Thin Love (Thin Love, #1)(2)

Ransom’s gaze runs over the commentators’ too-tanned faces, their receding hairlines, small hints of the handsome men they were when they took the field. Her son soaks in each detail of the teams being discussed, the bodies running, scoring in the file footage, and for the millionth time Keira is reminded that he looks nothing like her.

There are no traces of her in his features, no hints of her French ancestors. His eyes are dark pools that scream of a knowledge and a struggle far beyond his nearly sixteen years. They are not blue like hers, but inky black, narrow, bottomless. His cheeks are high, sloped, far more distinguished than her own. His skin is heavily tanned, near caramel, face peppered with faint freckles.

He is his father in duplicate. Just as imposing, just as beautiful.

Sometimes her son grins a certain way, laughs with a tone that is placating and sarcastic, and both gestures bring her back to the boy she loved; another ghost of the past reflected in her son’s gait, in his pleased, happy laugh.

“Elam went to the Ravens. He’s good. Not as good as Vasquez. That dude will help land us in the NFC Championship.”

“That’s months away, son.”

But Ransom ignores her, lifts the remote to the screen when the commentary shifts from the players waiting to be selected, to NFL gossip and speculation and the name she’s tried to forget she knew for all of Ransom’s life.

“Kona Hale enters the 2013 season as a free agent…” the sports caster begins, but Keira doesn’t hear the rest of his monologue. She only sees the picture flash on the screen. The hooded eyes, black and penetrating, the familiar grin, the scar across his cheek that Keira knows isn’t from a football game. And then, Ransom sits up straight as a video of Kona moves over the screen, reporters surrounding him, microphones pointed at his face as he leaves an airport.

Ransom’s gaze slips to her and she thinks there is a question there; the same question she’s waited for him to ask since the first time he became obsessed with Kona Hale, NFL darling. She knows Ransom sees the similarities. How could he not? But he doesn’t ask. He has never asked.

“Rumor is Hale is going to practice with the Steamers this summer.” Ransom flashes a grin identical to the one on the television set and Keira represses a shudder. “It would be cool if he came back home, right? Played with them? I mean, he’s getting up there, kinda old for a long contract.”

“He’s around my age, you know,” she says, unable to resist a smile when her son’s eyes go wide.

“I mean, you’re not old, Mom. But for a linebacker, well, thirty-six is pushing it.”

“Nice save, little man.”

Keira’s elbow moves off the sofa when Ransom nudges it. She doesn’t look at the screen, tries to ignore the voice, his voice, as he answers the reporters’ endless questions. She’d spent years doing that; blocking out an article online or him on a late night talk show. Keira’s learned to blind herself to the sports figure, reminding herself he is no longer the boy she loved. That face, that name, is something unreal to her and not the boy who shredded her heart.

Ransom stopped asking about his father when he was thirteen; when “what’s my father’s name?” had Keira’s hands shaking until she had to shove her fingers under her thighs to keep them still. She meant to answer him then. She meant to answer all of his questions over the years. But her boy stopped questioning, stopped wondering out loud who had given him his wide stature, the small cleft in his chin.

He stopped asking and Keira believed he no longer cared.

What an idiot she’d been.

“Kona, is it true you’re tapped for spring training with the Steamers?” a reporter asks and his laugh returns Keira’s attention back to the screen.

“You never know, Bryan. We haven’t decided…”

Still beautiful. Still charming and when Keira’s heart clenches, vibrates like a bassline drumming from a speaker, she can’t listen anymore.

“Want some popcorn?” She doesn’t wait for her son to respond before she moves into the kitchen. Keira takes a moment to herself, to push away the most relentless, insistent ghost.

On the counter she sees her mother’s cookbook. It is red and white, Betty Crocker and opened on the stand to a recipe for Chicken and Dumplings. It was rarely used and never by her mother, but the sight of it has Keira looking around the room. The counters still shined, even though they were unused by her mother who never learned more about cooking than picking up the phone to have someone else prepare it. And still, those shadows of her mother’s ghost could not block other things she remembers about this room.

Keira attempting French toast and Kona’s successful efforts at distraction. Kona leaning her against the counter, shirtless, his jeans lowered; her legs around that thin, tight waist, her open to him, giving, taking; her fingers hanging onto the edge as he worked inside her. Keira can still hear her own moans bounce into her ears across the wood floors. He fills this place and sometimes, Keira thinks, he still fills too much of her head, too much of her heart.

She had pushed back those memories, those sensations that Kona always worked in her, but being home has allowed her to remember how much he had consumed her. To her, then, he was life. He was breath. He was the searing part of her soul that burned her from the inside. With him, she couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move past the way his mouth felt on her skin. He had been that all—life, death, breath—all those impossible things you aren’t supposed to feel at eighteen. A first love so real, so tempting that sometimes she was sure he was a figment of her imagination.