Page 31 of Coiled Tight

Okay, fine, I’ll stop.

No bad, dark thoughts camouflaged with humor for me.

“No.”

Saúl switched the hand on the steering wheel and used the other to touch one of the controls in the middle.

I gasped.

The fucker switched on the child safety thingies. I wasn’tactuallygoing to open the door while he was driving slightly over the speed limit. I almost felt offended that he thought otherwise.

Then I remembered I’d just talked myself out of covering dark thoughts with humor, and I sobered up.

“So. Um. Kara is the best, okay? Like, purest cinnamon in the entire realm of cinnamons. Must be protected at all costs cinnamon. We met online because she’s also Little, and, um. Yeah. We had online playdates, and we got along, and you areforbidden to ask about Little time because I’m still embarrassed around you, but I need to give context.”

Saúl snorted. “Okay.”

Well, at least my tale of how I became the worst person in the whole world was amusing to someone.

“Anyway, so eventually she started talking about her then Mommy, and it sounded super abusive and bad and sad, and, well, she knew it, but it took her a while to break it off, you know? And then she was struggling with it a lot, and super paranoid that her ex would find her, or try to do something to her, and obviously, law enforcement didn’t help because misogyny, and it wasn’t just the ex but the local club who was on the ex’s side. I don’t know. It was weird. But, um. Yeah. She basically stopped playing in person, and so it was just the two of us for a while, and I mean, I was chronically online, so it was fine.”

“Cam?”

What?

I whipped my head up to see him because I’d obviously been keeping my gaze trained on the GPS screen. It was called survival skills, and I was not about to apologize for having those.

“I understand it’s a hard topic for you, but please breathe between sentences.”

“I’m breathing.”

Everyone knew that if you didn’t breathe, you died.

Duh.

“Agree to disagree.”

His arm flexed when he sighed. Was that a normal thing? And why was it alluring? I wanted to see more of what his body did with mundane things.

Ugh.

Bad Cam.

“Anyway!” If I didn’t keep talking and going back to thesomber mood, I was going to say something else, and that would be even worse of a colossal idea than staying to work under the guy who knew you wore a diaper for funsies. “So, at first I was all about… Yes, I’m going to be the best emotional support companion there is, and win all the awards for best friend of the world, right?”

“Right.”

Wait, was he answering a clearly rhetorical question to get me to breathe?

It was working.

Annoying.

I didn’t need a loop of constant feedback to get on with my storytelling. The sooner I got away with it, the sooner we could deal with the aftermath, when he’d finally see reason about why I was the worst. Would it make for an incredibly awkward ride? Yeah, of course. On the plus side, it would finally be out of the way, and he’d leave me to my solitude.

“But, um. There was an issue. Well, more than one issue. Like, it turns out I know nothing about helping someone who’s dealt with domestic violence or whatever? And I got very overwhelmed and down and I didn’t know how to cheer her up half of the time or be there for her without sounding like I was dismissing her stuff.” I scratched the back of my neck, taking the time to breathe myself before he could say anything. I was aware that I was hard to follow when I got on a roll and couldn’t speak faster if I tried. I was trying, kind of. Not as hard as I could. “But also… I was kind of going through things, too.”

“What things?” Saúl took a right before he had his eyes on me.