’s here for a playdate.”
Playdate. I loathed that he’d said that, even though I had no reason to. It was just banter, right? I walked in, taking in his living space for the very first time: industrial shelves, a monstrous home theater system, one dark wall that looked like someone had thrown dark paint at it haphazardly, one exposed brick wall, dark wood floors, and pipe lamps, making the place look like a luxurious crack lab. Trent Rexroth might’ve been quiet, but his place definitely spoke volumes about who he was. Rough around the edges. Unconventional. Dangerous, even.
Luna padded barefoot from her room, already wearing a yellow pajama set. Her hair was braided sloppily—probably by her dad—and I loved that he tried, even as I made a mental note to redo it. I squatted down and smiled, poking her belly button.
“Hey, Germs.”
She grinned, rolling her eyes at me.
“Germs?” Trent asked from behind.
“Yeah. Your daughter is a germ farm. And she likes to pick her nose, so I asked her not to shake my hand.”
Luna’s eyes widened in horror. You could tell that no one ever tried to be silly with her. People were always serious when it came to her, and why wouldn’t they be? They wanted her to get better. But what they didn’t realize was that for someone to get better, they needed to feel better. My mom, case in point.
People need something to fight for.
I was going to give Luna a reason to laugh until it all ended—knowing it would end, badly.
“I’m not going to explore this subject any further because I see Luna is finding it amusing.” Trent picked up his keys and wallet from the black island in his open space kitchen, and I remembered why I’d come. So he could go on a date. My skin prickled. “Luna’s bedtime is eight o’clock. She didn’t have supper yet. I’m letting her splurge because I won’t be here tonight. There’s spaghetti and FroYo in the fridge.”
“Wait.” I dumped my backpack on his floor and kicked off my Docs. “Spaghetti and FroYo are supposed to be treats?”
He stared at me, dead in the eye, not flinching. “Yes. Don’t give her too much of it.”
“Wow, are you, like, on C-R-A-C-K,” I spelled, walking over to the island to stand next to him, “or are you simply a product of the Soviet regime? This is not splurging. I wanna order pizza.”
He shrugged into his blazer. “You’re not. And by the way, she knows how to spell.”
I stood there, wondering why I’d humored and indulged him in the first place. He was terrible to me. Rude, arrogant, and cold beyond words. And I was awful to him, too. Stealing, spying, and constantly snooping around him. But the answers were there, plain and simple. I needed the money, and I enjoyed hanging out with Luna.
“It’s five past seven.” He glanced at his Rolex. “My number is on the fridge if you need me. Underneath it, you’ll find Camila’s number, my mom’s number, and Sonya’s—her therapist. Luna needs to brush her teeth before she goes to bed, there’s a small lamp that always stays on at night in her room, and she gets a bedtime story which she chooses from the library next to her room. Any other questions?”
Sonya? I had one question, but it wasn’t related to Luna. It was, holy-shit-are-you-actually-screwing-your-kid’s-therapist?
“Are you sure you’re going?” The underlining question was—do you really not want me? Stupid. Pathetic. Thoughtless. Why would Trent Rexroth want me, and why would it make any difference? I was a high school graduate with a hole in my heart and problems bigger than my existence, and he was… the opposite of what I needed right now.
“Give me one good reason not to,” he deadpanned, tucking his wallet and cell phone into his back pocket, his eyes still on his watch.
“Because you don’t want to.”
“You don’t know what I want.”
“Do you?”
He looked up, assessing me, before smirking. “By the way, I have more nanny cams in this place than your porking buddy Bane has tats, piercings, and STDs combined, so stay out of my shit,” he hissed it low so his daughter couldn’t possibly hear it. He walked over to Luna, kissed her crown, told her he loved her, and waltzed out the door.
Leaving me to stand there, my jaw on the floor, drowning in the delicious, dark energy he’d left behind.
I ordered pizza.
Small, meaningless protests were my stock and trade. I often felt like a citizen of occupied Europe in WWII. Someone who wasn’t brave enough to join the resistance, but couldn’t completely bow their heads to evil. I paid for the pizza myself, even though Trent had left a few bills on the counter, just in case. And I let Luna have soda.
Because it made her smile.
And when we blew bubbles into the soda, she even snorted.
And when I told her I was so full I could throw up but the pizza was so good I would probably eat whatever I’d puke out, her eyes lit up along with her smile.
After dinner, I poured half a cup of sugar into the organic, sugar-free FroYo and took it to the living room, where we watched Girl Meets World. I was ninety-nine percent sure that it was out of her age bracket, but it kept both of us entertained. Eight o’clock came and went. Rules were bent, because Trent had been the first to break them. He broke them the day he broke my mother’s expensive Louboutins. The day he’d agreed to hire me. He’d broken them when he bossed me around to get into his car when I was with friends, and forbade me to have sex with Bane, and way more other times than I cared to count.
After watching the show and slowly recovering from the food coma and sugar rush, Luna, who was sitting next to me on the dark brown leather sofa, turned her head in my direction and grinned, staring at my ribcage.
“What is it, Germs?” I frowned. She pointed at my neck, and I looked down.
“This?” I fingered the seashell on my necklace, made out of black shoelace and dark cerith shell. It looked like a dagger, and it felt like one, too. Luna nodded, her hand tapping her thigh. She wanted to touch it. I removed it from my neck, placing it in her hand. “Watch out, though. It’s sharp.”
