Faked - Karla Sorensen Page 0,58
his inked hand and kissing the knuckles. I had a thought but rolled it around in my head a couple of times before I said anything. "It must have been hard for your dad when your mom died. Cancer, right?"
He nodded. "We don't really talk much about those years. He married Adele about a year after my mom died."
"You don't look much like your dad," I hedged.
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. "No, not that I remember my mom—I was too young when she got sick—but from pictures, I look exactly like her."
"Maybe," I said slowly, "I could be wrong, but maybe Adele hated that reminder, and that's why she never let herself treat you the way you should have been treated or loved you the way you deserved to be loved."
Bauer's eyes searched my face carefully, and I held my breath that I hadn't said the wrong thing.
He swallowed. "I never thought of it that way before. I usually just tried my best to piss her off once I got old enough."
I smiled. "Color me shocked."
Flopping onto his back, Bauer pulled me next to him so that I was tucked into his side. My fingers traced that clock tattoo on his chest. As he spoke, the rumble in his chest was a delicious rumble under my ear. "I hate that that makes sense to me, princess. I don't want to understand because it was easier to just ... dislike and avoid."
I propped up on my elbow so he could see my face. "There's nothing wrong with reacting the way you have. And I don't say it to suddenly make you love Adele or want to have a relationship with her." I shrugged a shoulder. "I just like to figure people out. Why they do what they do, what the consequences are for the people in their life."
"Adele doesn't have much in the way of consequences, considering she never has to see me." He sighed. "And I think my dad and Finn are just so used to me not being around that they don't care much either."
A rebuttal of that statement was right on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed it down because I didn't want to push too hard.
"Did you figure out your mom?" he asked quietly. His hand found my hip, and he squeezed. I loved that he did that. At Richard's house, when he could sense I was uneasy with our little charade, he'd give me one small press of his hands to let me know he was there, that he was on my side.
Maybe the fact that he did it again at that moment was why I could answer. "Sometimes I think I have."
"Raging narcissist?" he asked.
My body shook with laughter, and I leaned down to give him a quick kiss. Bauer didn't even attempt to deepen it, which somehow endeared him to me even further, another fraction of my heart that he claimed by letting me talk about this serious thing. And talking about his own without prompting.
"There's probably a lot of truth to that," I agreed. "Brooke was a lot younger than our dad—who we share with Logan. It was a second marriage for him, and I think, I don't know, Brooke liked the idea of his old-money enough to overlook the age thing. When my dad had his heart attack, she was suddenly a widow with four young girls, and he hadn't quite left her the money she imagined was sitting in a bank somewhere." I'd picked apart our childhood from every angle over the years, witnessed the varying ways my sisters and I felt the ramifications of her leaving, yet it still made my throat tighten up to try to talk about it out loud.
His hand moved gently over my back. "We don't have to talk about it."
I smiled at him. "No, it's fine. Just thinking about the irony of what I'm going to school for, and I don't like talking about my own childhood issues."
"She left you, princess." His wandering fingers pushed under the hem of my sleep shirt, sweeping in small circles around the bumps on my spine. "It's shitty, and she's shitty, and I think what you're going to school for is fucking incredible, and there's something amazing that you didn't let her ruin you."
My eyes burned. "She didn't even really say goodbye when she dropped us off at Logan's. I think Molly knew she was leaving for good, but Lia and I were too young."
His eyes looked