Page 110 of Final Drive

Her mouth falls open a little. “Cameron, that’s a terrible date.”

“It’s an excellent date. You’re just not used to them.”

She snorts and comes up the beach. Instead of sitting across from me, she drops down beside me, close enough that her shoulder settles against my arm. Her boots get tossed somewhere behind us, and she digs her bare feet into the sand.

We don’t talk. That’s the point.

After a few minutes, the cold from the ground starts working its way through my jeans. Reese shifts closer, either because she’s cold too or because she wants to.

I don’t ask which.

“Cameron.”

“Mm?”

“I want you to bite me.”

I’ve known it was coming, or at least I’ve known she wanted it. Hearing her say it still sends something hot and immediate down my spine, but I’ve spent two months learning the difference between feeling something and having to do something about it. I keep looking out at the lake.

“I know.”

She pulls her shoulder away from mine enough to look at me. “That’s it? I know?”

“You’ve wanted it since the maintenance room. I’ve wanted it since about a week before that.” I glance over and find her staring at me like I’ve personally insulted her. “You don’t need me acting surprised just because you said it first.”

“Then why the hell have you spent two months staying three feet away from me?”

That’s harder to answer. Not because I don’t know why. I’ve known exactly why since the night it happened. I just haven’t said it to anybody, and once I do, Reese will have something that I’ve spent most of my life making sure people don’t get.

I dig my fingers into the sand beside my leg and watch it fill the spaces between them. “When I was fourteen, my father put my head through a storm door.”

Reese goes very still beside me.

“The scars on my left side are from that night. The ones on my back are from another one.” I don’t need to look at her to know what her face is doing. I can feel the questions coming, but she keeps them to herself, which is one of the reasons I’m able to keep going. “After a couple of years, I got good at knowing when it was coming. How he put a glass down. How hard he shut a cabinet. Whether he answered when my mother said his name. I could usually tell he was going to lose his shit before he knew.”

“Cameron.”

“I’m not telling you because I want you to feel sorry for me.”

“I know that.”

Of course she does. I look over then. She’s got her knees pulled up now, arms loose around them, and there’s no pity on her face. She’s just listening.

“I’m good at reading people,” I tell her. “Really good. I had to be. Somewhere along the way it stopped being something I did because of him and became...” I shrug because I don’t have a better way to say it without sounding like Tyler. “Mine, I guess. The one part of me I could always trust.”

Her expression shifts a little at that. “And you couldn’t read me?”

“Not in the maintenance room.” Even thinking about those few seconds makes my shoulders tighten. “When your heat hit, I lost the room. Completely. Couldn’t tell you where the door was, what Jackson was doing, whether somebody was talking to me. There was just you.”

She looks back toward the lake. “So you thought you might hurt me.”

“Yeah.”

No point dressing that up.

She picks at a loose thread on the knee of her jeans for a second. “Do you still think that?”

“I don’t know.”