Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(36)

Fuck. He had to use my full name, didn’t he? Had to invoke that instinctive, bred-in-the-bone obedience toward older authority figures. I stopped with my hand on the banister, tipping my head back and fighting to limit the expression of my frustration to an irritated groan.

I flinched at the first brush of his fingers on my shoulder.

“Don’t touch me,” I rasped. “Not right now.”

“Okay.” The hand disappeared. “I won’t. But . . . will you just sit down with me? Tell me what just happened?”

“You’re not my f*cking therapist, Professor.” I tried to make the dismissal scathing, but instead it just sounded weary. “I don’t need to sit on your couch and work out my issues with you.”

“I’d like to know what’s going on so I can avoid it happening again.” He sounded a little hurt, and I sighed, turning to face him. He looked so confused and concerned. Jesus. When was the last time anyone but Mo had cared about my feelings, unless they were being paid by the session?

I wanted to crawl into his lap and hide in him until all the bad feelings went away, and wasn’t that just f*cked up beyond belief? The last thing I needed was to start thinking of him as the daddy figure I’d never had.

“You really, really don’t want me to read you another chapter of Topher’s Pity-Poor-Me Drama.” I rolled my eyes. “How about we leave it at ‘Topher’s turned off by flaccid dicks’? So, I’ll go have some coffee, you haul out some porn and get it up, then when I come back upstairs I promise to be in a better mood, and we can pick up where we left off.”

“Jesus, Topher.” He scraped his wet hair back from his face. Beads of water collected on his temples and neck from where the ends were still saturated and dripping. “Do you really think I’d consider going to bed with you when you’re like this?”

“Yeah, I know, the freaking out is super-unattractive.” I grimaced. Why wouldn’t he just walk away? “Sorry. I’ll try to keep that under control in the future.”

I wasn’t being fair to him and I knew it, but this was what I did when threatened. When I was backed into a corner, I came out swinging.

“Goddamn it, that’s not what I meant!” The corners of his mouth and eyes grew white as he scowled. “Give me some credit for not being quite that shallow, would you? You look like you’re ready to fall apart, and I’m worried, okay? I’d like to know what the f*ck just triggered you so I can avoid doing it again.”

My gaze darted away from his, scurrying around the hallway and down the stairs, looking for something, anything else to focus on. In my peripheral vision, his hand stretched out again, but he stopped short of touching me. Smart man.

“Topher, please?”

My throat aching, I shuddered and laid my hand in his. He squeezed it, his thumb rubbing across my knuckles.

“I need to go get dressed. If you want, you can go sit downstairs, have some coffee. I’ll be down in a minute. Or if you don’t want to be alone, you can come with me. I’ll keep my hands off. No expectations just because you’re in my bedroom.”

Suddenly I very much did not want to be alone. If I was going to get into this—and I really didn’t see how I could avoid it now, because I owed him an explanation—I didn’t want to be alone in my own head for any length of time before it all came out. I wanted to get it over and done with.

“I’ll go with you,” I whispered, and let him guide me back to the bedroom.

While he dressed, I sat on the edge of the unmade bed where I now slept with him every night, wringing my hands in my lap and trying to find words. Once he had his underwear and jeans on, he offered me a prompt.

“Was it . . . an ex? A former partner? Did they do something—?”

I shook my head, finding some of my attitude again. “Not exactly. Fuck. Okay, fine. Whatever. The story goes something like this: The week school let out for summer vacation between second and third grade”—he sucked in a horrified breath and I offered him a grim nod, taking a bit of malicious satisfaction in narrowing my eyes to give him a you asked for it, bucko glower—“my mom—I told you once I spent weekends and summer vacation with her, right?—decided to go down to Alabama for a few months to hang with her father and cousins. Now, Grandpa had a brother and sister-in-law who adored children and never had kids of their own. They always loved having everyone’s kids come stay with them. It was a thing in the family; everyone did it. Whenever you visited, you left your kids to stay with them for at least a day or two. So Mom let them keep me for the summer. Let the weird, hyperactive kid who liked to play princess be someone else’s problem for a few months, right? Aunt Pearl and Uncle Jim would get to have a kid visit, Mom would get to party and not worry about having to make anyone a meal once or twice a day, so it was wins all around—except, of course, for the eight-year-old kid, who got to spend the next two months with a seventy-something-year-old man’s hand down his pants, and being forced to shove his hand down the old man’s pants in return.”

“Jesus.” Brendan wiped a hand down his face, pulling at the corners of his mouth, and sank onto a chair across from the bed. He looked like he might throw up. I didn’t blame him, though I just felt numb. Hollow. I was inured to it and could recite the facts with detachment. It wasn’t the first time I’d told this story. My therapist in high school had eventually coaxed it out of me. She’d then promptly broken confidentiality and told my aunt and uncle about it. The only reason I knew she’d done so was because she told me herself; my aunt and uncle never brought the subject up. It had just hung there, ignored. I never knew if they believed me, if they blamed me, if they hated him, or what.