Stunned by the never-before-asked question, I sat back and after a moment shrugged. “I’m fine.”

He said nothing, his throat bobbing like he was swallowing down words.

“One of the guys at St. Joke’s, we stayed friends,” I said because it really seemed like the guy was worried about me. “And Beth, now. I’d like to think she cares.”

Oh, that wish in my throat, it was burning so fucking hot.

Beth came back out of the house, panting almost like she’d been running, a pitcher of lemonade in her hands and a few stacked cups in the other.

“What are you guys talking about?” she asked, eyes wide and too bright.

“Your foster home,” Peter said.

“Ugh, that’s a terrible conversation,” Beth said, wrinkling her nose.

I stood and took the pitcher from her and the cups, setting them down on the table and moving over so she could sit on the bench with me. Peter watched it all like I was performing surgery.

The guy’s attention was starting to get strange, the conversation more like an interrogation than anything else. So I looked right back at him until he coughed and picked up a platter.

“We gonna eat?” he asked, gruff and scowling again.

We passed the meat and cheese. I took a hard-boiled egg, holding it in my hand. The memory stuck in my head, but I couldn’t put it together. Why in the world did this egg and tablecloth and whole setup feel familiar?

“Everything okay?” Beth asked, holding her own hard-boiled egg. I smiled at her, because we were ridiculous. I reached forward and tapped my egg to hers, like we were cheersing each other.

She looked at me with wide eyes.

“You are acting…weird,” she said.

“I’m fine.” I put down my egg and took tomatoes and avocados, passing the platter around again. “In fact,” I said, “I think I’m happy.”

“This is you happy?” she asked, a smile curling around her lips, and I shrugged.

“Maybe?” I wrinkled my nose, and I knew as clearly as I knew my own hands that she wanted to kiss me.

“Not sure what there is to be happy about?” Peter said. “You two are in some trouble. You got a plan?”

“Good point,” Beth said, swallowing down her smile. “And no, I don’t have a plan. Do you?” she asked me.

“Nope.” I couldn’t stop smiling when there was seriously nothing to smile about. Happiness felt a little like losing my mind.

“You know you can stay here as long as you need,” Peter said.

“I do know,” Beth said. “And I appreciate it.”

“Carissa is hopefully talking to Bates,” I said. “Explaining the situation.”

“Do you think he’ll listen?” Beth asked. “Let you go?”

I shrugged.

“What are you going to do about your mom?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know,” Beth said, looking rather lost. A little forlorn. I reached over and squeezed her leg under the table, and she gave me a smile.

“Simon says you should go back on YouTube, tell your story,” I told her.

“My story?” she asked like it made no sense. Like she didn’t have a story.

“About your mom. The drugs. Abuse.”

Peter made a low sound in his throat. Disagreement.

“You don’t have to tell anyone anything you don’t want to,” Peter said. “You don’t need to go parading your business on the Internet for everyone to see.”

“‘You don’t have to tell anyone anything you don’t want to’ is sort of how we got into this mess,” I said. I watched her remove the seeds from a tomato, remembering what she said that night at the Yucca Lounge—how what was between us were the things we weren’t saying. What was standing between her and total freedom from her mother was the story she’d told me. The story she should be telling everyone.

“I’m not saying you should do it,” I told her. “But I don’t think you should be scared of doing it.”

“I called my manager again,” she said.

“And?” I asked.

“I left a message.”

“Maybe we need to try someone other than your manager.”

She wiped her face, her eyes and sighed like the joke was on her. “I don’t actually have anyone else to call. You were right, Tommy. The only people who would help me are sitting at this table.”

“What about Beth?” I asked. “Your assistant.”

She tore a piece off her bread but didn’t eat it. “I think I burned that bridge.”

“I don’t think you did.”

She looked up at me, the sunlight catching at her amber lashes, turning her eyes to gold.

“It doesn’t hurt to try,” I said.

“You know that’s not true,” she whispered. It hurt a lot to try. To try and fail. To try and be rejected. To try and get nothing for all the effort.

