Page 103 of Enemies with Benefits

"Okay, that's...a really good point. It's a little stupid to sit around and expect that you're going to give away all your dirty little secrets."

"Especially to you of all people."

"Sure, but how many of them have you told Kayden?"

"That's none of your business," he said, his casual tone disappearing and giving way to the hostility I was used to.

I sighed. “And I thought we were actually getting somewhere."

I was met with silence, but I didn't turn around to gauge whether the silence came from him being pissed or if he was just thinking. I needed to take my advice and not try to break down everything. At the beginning of...whatever the fuck was going on between us, there had definitely been a lot of overthinking on my part. I'd been trying to anticipate what we were going to do, figure out why we were doing things, and just...trying to put together the various pieces of the puzzle to make sense of it all.

Yet the whole time, it had run contrary to how I handled pretty much everything. At first, I'd been so preoccupied with needling him about learning to take it easy and then trying to get him to take the idea for a whirl, that I'd stopped doing it myself. Lately, and tonight especially, I had been operating purely on instinct, on an intuitive level, and it had worked out. Sure, it had been messy and didn't turn out anywhere close to what I'd hoped for the night, but that was life for you. It never worked out the way you wanted, and even when you tried to make life work in certain ways, it snubbed you at every turn.

So why not simply enjoy the ride and figure out if the destination was worth camping out in for a bit?

"Messy," he muttered, stirring me from my thoughts.

I glanced at him, brow quirking when I saw the perfect rings I'd been trying to achieve coming from his lips. "What?"

"My life," he snorted, puffing heavily on the cigar and giving a rough cough before carefully easing back in his seat. "That's what it's felt like for...well, forever. Like, my life is just one mess after another."

"Not to, uh, diminish shit, but I think if you scratch the surface of most people, they'll say the same thing."

"Yeah. And they're always so goddamn miserable about it, not that I have any room to talk about being a miserable son of a bitch."

"You're not miserable, just...grumpy."

"I hate when you try to make me feel better, that's how I know things are really bad."

"Alright, fuck you too."

He snorted, and the potential anger in me died at the rare glint of mischief in his eyes. "I just...I've spent so long trying to make life,mylife, make sense, and it just...doesn't. Every time I think I've got something figured out, something is waiting right around the corner to fuck me up. Thought I had my shit figured out, then I fucked it up and got smacked down to beat cop. Then I get a handle on that and feel like shit's going my way for a bit and boom, suddenly I find out my ex had a whole ass kid that was mine that she kept from me and I have to figure out what I'm going to do about that."

"How's that going?"

"What?"

"Figuring out what you're going to do about that? Figured out how to deal with the overwhelming panic of being a parent without having time to brace for it?"

"More like trying to figure out how to be a parent without bringing up all the fucked up shit my parents did to me in the process."

I smiled. “Well, then that means you already decided to be in Micah's life."

There was a pause, and then he grunted. “Yeah, guess I did. Not quite sure how to feel about that."

"Who the fuck said you had to know?"

"Certainly would make things easier."

"Would it?"

"Probably not."

I chuckled, finally deciding to pick my chair up and twist it around so I could face him. If we were going to have what was basically our first heart-to-heart, then I should probably pay attention. "So you know what you're going to do, but you don't know how to feel about it or how to deal with your feelings on it."

"Pretty much," he said, wrinkling his nose. "It's funny, I bitch about how you never take anything seriously...for the most part anyway, but you have an easier time with pretty much everything. You don't struggle."

"Look, if you think I don't struggle, then you clearly haven't been paying attention," I scoffed. "I struggle. "