Chapter 33

Liv

I sit bolt upright in bed.

This time it doesn’t take me as long to remember where I am or to figure out what’s woken me. Katie’s crying.

I drag myself from the bed—mine, because Chase and I have been careful not to let Katie catch us sleeping in the same bed—pull a hoodie around me, and hurry down the hall.

Her door is open a little ways, and as I get closer, I hear something that stops me in my tracks. A second voice, interwoven with Katie’s still-panicked cries. Chase’s, deep and husky from sleep.

I stand in the shadows of the hall, listening. I can’t hear his words, only the rhythm and texture of them, soft and soothing. A sound you can wrap yourself in, and that’s what I do. I lean against the wall and wrap myself in the sound of Chase.

Katie’s voice quiets, more and more intermittent until I don’t hear her at all. Now I can only hear Chase’s voice.

What he’s murmuring, over and over again, is I love you.

If I were not me, and he were not him, and I were not leaving, I think it would be incredibly easy to fall in love with him.

The thing I’m learning is that there is a lot of Chase that no one knows. Everyone knows bits and pieces. But maybe now I know the most bits and pieces. And they add up to so much more than I’d thought. To this amazing man, with so many dimensions, who has worked hard to be the best person he can be, despite the forces arrayed against him.

“Jesus, Liv!” Chase says, emerging from Katie’s room and jumping a foot, startling me out of my reverie.

He’s wearing nothing but pajama pants. It’s a good look for him.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just thinking. She was wrong. Thea.”

“What?”

“She was wrong to try to keep Katie from you. You’re a great dad. The best.”

He looks pleased. And embarrassed. He shrugs me off.

“Liv?” he asks.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Who’s Zeke?”

My stomach lurches. “How do you know about Zeke?”

“Eve said I should ask you.”

Irritation twists in my stomach. Giving him too much power again. I wish she wouldn’t.

“He’s an asshole guy I dated a long time ago. He’s no one.”

“Well, if it’s no big deal,” he says lightly, “then you shouldn’t mind telling me about him.”

He takes my hand and leads me away from Katie’s room, down the hall and into his room. We stop inside the door. “Shoot,” he says.

I shrug. “Seriously. It’s nothing. I dated him after college. We moved in together. Pretty soon after that, I caught him kissing someone else. You see? Classic story of an asshole.”

“Were you in love with him?”

It is the last, the very last, question I was expecting Chase to ask. I hesitate, then nod.

“A little? Or a lot?”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters.”

I turn away. There’s a crack in the hallway paint that looks like the letter J.

“Liv.”

My chest is tight. “A lot. Way too fucking much.”

“And you thought he loved you back?”

I pull the hoodie around me and cross my arms.

“He knew about my mom and that I’d grown up in foster care.”

I’m not sure why those words decided to come out of my mouth right then. Or the next ones:

“And that I never got to stay anywhere.”

I have the choky sensation of tears rising in my throat, behind my eyes, but I battle them back. I will not give him the satisfaction.

“What happened?” Chase asks quietly. “What did he do to you?”

His voice is steely. I think maybe if Zeke were here, Chase would hurt him. And I like that, just a little.

“The night he asked me to move in with him, I’d woken up with a nightmare. It didn’t happen a lot anymore, but sometimes. It had happened a few times when he was there. This time, he held me, and then he asked me to move in with him. He said, ‘That way, I’ll always be here. You’ll never have to wake up alone again.’ ”

My voice is shaking.

“You know what makes me the maddest? I’d known better for years. It’s not that people are bad. They’re not bad, they’re just weak. They can’t keep their promises. They change their minds, they fall off the wagon, they give in to temptation, they get themselves arrested, they fall for someone cuter, younger, sweeter—whatever. But you’re an idiot if you think otherwise. That’s the thing. You’re an idiot if you think otherwise. I was an idiot.”

“Not all people.”

“All. People.”

“Liv, that’s not true.”

“All people make mistakes. All people are fallible.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean—”

I talk over him. “He owned a small house, and I moved in there with him, and I remember when I was decorating, I remember thinking, This is it. I’m doing this for real this time. Permanent. I didn’t have to think about how I’d dismantle it for moving, or any of that.”

Chase looks stricken. “Liv.”

“It’s okay. I want to tell you the rest. Pretty soon after that—six weeks? Eight weeks?—I came to his office to surprise him with lunch and caught him kissing—like, passionately kissing—one of his coworkers. The worst part—I know this is crazy, but I swear, it’s true—the worst part was packing up my things. Not because the house was anything special, but because I’d been dumb enough to think it was mine.”

He’s never taken his eyes off my face the whole time I’m talking. Now he says, “You weren’t an idiot. You’re not an idiot. Trusting people doesn’t make you stupid.”

He puts one big, warm hand on my hair, slides it down around my jaw, and even though he’s wrong, I don’t argue. I lean into his touch. He drops his hand, brings the other one up, and pushes my hoodie off my shoulders. He pulls me into his arms. It feels unbelievably good, the heat of his bare torso soaking straight through my thin pajamas.

Also, he is like a wall of muscle, and I want to climb him. Parts of my body may actually already be climbing him, even though I have not directed them to do so. I say this only because my knee seems to have hooked itself up near his waist, and his hand is cupping my ass.

His mouth comes down on mine, hard and hungry.

“Mmm,” one of us says. Or both of us. It’s hard to tell.

He picks me up so both my legs are around his waist and carries me to the bed. We fall backwards onto it, me on top. Then he flips me over and covers me with the wall of muscle.

“Clothes. Off,” he says, although I don’t think it’s a command because he is busy removing them. While also kissing me everywhere. Eyes, nose, cheeks, throat, collarbone, ears—his tongue tickling, his lips catching my earlobe and sucking until I whimper—breasts, catching my nipples one by one and devoting himself thoroughly to them.

“Chase,” I beg. “I want you.”

He’s lining himself up when we both say, “Condom.”

He rolls for the night table.

“Hang on,” I say.

He looks at me, all heavy lids and dark eyes and slack lower lip.

“Any chance you have a clean bill of health?”

“Checkup two months ago, no one but you since.”

I smile. “Huh. So I was the first in a while? Wish I’d known that. I would have given you a really damn hard time about it.”

“You gave me a hard enough time as it was. All that kissing assholes while I stayed home fantasizing about doing this to you. What about you?”

“Clean. And IUD.”

Chase is nothing if not efficient. I’ve barely gotten the words out when he’s pushing into me. And I’d forgotten what it’s like to be skin to skin like this, not only our torsos and thighs but him inside me, how much hotter it is. And slippery. And perfect.

“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “I forgot. How. Good. This. Feels. It’s like a fifth gear for sex. Actually, no,” he interrupts himself, withdrawing almost all the way and looking down at where our bodies meet. “You’re the fifth gear for sex. Bareback with you is like a whole thing better than sex I didn’t know existed.”

And he thrusts into me, groaning.

We are both wordless for a long time, until all he can say is my name, and I bite his shoulder to keep from waking Katie.