The Slow Burn (Moonlight and Motor Oil #2)(67)
Toby stared up at her, feeling her fingers in his beard, warmed by the light shining in her blue eyes.
A light, until right then, he’d never seen.
Jesus Christ.
She was gorgeous.
But that light was stunning.
She kept shining that light on him.
“Thanks to you, the pressure is off. I got weighed down by it and forgot important things. I forgot what my mom taught me. I forgot that it’s about Brooks doing a chocolate wiggle. It’s about taking my son out in the snow and accepting God’s offering. It’s about holding on to those traces for as long as you can. I can’t lose sight of that. And since you helped me, I have room to breathe and make the right decisions about what’s next for me. Today, I went to the Fair with you and my boy and doing it, I remembered who I am. I stopped walking the path I’d veered onto and got back to the path that’s me.”
She dipped her face closer to his and kept talking.
“I’m a witchy woman, a rock ’n’ roll gypsy who’s all about embroidered jackets and nut clusters and the joy of knowing my son saying ‘sissis’ is him trying to say Christmas, and sleeping beside a man who’s not afraid to fuck me hard or joke about sex stores.”
“I’m not joking about sex stores,” he thought it important to inform her, and that bought him a beaming smile which was also something he’d never seen.
In his arms, he had Addie unleashed.
And it, too, was stunning.
“I love that even more, Toby.”
“And I love that you’re finding the way to you, honey.”
“I have you to thank for it.”
Hell no.
She wasn’t going to do that.
“That’s not on me, that’s all yours, Adeline.”
“And that’s what I love. That you’d think that, when I would have worked today if you hadn’t been open about your priorities and made me think. I would have missed a day where parts of it will fade from memory, but every year that wreath will be somewhere in my home for Christmas, so it’ll never go away. You did that, Toby. You reminded me what’s important. I’ll always have that reminder. And I thank you for it.”
“I’ll accept gratitude for that, baby.”
Her fingers found the end of his beard and she tugged it as she bent to touch her lips to his.
She lifted her head and remarked, “Your issue with women drivers is probably about Margot.”
He was so down with the warmth and goodness of where they were, her shift in gears was hard to follow.
“Uh . . . sorry?”
“Deanna tells me she’s a menace on the roads.”
“She’s not a menace. She’s a catastrophe. If I didn’t think she’d disown me, I’d turn her into the DMV. And I’d have done that when I was thirteen.”
Addie grinned and nodded. “So that’s probably why you don’t like women drivers. At some time when you were a kid, she freaked you with her driving and you transferred that to all of womankind.”
“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t like women drivers because I was in the passenger seat of a vehicle with a woman I was dating up in Alaska, and when I told her I didn’t want her spending the night, she lost her mind and control of the car, which after she screamed at me for a stretch of five miles, she wrapped around a tree.”
Addie’s frame went solid on top of him.
“I got a concussion and broke my clavicle and was off work so long, they put me on half-pay and I nearly had to ask my dad to send money so I could cover my rent.”
“Shit, Toby,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I was a logger. Every day was a physical day, but that day had been worse. It was her birthday, or I wouldn’t have gone out at all. I wasn’t in the mood. She’d decided what she wanted for her birthday present and she wasn’t pleased she wasn’t gonna get it. She shared that by getting hysterical because she wasn’t gonna get laid and then giving me a hospital stay.”
“Not every woman is going to do that, and I certainly wouldn’t with my son in the car.”
“Once bitten, twice shy,” he murmured.
“Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“Because we were goin’ to a Christmas Fair and it wasn’t time to land the heavy on you, and honestly, I was yankin’ your chain, mostly about the only-riding-with-a-guy stuff because you’re fun to tease.”
She gave him a little smile before she said softly, “God, that must have been terrifying.”
“Sittin’ there with her shrieking and swervin’ everywhere and goin’ way too fast, and her not listening to me begging her to calm the fuck down, so not having any control over any of that, my life in her hands, yeah. It was pretty fuckin’ frightening.”
Addie stroked his beard. “I’m sorry that happened to you, honey.”
“Worst part, it fucked her up,” he told her. “She had a skull fracture, think she broke all of her ribs, her arm. I came to, turned my head, saw the state of her, blood all over. So much I thought she was dead.”
“God, baby,” she breathed.
“She wasn’t. But gripping the steering wheel before impact with the adrenaline spike, she did some kind of damage to the nerves in her arms that couldn’t be fixed. She could barely squeeze a ball, that never got better, and she blamed me.”