She pressed her fingertip to the end, sucking in a breath.
“I was running on the sand one day—it was really hot and I left my flip-flops in my car because I like walking barefoot, when I stumbled over something. It cut my heel so deep I could see my tendon. I picked the prickly thing up. I couldn’t believe something so pretty could hurt me so badly. So I decided to keep it. Because sometimes, our favorite things are the ones that make us cry.” I chuckled at the skeptical look on this girl’s face.
“Have you ever swum in the ocean?” I asked. I had a feeling I knew the answer to that one. She hesitated for a moment before shrugging.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
It was definitely a no.
“Would you like to?”
Luna shrugged again, but in a totally different way. Her first shrug was disappointed, resentful. Her shoulders sagging down. Her second shrug was more wistful. Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I clung to nuances like they were my lifeline. After all, sometimes, they were the only thing I could squeeze out of Theo.
“Would you? If I took you? If I…taught you,” I probed, my skin catching flames at her intense stare.
She nodded, her head snapping up, as if she remembered something. She put her little hand on my forearm, telling me to wait, and jumped from the sofa, padding down the hallway. This girl was living directly in front of the ocean, yet all she was ever allowed to do was go to Funny Felix parties on the dry, boring sand, without dipping a toe. Her dad seemed like such a self-centered prick. I wondered if she was able to share any of her likes and dislikes with him. I sat on their couch, gawking at the walls around me. The feature wall was decorated like some big shot artist had thrown dark paint on it on purpose. Grays and blacks and deep purples. It was half-graffitied, and looked exactly like something you would find in a bachelor’s pad. But Trent wasn’t a bachelor anymore, no matter how emotionally unavailable and single he was. He had a daughter.
This place looked like him.
Dark. Brooding. Moody.
It didn’t look like Luna.
Hesitant. Curious. Gentle.
Luna came back with a big children’s book, square, thin, and flat. She dumped it on my legs, climbed on the sofa, and started flipping through it until she found what she was looking for. She stabbed her finger to the image.
“Seahorse?” I asked, furrowing my brows. She nodded, staring at me expectedly.
“Oh, you want to know if I ever see any seahorses when I surf? No. They’re hard to find. They’re shy creatures, I think. They live in reefs and sheltered places.”
The disappointment on her face made my heart twist. I rubbed the back of my neck and looked around. Trent’s laptop sat on the dining table across the room. I knew it wasn’t an afterthought. He wanted me to see it. Wanted me to touch it. It was a test, and I was about to fail it—jeopardizing my father’s plan—to try to pacify Luna.
“Hey, why don’t we read more about seahorses on Wikipedia? Maybe there’s a good documentary on them on YouTube.”
Her eyes lit up like Christmas, and it was worth all the shit he was going to give me when he found out.
“I’m kind of bending the rules for you. Are you going to tell on me?”
She scrunched her nose, shaking her head like the mere idea was insulting. And that gesture—the nose wrinkling—it was so me.
For the next forty minutes, Luna and I learned everything there was to know about seahorses. We watched a male seahorse giving birth to a gazillion baby seahorses and laughed. She laughed because there were so many. I did because it looked like a man shooting his load after watching the filthiest porn ever recorded.
Then before we knew it, it was ten o’clock and bedtime became non-negotiable, because I was pretty sure Trent would hang me from his balcony if he found us still hanging out in the living room when he got home. Luna didn’t put up a fight, which I thought was strange, because Theo always had. He would yell and plead and bargain and try to manipulate me, just like his father.
I tucked Luna in, sitting at the edge of her black wood bed. The whole room was blue and full of posters of seahorses, seashells clinging to the walls. It had her personality, and suddenly, the need to cry slammed into me. Because it wasn’t my first rodeo tucking someone into bed, and it wasn’t the first time I knew I’d have to say goodbye to them, eventually.
I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t. Couldn’t.
Every bone in my body ached, burned, and yearned for it. Which was exactly why I needed to stay away. I couldn’t bulldoze into her life, knowing I couldn’t stay. It was like planting myself in, watering the seed, letting the sun kiss it and allow it to grow only to yank it from its roots. Knowing Luna was like me—attached to an unstable man who could tear her away from me tomorrow morning if he wanted. And who knew what Trent Rexroth really wanted? He was an eternal riddle enfolded in a delicious suit.
“Hey, Germs, do you know what?”
Luna nodded, letting me “burrito” her by tucking the edges of her blanket under her body so she was positively cocooned. That’s what I used to do to Theo, the rare times he’d let me.
“I had a lot of fun tonight. And I hope you did, too.”
She nodded, and I smiled, and maybe it was too dark for her to see it, because the next thing she did shocked me.
“Me, too.”
Throaty. Small. Breathy, like wind caressing waves at dawn.
Floored, I blinked away my surprise. Luna had spoken. To me! I wondered if she did it with Trent and Camila, too, every now and again, but I doubted it—he’d made too big of a deal about her nodding. I wanted to jump and call him, but had to play it cool. Fretting about it would only serve as a reminder that she was different.
“You’re just saying that because I fed you pizza and Coke and broke every single one of your dad’s rules.” I smirked. She laughed. I stood up awkwardly, moving away. Not kissing. Not touching. Not caressing.
“Good night, Germs.”
A little nod in the dark. I turned on the Dora the Explorer lamp by the door and smiled. I’ll take it.