Page 78 of Only Between Us

“Do you want me to?”

“I do. Very much.” Brooks pauses. “I trust you.”

What are you trying to do to me?

My throat closes up, nose prickles. I don’t know where this is coming from, but I take a moment to fight the responding sob building in my throat.

This—weare moving in such a stupid, irresponsible direction. Feelings were not meant to be part of the equation.

“I lied to you,” I say. Hoping he flies off the handle. Gets his guard up.

Brooks doesn’t even flinch. “Okay.”

“You asked a while ago whether I went looking for my birth parents. I told you no, but I did see them again. A year after they left. They were passing through town and tracked me down at school. Said they wanted me back.”

My heart pounded so hard it hurt, when that familiar voice called my name from across my high school parking lot. I’d been heading home at the end of the day, turned and found the woman I’d last seen in our old kitchen the night before she left me.

I didn’t go looking for them, but it was certainly a lie by omission.

Still, all Brooks says is “Okay.”

It was easier when I couldn’t stand him. I fiddle nervously with the anchor charm around my neck, trying to figure out where to start. I’ve never told this to anyone. Not my parents. Not Shy.

“By the looks of their back seat, they’d been living in their car. And the years I was with them… well, you know about that.” I shake my head because it’s my history, things I’ve actually lived, and it still feels unbelievable. “I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I told them about the Robertses. And that I wasn’t going to leave with them.”

“You don’t have to justify not wanting to go back to that.”

“Well, they didn’t like it. Whatever reason they had for coming for me… it was gone the second I told them. Their parting words wereyou’d better hope you’re worth all that trouble. And I didn’t understand the full extent of what they meant until later.”

Brooks stares off into the distance, the rapidly setting sun streaking blues and oranges across the sky. His body looks tense, locked up. Like he’s anticipating a kick to the gut.

“The way my parents took me in wasn’t exactly legal. I had a maternal aunt I should have gone to after my birth parents left, but she wasn’t much better than my birth mother.”

My parents had gone about their research discreetly, and they’d figured out quick that seeking legal guardianship would likely have me taken away. But they hadn’t been the only ones to realize it.

“You want to know how I know you can hear everything from the bedrooms at the house? A year after I last saw my birth parents, I woke up in the middle of the night to my mom crying in the kitchen. She and Dad were talking about my birth parents, how they’d come around earlier that day. Tocollect their payment, Brooks.”

A bird lands on the edge of the cliff, just a few feet away. It ruffles its feathers, pulling my attention from Brooks’s growing frown. I’m grateful for the distraction and take a moment to soothe the squeeze in my stomach, the nausea that always comes when I let myself dwell on this part.

“Apparently, they’d come by the house after I refused to leave with them the year before. Threatened to go to the police because I wasn’t staying there legally, and began extorting my parents for more money than they could afford in exchange for keeping their mouths shut about it. My parents had to remortgage their house to afford it.” I grind my teeth together, denying the tears. “Can you believe that? They’d beenpayingto keep me. Who does that for a strange kid they picked up off the street? After they caught me stealing from them. I wasn’t the easiest kid, either. Had gone years without parental supervision, and it showed.”

I never had the guts to ask my parents about the conversation I’d overheard. Can only assume Patricia and Tyler Pippen showed up every year until I turned eighteen, when it no longer mattered where I lived.

“It’s a level of kindness I can’t even… It still makes no sense to me, to this day. My own birth parents didn’t care to look after me. Igrew up hearing how much of a fucking burden I was to them, every single day. And they turned me into one for my new family. They neglected me, abandoned me, and still couldn’t let me just be fucking happy, foronce—”

My throat closes and the tears I’ve been fighting come, full force. A sob cuts through the summer sounds around us.

Fuck.

The last thing I see is the shock in Brooks’s face before I press my palms into my eyes, fighting for control so hard I’m actually shuddering.

“Hey.” Brooks’s hand lands on my shoulder.

“Don’t. Don’t say anything. I don’t like to cry.”

“I know. Take a breath for me.”

I do what he says, force one into my lungs.