Brayden
I slept like shit last night, and since tonight is Ethan’s bachelor party, I’m going to pay for it later. There was no avoiding it, though. I heard her come in, heard her climb the stairs, heard the water running in her bathroom as she got ready for bed. I waited, but she never came. I put myself out there, made it clear how I feel, and she never came.
If she doesn’t want me, I’m just going to have to deal with that. Even if I feel the way she looks at me. Even if I can’t believe this chemistry between us is one-sided.
At five, I give up on fighting for more sleep, make a pot of coffee, and return to bed with a mug of caffeine and a book. It takes a while, but eventually the thriller sucks me in enough to take my mind off the woman upstairs.
That’s why I barely even realize Molly’s in my bedroom until she’s crawling into my bed. She takes the book from my hand. “We need to talk.” She sits back on her heels and stares at me, waiting.
I push myself up and lean against the headboard. It’s almost eight. “How’d you sleep?”
She shakes her head. “Not great, but I wanted to talk to you before Noah gets home.” She scans my bare chest, my arms, lingering at the waistband of my flannel sleep pants. Her shorts are so tiny they could be panties, and her long-sleeve cotton shirt is so thin I can make out the outline of her nipples beneath it. Her hair’s twisted into a sloppy knot on top of her head, and a few stray locks have fallen around her face. She looks like she walked right out of my fantasies and into my bed.
“Are you okay?” I lift my hand to tuck one of those stray locks behind her ear but drop it before I touch her. She needs to decide where the new boundaries are . . . assuming she wants to change them at all.
She takes a deep breath. “I like you, Brayden. I liked you before that night we spent together, and I like you now. But I don’t . . .” She shakes her head and meets my eyes. “I don’t do relationships.”
I raise my brows. “I’m sorry?” It sounds like something an asshole guy would say—a throwaway line he’d use to get the girl to sleep with him. But this isn’t some asshole guy. It’s Molly, and she doesn’t need a line if she wants to get me in bed. After all I said last night, she knows that.
“I made a decision when I had Noah. I’d met other single moms and saw what havoc dating could wreak on their lives. I know what it did to me when I was a kid.” She swallows hard. “Mom had relationships with three different guys before she married Nelson. Each of them serious enough that I thought they’d be in my life forever. I . . .” She searches my face as if she’s looking for a sign that I understand. “I got attached, and when they left her, they were leaving me too. By the time she married Nelson, I’d started to feel desperate. Kids aren’t stupid. They know they’re part of the equation of a relationship. They hear the adults fighting about money and errands and who has to take the kid to dance. I thought it was my fault the other men had left.”
“Molly . . .” My voice breaks on her name. Her eyes are locked on my headboard, as if it’s too hard to say all this while looking at me.
“Don’t give me your pity, okay? I don’t like talking about it because I hate pity, but I want you to understand. Even if Nelson hadn’t fucked me up, dating a single mom isn’t like dating someone without kids. If I bring you home and then we don’t work out, my son’s affected too.”
“Bring me home? We live together, Moll.”
She rolls her eyes and almost—almost—smiles. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” My voice is rough. “I think I do.” And I already know that I don’t like where this conversation is going.
“I decided that I wouldn’t drag guys in and out of his life like that. That if I wanted to see men, it would never go any further than a few casual dates. I’ll do whatever I have to do to save Noah from the screwed-up mindset I had. I never want my son to feel so desperate that he’d endure abuse for my sake.”
Screwed-up mindset. The way she says it like that, it’s almost like she blames herself for what her stepdad did to her. “It wasn’t your job to stop him. It was his job to never violate you to begin with.”