Gin Fling (Bootleg Springs, #5)(28)

“He or you?” Shelby asked astutely.

“You’re annoyingly perceptive.”

“I do what I can,” she joked airily.

“Anyway, I hated my father for a long time. But at some point, I realized it had been the pregnancy and the resulting baby—me—who had derailed Mom’s life. She sacrificed it all to keep me.”

“And when you voiced this to your mother?” Shelby asked.

“How did you know?” I shook my head. “Never mind, creepy psychic woman. It gave me a few rough years in high school thinking that I was the problem. I had some anger issues. Acted out. Acted like a teenage asshole. But she never gave up on me.”

“Of course not. Probably because—and I’m just guessing here—she felt that her decisions had lessened your life in some way,” she mused.

“This is creepy. Is this what you do all day?”

Shelby laughed, and I liked the sound of it. “The reasons why people do things are fascinating. So tell me about your mom and your rocky teenage years.”

I was proud of how the two of us had come out of it. The choices we’d made. “She saw right through me, kept pushing until I blurted it out that she’d have been better off if I’d never been born.”

“And what did your mom say to that?”

“She called me a ‘sweet, kind-hearted idiot.’” I smiled remembering it. “Told me she would do it all over again because I was the best, brightest thing in her life, and she wouldn’t change a thing.”

“Now, that’s a good mom,” she said with satisfaction.

“The best. Once we had that out in the open, she dumped me in this teen weight-lifting program at a local gym. I found working out drained my anger, helped me focus. And the rest is history.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” she said, calling my bluff. “You went from an angry teen to a man who makes a living fixing people. What I want to know is what made you come here? You had to know for a long time there was a possibility that you had half-siblings. Something you easily could have discovered with the bare minimum of research.”

The subject of Rene sure was coming up a lot lately as if the universe was intent on making me work through it again. “There was a girl,” I said slowly.

“Aha!” she said triumphantly.

“Oh, you’re going to regret that preemptive victory,” I predicted.

“Spill it, my friend. Tell me about this girl.”

“Rene was pretty and interesting and smart. She was in commercial banking. Driven, focused. She knew what she wanted and how she was going to go get it. We met online, got paired up on a dating app, hit it off. She was into fitness and museums and had a whole Pinterest board dedicated to her future wedding. After a while, I could maybe start to see the possibility of me as the groom.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It was heading in that direction. We were still getting to know each other. And the more I got to know her, the more I liked her. And then she got sick.”

“Sick?” Shelby tensed beside me.

“It was a pretty aggressive cancer. And Rene didn’t want to divide her focus between a new relationship and a new diagnosis. One that didn’t have a positive prognosis. She told me she really liked me and she appreciated the time we’d had together but that she needed to put her energy into her health.”

“She dumped you because she had cancer?” she clarified.

I nodded. “Like I said, she knew exactly what she wanted and how she was going to get it. And I let her go.”

Shelby slumped in her chair. “Wow. And you’re using the past tense so…”

“The next time I saw her was at her funeral.” I could still see her, lying there looking perfect. But she was a stranger. And she was gone.

“Oh, Jonah,” she said softly.

“It’s fine,” I said, waving away her concern. “I let her push me away. She passed away. And then I saw my father’s obituary, saw that I had brothers and a sister.”

Shelby got out of her chair and slid neatly into my lap.

“What are you—?”

Her arms went around my neck.

“I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

I let her hold me tighter. The tighter she held on, the looser the knot in my chest got. “Yeah, me too.” I sighed into her hair.

She held on for a while, and I wrapped my arms around her. We sat in silence. Listening to the crackle of the wood and flames, the laughter of friends, the symphony of the crickets and tree frogs.

The music changed again. Country still, but something slow about first-time love.

“Jonah?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you wanna dance?”





15





Jonah





She’d left her hair down and loose tonight. The tips of it brushed my hand where it rested on her lower back. The firelight was soft on her face, flickering us into and out of shadow. Her eyes were more brown in this light, framed by the thick shock of bangs.

I let her lead me toward the fire, into the light and the warmth. Into the crowd of people who had once been strangers and were now friends, clients, neighbors.

“Do you miss her?” Shelby asked. “Your mom, I mean.” She slipped her arms around my neck.