Page 99 of Fight For Me

“Are you crying?” my mom asks, pulling my face up from her shoulder so she can study me. “Baby, don’t cry. Your dad will get over it.”

I shake my head, reaching for the tissues. “I was just thinking…of everything you guys have done for me…” I manage between those gulping hiccups I always get when I cry. “This room and…you’re such good parents!” I cover my face and my mom chuckles softly, pulling me into her.

“I think you’re in the “everything is too much” stage of heartbreak,” she tells me, and I nod against her shoulder. It definitely feels like the slightest thing could set me off right now.

She pats my back until I manage to stop crying.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you and dad.”

“Oh, please,” she says dismissively. “You didn’t do anythingwrong, Alexandria. Whatever your dad might think, you’re not actually required to tell your parents every detail of your love life.”

“Even when that love life revolves around a person you guys think of as family?”

She shrugs. “It definitely makes things more complicated. And it would have been a lot easier if we’d found out before it was aired on national television.”

I groan. “Please don’t remind me. It feels so…violating.” I look up at her. “You’re allowed to say I told you so. You all said that show was a mistake.”

“You’re supposed to make mistakes in your twenties,” she says. “You’re supposed to take some chances. God, Paige and I took off to follow a band around for an entire summer and I think my mother almost had a heart attack when she found out. You haven’t put your dad and I through half of the crap we did when we were younger.”

“Well following that band turned out pretty good for me,” I point out. “Since I wouldn’t, you know,existif you hadn’t met dad.”

She laughs. “Good point. All I’m saying is that you have a good head on your shoulders, babe. Try not to get too upset about making the occasional mistake.”

“Sneaking around with a guy a decade older than me and having it end up on TV seems like a pretty big mistake.”

She brushes loose strands of hair out of my face so she can study me. “You ready to talk about him yet?”

My heart clenches painfully. “I don’t know.”

“You always did have a crush on that boy.”

I gasp. “You knew about that?”

She snorts. “Alex. You wrote his name on everything. I used to find reams of notebook paper in your trash can with the words Alexandria Warner written all over them.”

“Oh my god,” I mutter, covering my face. It’s so stupid—my first thought is that I hope she’ll tell Wyatt this someday. He got such a kick out of knowing I had a crush on him in my teens. Then I remember that there won’t be jokey conversations with my parents about our relationship and the tears come back with a vengeance.

“I was so happy with him,” I gasp out. “He treated me so well and we had so much fun. He was so easy to talk to and I always slept better when he—” I manage to cut myself off before I finish that sentence. My mom and I are way closer than most mother-daughter pairs, but I have no desire to give her details about my sex life.

“And you don’t think there’s any chance you might get back to that?” she asks gently. “Maybe he was just overwhelmed by everything last night.”

I snort through my tears. “It wasn’t just last night. He was terrified of anyone finding out the whole time.”

“He thought we would be upset about the age difference?”

There’s another slam downstairs, this one followed by a stream of muffled curses. I raise my eyebrows. “Can’t imagine why he would think that.”

She chews on her lip, searching for the right words. “It is a pretty big age difference, babe.”

“Does it bother you?”

She holds my gaze. “A little.”

Annoyance spikes. “You dated an older guy before dad.” More than one, actually. My mother wasn’t joking about nearly causing her parents heart attacks when she was younger. She had some pretty wild ways.

She holds my gaze. “And it was a disaster and really unhealthy.”

“You think I’m unhealthy?”