We did know that. That might have been the second lesson I ever learned.

I wanted to kiss away the sadness on her face.

“Text her at least,” I said, handing her my phone. “Let her know you’re okay.”

Beth looked down at the phone for a long second but then picked it up and typed in her assistant’s number and started texting.

“Have you lived here long?” I asked Peter, happy to change the subject for no other reason but that Beth looked suddenly less tense now that we weren’t focused in on her.

Again, I had one of those sunbursts of insight into her—the costumes for the performances. It was easier for her to be the center of attention if she wasn’t really herself.

Good God, I could spend the rest of my life unpeeling this girl’s layers.

I wish…

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” Peter said. “It was my father’s land before it was mine.”

“Wow,” I said, building up my sandwich, throwing in a little bit of everything. I didn’t really like avocado, but it looked so good. “Family business.”

“Well,” Peter said. “It ends with me.”

There was something so hard about those words. So final. The way he said it like each word was a tombstone. A weight he would not pick up again.

Fuck, if I was bad at small talk, he was worse.

“How…how did you two meet?” I asked, looking over at Beth, trying to guess how she ended up here.

“I worked here for a while after I ran away,” she said, jumping in quickly with a too-bright smile. Not really answering my question. How did she end up on this super remote farm? It’s not like she could have wandered off the street. “I come back from time to time to make sure Peter hasn’t gone full hermit.”

Peter scowled at her with such affection it might as well have been a hug.

“She made her first YouTube video right here,” Peter said, his neck a little red again, like the memory was so pleasant it embarrassed him.

“Oh my gosh, remember that?” She laughed, and the sound of it made me smile.

“She’d done this ridiculous makeup for Halloween—”

“Not ridiculous,” Beth said like she was offended. “Brilliant. I was a baby makeup artist, and I figured out how to make it look like I had a giant spider coming out of my eyeball.”

“What?” I cried.

“I know.” She was all joy and glittering pride. “It was amazing.”

“It was gruesome,” Peter said. “But it was…” He shook his head like he didn’t have any words for it, and I knew the feeling when it came to Beth. “Beautiful too. So she had me take this video of her with her phone.”

“What was she doing?” I asked.

They looked at each other, Peter grinning. Beth wincing. “You gonna tell him or do you want me to?” Peter said.

“I was rapping the Nicki Minaj rap from ‘Monster.’” My eyebrows lifted, and she shook her head. “I was eighteen and thought I was very cool.”

“With a giant spider coming out of your face, I bet you were cool. Is that how the whole YouTube thing started?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” she said while the smile slowly faded from her face. “God, it used to be so fun.”

She sounded completely joyless. Flat. I glanced at Peter, who was watching her with his unreadable face.

“When did it stop?” I asked. “Being fun?”

“Seven months ago. When I put up ‘Making Waves.’ That was the last fun thing I did. Excluding you, of course.”

I could feel the blush explode across my face, but Peter and Beth didn’t seem to care about the sexual innuendo. I was the only prude at the table.

“Is this what you wanted?” I asked. “This kind of career?”

She shrugged, tearing her bread into tiny pieces and rolling them into balls. “I didn’t even have time to decide if it was what I wanted. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was like from the moment I hit upload, it was just this thing that was happening. That’s how the doctor got involved with his bullshit drugs…I just had to keep going because there was no time to stop.”

“You need to eat,” Peter said, like the personal conversation was just too uncomfortable. “Before the bees come.”

Beth nodded and stopped picking at her food, taking a bite of one of her bread balls. Peter put salt on his plate and rolled his egg in it.

“Ploughman’s lunch,” I blurted.

Peter looked up, surprised, the egg halfway to his mouth.

“What now?” Beth asked with a laugh.

“That’s what this is,” I said, looking down at the food. “Or at least that’s what my mom called it when she used to do this. She called it ploughman’s lunch.”

