Stay with Me (Wait for You, #3)(64)

Several seconds passed, and then Jax settled behind me, closer yet again. I could almost feel his legs behind mine. “It’s not really bedtime material.”

I figured that. “I want to know.”

“Do you really?”

Asking myself that same question, I realized that I really did want to know—to know more about him. “Yes.”

There was one more pause. “We were in Afghanistan together, a part of a scouting group. There were at least twenty of us and we’d done it so many times it was like habit. All of us were on point, but we weren’t worried, but that’s the thing about habits. They can break you, too.”

I bit down on my lower lip, unable to imagine the kind of world he’d seen.

“We were outside a small village—a village that looked like any number of them we scouted in the past, but it was different. Turned out to be heavily armed, and not all of them were a part of the cause. There was a roadside bomb.”

I flinched. Oh my God, a bomb? You didn’t live in America for the last decade or so and not be familiar with the destruction a roadside bomb, even the small ones, could wreak.

“It was an ambush,” he added quietly, almost like an afterthought. “These things happen a lot. One minute everything is going smoothly, and then the next, the whole world is blowing up. Our group was scattered. Reece took a shot to the gut. I got him out of there.”

The next breath I took felt funny. “You got him out of there?”

“Yeah.”

And that was all he said about that, but I knew there had to be more. It wasn’t as simple as getting someone out of there when bombs were going off and people were shooting at you. “Was . . . was that something that kept you awake at night?”

He didn’t answer for a long moment. “Some nights . . . I dreamed that I didn’t get to Reece in time. Then other nights, I saw the things that went down that day. Crazy how the brain holds on to those kinds of images.”

My chest started to ache. “And whiskey helped with that?”

“Sometimes,” he murmured. “It sort of dulled everything—dulled the detail.”

I wanted to ask more, but then he asked a question that caught me off guard.

“Did you like doing the whole beauty queen thing?”

My eyes went wide. “I . . .” I didn’t want to answer the question because I didn’t like to even think about it, but I doubted Jax liked to talk about people shooting at him and bombs, so I owed him. “I liked it sometimes.”

Okay. That wasn’t a lot, but that was something.

“Sometimes?” he prodded gently.

I sucked my bottom lip between my teeth and then closed my eyes. “Sometimes it was fun. I was a little girl and I liked dressing up. I felt like a fairy princess.” I coughed out a dry laugh. “So it was like playing dress-up every week and it made . . . it made my mom happy when I had my hair done and all the makeup on and I was onstage. And it made her really happy when I’d win, especially the big titles.”

“What kind of titles?” he asked into darkness.

“Grand Supreme is one.” I had to open my eyes, because I could see myself on the stage, turning and blowing kisses and folding my hands under my chin. “When Mom was happy it was like she loved me. I know she loved me, but it was like she really loved me then.” I wiggled my hips again, trying to find a spot without flopping onto my back. “But there were times when I wanted to be . . . I don’t know, just be a kid. I wanted to play, but I had to practice walking, or I wanted to hang out with my dad, but he didn’t like going to those things, and sometimes I wanted to spend time with . . .” I trailed off, closing my mouth.

“Spend what?”

Sometimes I wanted to be at home, spending time chasing after Kevin. He was older than me—the big brother—and when I was home, I was his shadow. And I also liked being with Tommy, because he was so small and so cute, like a real baby doll I’d played with.

But I didn’t say that, because it had been years since I’d spoken their names out loud, and it had been years since someone else said their names, up until Clyde had over the weekend.

“It was okay,” I said, hurrying on. “It’s not something I think I’d ever do if I had a child.”

“Me neither. I think it causes little girls to focus on the wrong thing—everything being about looks. So that’s something we agree on.”

“Yeah,” I whispered, feeling my belly tighten. It was different lying in bed with Jax and talking about what we agreed on when it came to child rearing.

“What was something you liked doing as a kid that didn’t involve the beauty queen shit?” he asked.

My heart squeezed because I couldn’t answer truthfully. My favorite thing had been hanging with Kevin. I went with the next-best thing. “Playing basketball.”

“Basketball?” The surprise was evident in his voice.

“Yeah, what about you?”

There was no hesitation. None whatsoever. “Pretending like my little sister got on my every damn nerve when in reality I loved when she followed me around, because with her, we were always getting into something.”

My breath caught, and I didn’t know what to be more affected by—the fact that he had a sister or the fact that his relationship with his sister sounded a lot like Kevin and my relationship or what it could’ve been. “You have a sister?” I asked after a few moments.