Page 33 of I am Dressed in Sin (Death by Daybreak MC 2)
“I thought I was never going to see you again,” she tells me, dropping one arm by her side and clutching at her elbow with the other. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat …” She trails off as I do my best to process the implications of that. “I fell off the wagon.” Here she pauses to lift up both hands in surrender. “But I stopped a few weeks ago.”
She used again for the first time in years … because I left? Because she missed me? Was worried about me?
I’m annoyed with her, but only a little.
“What are you cooking?” I ask, because I’m not going to lie: I have intimacy issues. Enough emotional problems to choke an elephant. Do you blame me? But … I’m trying here. And I have no idea why. I don’t owe Nellie a damn thing. I don’t owe Cat. I don’t owe his awful, awful officers and their lies.
This though … this is me trying.
“Oh,” Nellie says, blinking through big, wide, blue eyes at me. The eyes of my sisters. Meanwhile, here I stand, cursed with Cat’s eyes, the color of dried blood, rust-red and flaky. “I’m making borscht. I thought you might be hungry …” She trails off again, the question evident.
“Sure, I could eat,” I say, and then my stomach growls so loudly that my cheeks actually flush. Damn it. Why is it that the brain can lie—even to itself—but the body always knows? The body always fucking knows. It knows when it’s turned on by men it should hate. It knows when it’s hungry even if the last thing in the world you want to do is eat.
Nellie smiles at me, ignoring the broken glass on the floor to fill two bowls, and then leading me into the solarium. Yeah, my grandma was that sorta rich. Of course, she lost all her money to bad investments just after I was born, but the house was paid off, so she got to keep that. She lived like a pauper in a prince’s castle.
I sit down across from my mother at the small table, glancing at the array of tropical plants clustered in pots around the edges of the room. I frown at that. Gram had a green thumb, but Cat’s is undeniably black and bleeding. Last I was here, everything was dead.
“Oh,” Nellie says, looking around at the foliage. “Sin’s been taking care of the plants and the garden up here. Looks good, don’t it?”
I pause with the spoon halfway to my mouth, putting it down with the clink of metal on porcelain.
“Sin?” I choke out, my brain refusing to connect the dots. “Sin takes care of plants?”
Nellie nods at me eagerly, clearly enjoying our conversation. To be fair, this is the longest conversation we’ve had in years. Years. Since before my sisters died, definitely.
“If I were ten years younger,” she murmurs and then pauses again, lifting her eyes up to look at me. I’m staring down at the borscht, wondering what the fuck it even is, and trying to piece together the idea of Sin taking care of plants. Also, of my mother complimenting a guy I’m into.
People can change, but they don’t morph into completely different humans.
Eventually, my hunger wins out and I dip my spoon back into the bowl. My hand shakes as I lift it to my lips, but that can’t be helped. I’ve been through some shit recently.
“Your father told me about the wedding,” Nellie starts, her own voice quavering slightly. It occurs to me that she’s afraid of me. Whether she’s afraid of me in the way that she’s afraid of Gaz, or if she’s just worried she’ll offend me to the point of cutting her off permanently, I’m not sure.
“Which wedding?” I clarify, tasting the soup and deciding that it isn’t as bad as it looks. Nellie’s cooking has certainly improved from the last time I tried it. “The one to the mafia kid or the one to Beast?”
My mother hesitates, her own spoon resting in midair.
“If you’re worried about the mafia one, don’t. We didn’t actually get through the ceremony or consummate the marriage.” Instead, I consummated it with Grainger of all people. I take another bite of my food. It’s warm, with a sweet and sour kind of taste, like a vegetable stew or something. “If you’re worried about the one to Beast—”
Nellie sets her spoon down and sits up, drawing my attention to her thin, tired face. Once upon a time, she was the belle of the ball, the most beautiful woman in club history. I still hear snippets of old-timers talking about her in awe. But when you live a hard life, it rides you into the ground.
“I like the idea of him for you,” Nellie starts, and this time, when I go stone-still, she actually shivers. Guess it’s the same sort of fear she has for Gaz. Do I deserve that? I’ve never hit her. Her son, however, is wrong in ways that can never be fixed. Do I have that same sort of wrongness inside of me? “He’s a good man.” She picks up her spoon again as I continue to stare at her.
