Hard Sell (21 Wall Street #2)(57)

“Nah, I’m good. You?”

“Saving room for dessert.”

I groan. “I can’t even think about having more food. That steak was enormous, and you put half a stick of butter on my potato.”

“It’s the only way to eat the things. That or fried.”

“Or mashed,” I point out.

“I never liked mashed potatoes,” he muses. “I think because they remind me of Thanksgiving.”

I lift my head to look at him. “You don’t like Thanksgiving?”

He grins. “You’ve met my parents. What do you think?”

“Tell me Felicia didn’t come over for holidays.”

“Not until I was in college. I guess they figured with me gone most of the time, there was no point in keeping up pretenses anymore. Not that they ever did a good job of that in the first place.”

“God, you poor kid,” I murmur.

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“It was pretty bad,” I say with a laugh.

He looks at me, his eyes going serious. “Yours was worse.”

I suck in a quick breath. “You know, maybe I will grab some more wine.”

I start to stand, but he puts a hand on my leg, holding me still. “Sabrina.”

“What?”

“Why don’t you ever talk about your childhood, your life before New York?”

“Because it sucked. As you’ve already said, yours was bad; mine was worse. I don’t see the point in discussing things best left in the distant past. Ian’s the only thing from that part of my life that’s still around.”

He flinches. It’s slight, almost imperceptible, but enough to give me pause. Surely Matt’s not jealous of Ian. Is he?

“I didn’t mean to imply . . . I just . . . I didn’t even know you then.”

“I know. Which is why it sucks that I’m always on the outside, like I’m being punished for growing up in Connecticut instead of Philadelphia with you two.”

I touch his arm. “That’s not what this is about. This isn’t me trusting Ian more than you.”

“Okay,” he says quietly, and my chest clenches in panic. He’s giving up on me already. I should be relieved. Instead, I feel . . . lost.

“It’s fine, Sabrina.” Matt’s blue eyes soften as his touch moves from my knee to my cheek. “You don’t have to tell me.” The gentle tenderness in his voice is like a battering ram on the very walls he mentioned earlier in the evening.

My self-preservation’s stayed strong for years, but my need to keep everything compartmentalized into painful past and carefully restrained present seems to be wavering a little more with every passing day. First with Lara and Kate, now with him.

Especially with him.

Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s past time.

I take a breath for courage. “It’s not a pretty story.”

His eyes widen in surprise. Then he wordlessly hands me his whiskey, which is stronger than my wine. I smile and take a sip. I’m not above using liquid courage.

“It’s not a long story, either,” I say, handing him back his glass. “I mean, it’s not like some convoluted saga.”

“Damn, I love those. All guys do.”

I smile at his sarcasm, using it to buy some time as I pluck at a stray string on the blanket.

He stays silent, waiting for me. Letting me do it my way when I’m ready.

“So. You know I grew up in Philly. But it wasn’t like Liberty Bell, cheesesteak-sandwich-wars Philadelphia. We’re talking a neighborhood you’ve never heard of, or, if you have, it’s because of its crime rates.”

I pull harder on the string.

“My dad died when I was a baby. Heroin overdose. Though, from what I was able to piece together about him when I got older, I’m not sure he’d have been around if he’d lived. Sexual assault record, vehicular manslaughter . . . all sorts of nasty stuff.”

The tiny little string I’ve been fiddling with is now nearly a foot long, courtesy of my nerves. Matt puts his hand on mine, linking our fingers, and squeezes. Continue.

“It was just my mom and me for a while. Then later, my two half brothers lived with us. We alternated between crappy housing and crappy trailers. I’m not sure I ever lived in one place longer than a year. She liked her drugs a little bit, her booze a lot. But mostly?” I take a breath. “Mostly she liked her men. Or maybe the men liked her.”

“What’s she look like?”

It’s an easy question, and I suspect he means it to be. I squeeze his hand. “Like me. Brown eyes instead of blue, but otherwise I look just like her.”

What I don’t say out loud is that every time I glance in the mirror, I feel a tiny flash of fear that the similarities are inside as well as out. That I’m just as cold, opportunistic, and self-absorbed.

“So she was beautiful. What else?”

“You’re good at this,” I say begrudgingly.

“Only with you.” He brushes a strand of hair off my face.

My heart does something ridiculous, and I look away, knowing that the hard part is still to come.

“She never kept a job for long,” I say, my words a little bit rushed. “She worked on and off at clothing stores but got fired for helping herself to the items. Or she’d work at a cheap diner and get fired for being a lot better at flirting with the customers than actually getting them their food.”