Page 57 of Licks

I nudged her knee with mine. “That’s what she said.”

She tipped her head back and chuckled. “It is what she said. You have a gorgeous cock.”

There was that fire again, gripping my groin. Sex wasn’t what we needed now. My lame humor probably wasn’t much help, either.

Her face sobered. “Seeing you in there, with that crowd, those eager women—I don’t know how to handle that. I want you, August, more than you know. More than for two days. But there will be stretches of time apart and all sorts of obstacles, and I have the potential to turn into a psycho girlfriend who gets clingy and weird when you’re performing for a crowd of rangy cougars. Which means we might fail. I’m ridiculously terrified of what might happen to me if we fail.”

We wouldn’t. I knew it as sure as I knew the sun would rise. I still understood her fear, how hard our years apart had been. If there was an easy solution, I’d be all over it. Demand she see us as a couple, not a fling. But there was no easy answer to be found. I felt inept. Useless. Stuck. All I could do was listen to her, be here for her the way she wanted. What if it wasn’t enough?

“So you’re not willing to try?” I asked.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what? Tell me what you need, and it’s yours.”

She touched her belly briefly, as though cradling something precious, then she reached over and grazed her fingertips down my cheek. “Time. Our seconds, like you said. No talk of relationships or future yet. I’m not ready for that.”

I gathered her hand in mine and kissed each of her knuckles. “Then that’s what you’ll get.” Even though it wasn’t what I wanted. “But I have one demand.”

“Do you, now?”

“There will be more bikini posters.” I wasn’t sure where her code for sex had originated, but saying it restored her playfulness.

She shimmied her shoulders. “That, my fine sir, will not be a problem. There will be a whole Sports Illustrated issue of bikini posters. Before that, though”—she gripped my thigh, excitement in her wide green eyes—“we have more PI work.”

She went on about Uncle Rex’s clue to her father’s name. Tom or Ted. I did my best to show surprise, but the guilt over my lie thickened my throat, mixed with all the angst broiling inside me. The urge to confess what I knew rose, but I stomped it down. It was just another thing that could sink us. Another obstacle. Another reason we might fall apart.

Because of my idiocy.

But as she spoke about her mother’s favorite drink and how Mary had danced in the club and had wanted to be on Broadway and had eaten her first hotdog, my niggling remorse lessened. Gwen had wanted a hotdog because her mother had eaten one—maybe in this very spot. A day ago, she’d never have sought that connection with Mary. She actually smiled when gushing over her mother’s first kiss, made me read the passage. (After we’d wiped the grease from our hands.) This was the right thing, not telling her what I knew.

It also brought me back to the first time her mother had proved she’d loved her daughter.

The day of Gwen’s nineteenth birthday, I’d called Mary, desperate, asking for Gwen’s address. I’d denied my feelings for Gwen too long, had needed to speak with her and figure out if I was alone in my unshakable love. I’d been worried her mother would stonewall me, brush me off. She’d never liked me hanging around her daughter.

Mary Hamilton had surprised the hell out of me with two short sentences. “Gwen loves you, August. Don’t let her push you away.”

After picking my jaw up off the floor, I’d gone out that afternoon and had bought Gwen a birthday ring, to pledge my love. To fix whatever the hell I’d broken. If her mother was pushing us together, I’d figured Gwen must have told her something. Let it slip, how she’d felt.

That story may not have had a happy ending, and I was pretty sure Gwen had never opened up to her mother. Understanding what Gwen wanted had been a mother’s intuition alone.

As was Mary’s recent letter to me. Her final line—Remember what I told you on Gwen’s nineteenth birthday—had been a woman still looking out for her daughter, showing love in the only abstract way she knew how. She’d sent me the information about Gwen’s dad, not Gwen. She’d wanted us together. She’d known how unresolved our feelings had been. Without that push, I wouldn’t be here now, falling in love with Gwen all over again.

Fighting for her to give us a chance.

It didn’t absolve Mary of her abysmal parenting, but she’d wanted Gwen to find her father, and to find me.

I may have ruined the father part, but I owed it to Mary to let Gwen discover her mother. Learn to love a part of her, if possible.

This was the right thing to do, for Gwen, and for Mary.

Gwen

“Will you come to a lookout point with me?” I was too buzzed to quit following clues. I could barely sit still.

“You trying to take advantage of me, Possum?”

A tempting notion. One I would indulge in later. For now I couldn’t stop picturing a young Mary Hamilton eating hot dogs and having her first kiss. “My mother mentioned a place in her journal—a lookout called Tank Hill, which I’ve heard of but never visited. It just feels right, to keep following in her footsteps. It led us here, to Finch and you guys talking. And—”