Scandalous

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.

KATIE DEJONG MADE ME THINK about teenage Trent.

One thing about him was he didn’t believe he’d be sitting here today, eating a lobster (he hated lobster), drinking imported wine even though he lived in California (he hated wine), discussing the pros and cons of college rankings (he didn’t give a shit.)

This was exactly why I’d never dated. It was boring. The end game—marriage and kids—didn’t interest me, and the short-term touchdown—sex—was available without the inconvenience of wining and dining someone.

I didn’t say more than sixteen sentences the whole date, but I wasn’t rude, either. And I walked Katie to her car, and smiled at her, and didn’t promise I’d call, but when she leaned forward for a kiss, the kind I’d never give a steady fuck, I smoothly diverted it to a peck on the cheek.

Then I drove the fuck out of there, realizing, when I parked my car in the underground lot, that I couldn’t even remember what she’d worn or what color her hair was.

The weird sense of urgency grasped me in the balls in the elevator. The notion that I fucking went and put my kid in the hands of someone I barely knew suddenly made very little sense. All I knew about Edie Van Der Zee was that she was a liar, a thief, and a girl in trouble. Why I’d have her anywhere near my kid unsupervised was a mystery. I was worked up even before I shoved my key in the door. By the time I opened the door and saw what was going on, I was on the verge of flipping my shit.

A pizza box was sitting on the island, making the whole living room and kitchen area smell like oily bread and fucking mushrooms. Two cans of Coke on the counter—of course, she hadn’t even bothered throwing them in the trash—and that’s before I walked into the living room and found Edie sleeping on the couch, with my laptop in front of her. Spying, no doubt, and not giving a single fuck about hiding it.

I walked over to her, tucking my hands in my pockets, watching her. The way her chest rose and fell. The blonde hairs of her eyebrows. Her full, pink lips and golden hair. The tan lines on her shoulders. Her freckles.

“Wake up,” I commanded, my voice dripping ice all over her stirring body.

Her eyelids fluttered, at first slowly, and she didn’t sit up until I took another step forward, nudging her arm with my knee.

“Hey.” Her voice was hoarse. “How was it?”

“You ordered pizza.” I ignored her. “My daughter doesn’t eat fucking pizza.”

It wasn’t about the pizza. It was about the laptop. Not that there was anything on it—I kept everything on the flash drive—but it drove me nuts that I’d trusted her with my own daughter and she, in return, had spent the time in here trying to fuck me over. Again. Had she ignored Luna the whole time to play hacker?

This thing between us had long since separated fucked-up territory and was now deeply in batshit-crazy-ville.