I looked up at the still and pale faces of Beth and Peter. “Sorry,” I said, realizing I was being a little weird. “The memory just came back to me. Looking at all this stuff. When I was little, before she died, she’d pack these picnics all the time. Hard-boiled eggs and bologna and the cheap white bread. She had this red blanket, and she’d spread it out at a park, or if there wasn’t a park, we’d sit on the hood of her car. It was nice.”

“How…” Peter cleared his throat. “How did she die?’

“Overdose,” I told him, and he looked away, nodding like that made sense to him somehow.

“How old were you?” he asked.

“Eight.”

“I didn’t know that,” Beth whispered.

“Yeah, she…ahhh—” This didn’t seem like happy lunch conversation, but they were both watching me so carefully, I didn’t know how to stop. “She’d left for the night—”

“She left you alone?” Beth asked.

“Yeah. She did that. I mean, she was young, you know? Wanted to have a life. She’d leave me with some food and the TV. She wasn’t usually gone overnight. Just a few hours. But she didn’t come back that night. Or the next, and I stayed as long as I could. Ate all the food that was in the apartment, and then I left to try and go find more. But I didn’t have keys…” I waved my hand. “I got picked up in the grocery store, eating a box of Twinkies right there in the aisle.”

I laughed, but they didn’t laugh with me.

“How long were you in that apartment?” Beth asked.

“Few days. I’m not really sure.”

“Do you remember a lot about her?” Peter asked.

“You don’t have to talk about this,” Beth said in a rush. “It’s sad—”

“It’s not,” I told her. “Not anymore. These memories haven’t been sad for a long time. She was pretty. She had a beautiful laugh, when she laughed. We moved a lot. I think money was hard. Mostly…I was alone, while she worked, while she partied. But when she was around, she was good to me. She tried. That’s what I can say about her. She tried.”

I glanced around at the stricken faces of Beth and Peter and lifted my hands. “Sorry, I don’t mean to bum anyone out.”

Beth handed my phone back to me and then sat with her hands in her lap, not eating anything when I knew she had to be so hungry.

“What happened to you after she died?” Peter asked, and Beth groaned low in her throat like the question hurt her.

“Peter,” she breathed. “Please—”

“It’s okay,” I told her, squeezing her knee. “I swear. It doesn’t bother me to talk about her. I spent some time in various shitty group homes while they tracked down my grandparents, who weren’t interested in an eight-year-old kid they didn’t know anything about, and then I got put in my first foster home.”

“You never told me about your first foster family,” Beth said.

I sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah, I guess not.” I didn’t much like talking about them. I liked, when I was a kid, to pretend they’d been a dream. Those memories hurt a little bit more than the ones of my mother. I’d let down a lot of guards with that first family.

“Were they decent?” Peter asked, and his voice sounded like it was bursting out of his chest.

“Really decent. Mark, the dad, taught me how to play catch, and Vanessa, the mom, she was probably the most loving person I’d ever known at the time, which might not have been saying much. But she was very kind. I think…had things gone all right, I would have been adopted, but the dad, Mark, he got really sick and after about two years, I was removed from the home.”

“He died?” Peter asked.

“He did. I got put in a few other homes and I started getting in trouble for fighting. Stealing. I kept trying to run away to go back to them. I didn’t understand that Vanessa was grieving and that there wasn’t room for me—”

Peter stood up, and I shut my mouth so fast my teeth clicked.

“You... you eat,” he said, looking anywhere but at me. “I’ve got some work to do. Leave the dishes when you’re done.” And then he was walking away from the table.

The silence after he left was stifling, and I didn’t know how to change it or fix it. This was why I was shitty with people; I didn’t know how to be easy. I could only be a stone, weighing everything down.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be.” She spoke in a rush. “Don’t be sorry about anything. Not a single thing.”

“I’d told myself I would make small talk with Peter so that you wouldn’t be stressed out, and now look what I’ve done.”

“You haven’t done anything,” she said. “I’m…I’m glad you told me those things. They help me see all of you, you know?”

I looked over to find her watching me with tears in her eyes.

