Page 10 of If You Were Mine (After We Fall 3)
“My rate, the details about when and where, the Platonic Promise.”
“Platonic Promise?” I handed over five twenty-dollar bills folded in half and he tucked them inside his coat pocket.
“The part of the contract where we both acknowledge that there will be absolutely no sexual contact whatsoever.”
“Oh! Right,” I said, feeling my face warm even more. “Of course.”
“If you think you might have a problem with that, Claire, I can’t book the date. ”
Flustered, I flapped my hands. “No, no! Of course there won’t be a problem with that. I—”
He burst out laughing and grabbed my wrist. “Jesus, I’m kidding.”
“Oh.” I laughed at myself a little, shaking my head. “Sorry. I’m just really tense about this.”
“I can tell.” He squeezed my wrist before dropping it, and I noticed how big and strong his hand was.
“It’s gonna be fun,” he said, standing up. “I promise.”
Wow, he’s really tall. Long legs. Wonder if he has a nice butt. “If I say I believe you, will you think I’m too trusting?”
His eyes went crinkly at the corners when he smiled. “In this case, you can believe me. I will show you a very good time.”
Something about the way he said it made my thighs clench.
I tried not to think about that.
Five
Theo
* * *
Claire said she didn’t need to be walked to her car, that she was meeting friends for dinner at Union Street, so I bid he
r goodbye with a handshake and told her I’d see her soon. It always felt a little uncomfortable taking money from someone just for meeting me, but I’d made my peace with it. Women were much more likely to book the date if they’d already made a deposit, and I needed the income. Jobs had been scarce lately, Josie’s house payment was due on the fifteenth, my fucking brother was still gone, and the girls had been sick lately. Medicine wasn’t cheap.
Had I known I’d be supporting my brother’s wife and kids one day, I might have tried harder to get a college degree and not fucked up my life so much. Every time I thought about the scholarship I’d gotten and pissed away by being young and stupid, I wanted to punch myself. Yes, school was hard, and keeping up my grades enough to stay on the team had been tough, but I should have stuck it out.
But I was a MacLeod. Leaving was our specialty.
My mother had left us before I was even out of diapers. My older brother Aaron had been nine at the time, and he once told me he’d seen a note from her that said Tell the boys I love them.
“Do you think she did?” I’d asked him when I was maybe six.
His answer had surprised me. “Yeah. I do.”
“But…she left.”
“Yeah. She did.”
“Does Dad love us?”
He’d frowned. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Our father was an alcoholic, in and out of jail throughout my childhood, and I’d learned that I much preferred it when he was in, since his releases always meant bumps and bruises I had to explain at school. Still, Aaron had taken the worst of it. He’d never let our dad lay a finger on me if he was around. When the asshole finally left for good, I was eight and Aaron was sixteen. We moved from Kansas City up to Detroit, which is where I finally had some semblance of a normal childhood. We’d lived with our grandmother, who’d actually cared for us. I’d attended a good school, I’d had friends, I’d played sports. I’d even gotten a football scholarship to a college in upstate New York. Aaron had finished high school and gotten a job at a construction company. On the outside, things looked OK.
But we were damaged in ways you couldn’t see.