“No,” I breathed. “No, baby, no tears. There’s nothing to cry over. It’s ancient history.”

“But it’s not,” she whispered. “You’re still that boy, waiting for your mom to come home, just like I’m the girl waiting for my mom to hear me.”

This morning I’d been ready to drop Beth off at her apartment and walk away from her. Right now, on this deck, my body blissed out from her touch, my fingers burning from the tears I wiped off her cheeks, I wasn’t ready at all.

I couldn’t even imagine a time when I would be ready. The date kept slipping further and further into the distance.

I wish…

“Come with me.” Beth stood, her hand outstretched toward me.

I was new at this, not totally used to the signals and signs, but I would have to be dumb and blind to miss what Beth wanted. It was written on her face. Her skin. I saw it in the way her nipples pressed against her shirt. She was everything subtle and not subtle about sex right now. About connection and about us.

I put my hand in hers and stood with her.

With her free hand she put my food on her plate and picked it up.

“We’re going to need provisions,” she said like we were soldiers off to have a sex battle. I grinned at her, feeling lighter than I had in years, and put the last of the eggs on the plate.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

I followed her up the stairs, my eyes glued to her hips in the black jeans she wore. The sway of her body, the curve of her spine. I was hard in a heartbeat.

I’d fucked up that conversation talking about my mom and the foster family. There was a chance I’d never be able to talk about them without making an emotional hash of it.

But this…losing myself in Beth, I could do. So far I hadn’t fucked this up at all. I had beginner’s luck. Maybe making love to Beth was my one true skill.

Inside the apartment Pest was sprawled out on the bath mat, asleep, and I shut the door to the bathroom while Beth put our food on the dresser.

“It’s been a long time since I talked about my mom and my first foster family,” I said.

“It’s not easy.”

“But fuck, I feel… better. You know?”

“I felt better when I told you about my mom. I mean, better and worse.”

“Better and worse, that’s it.”

Maybe there were a million women who would know me like Beth did, if I let them. If I let them into my life, even a little. But it was like I knew I only had room for one person like this in my life. And Beth got there first.

No matter who I dated. Or loved. Or had sex with. Beth got there first.

It was the singular truth of my life. I was Beth’s. Completely.

I loved her. I loved her now as much as I had then. More maybe. I loved the woman she was. The girl she’d been. Every piece of her, and I wanted to believe there might be hope for us.

And the hope was a slippery fish. With teeth. And I didn’t know how to hold it.

“I’m not hungry,” I said out loud instead of letting I love you fall from my lips.

Because I wasn’t ready to say it.

“Me neither,” she said.

I reached for her, my hand on her hip, the other at the nape of her neck.

“Make it good,” she whispered. Staring at my neck and shoulders, her hands still at her sides. “Make it something I can’t forget. Ever. Even if I try.”

Even if I try. Fuck.

She lifted her hands to her hair, to take it down. After that lunch, after telling her my story, I didn’t want the game. I wanted to do this with Beth. Not Jada.

“Don’t,” I breathed, pulling her hands from her hair. “Leave your hair up. Just let me love you the way you are.”

Immediately she shook her head, taking down her hair anyway.

“You won’t?” I asked.

“I can’t.”

It was a small pain she’d inflicted. A livable pain. I knew that. But still it hurt. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, across her face. Hiding her. Hiding me.

“I like it like this,” she said and I blinked. “I like the way you fuck Jada.”

Her hair was a wild mess around her small face. Like she’d been in a storm. Like she was a storm. And I was caught up in it. In the look in her eyes. The way she licked her lips.

She didn’t want love.

She wanted sex.

She wanted fucking.

It was me who wanted love.

But I put that boy away and let this be about what she wanted.

“What do you like about it?” I asked, stepping toward her as I pulled her into me at the same time. We met with a sigh and curse. If this was how she’d have me, this was how I’d take her.

“It’s rough,” she said. “Like you’re not sure if you like me.”

Right.

It was because I loved her.