I pushed through his hold on me and planted my face in his chest.
He slid his arms around me again.
“First things first,” he said, “Christmas and getting Julia back.”
“And avoiding Gram making her macaroni and cheese.”
“And that.”
I smiled against his shirt and wrapped my arms around him.
He gave me a squeeze.
“You guys suck!” Amber shouted. “All sweet all the time. That’s not rock ’n’ roll! You jumping his bones in the airport, that was rock ’n’ roll!”
And I started laughing.
A couple of days later, we were kissing and groping on my bed in my bedroom.
Sonia was off with some friends.
Gram and Gramps were at some holiday cocktail party at the golf course.
Tom had gone up to Chicago to touch base with his family who he wasn’t really close to, but they got along.
So, I had Preacher all to myself.
In my bedroom where, after meeting him, night after night I thought of doing with him all the things I was right then doing with him.
I felt him hard against my stomach, and I’d felt that before, I wanted to feel it better, like I had wanted before, but had been foiled in getting, and also like I had before, I went for it.
He caught my wrist, rolled to his back, tucked me to his side then his hand slid up my back to my head and he shoved my face in his neck.
“Cher, give a guy a break,” he said thickly.
Shoot.
“Preacher—”
“Not gonna happen.”
Damn.
I watched down his body as he stretched his legs out, crossed his feet at the ankles, and from that, I knew I could beg or promise the moon and the stars, but it was not going to happen.
I sighed, relaxed, and that was when Preacher started playing with my hair with the fingers of one hand, also playing with my fingers with his other.
I let him, and since my arm was trapped under me and I couldn’t return the favor in some way, I pressed closer.
“You got a pretty room, cher,” he muttered.
I closed my eyes.
Tight.
“We have girls, we’re gonna give ’em rooms just like this,” he said.
God.
I opened my eyes and I didn’t want to do it because I never wanted to do it.
After she was gone, I came undone.
The ensuing custody battle, and losing it, I didn’t think I’d be able to pull myself back together.
But then I did, as best I could, so I had to keep a hold on it.
But Preacher was stretched out on the bed Mom bought me, and she’d like him just as much as Gramps did at first, and just as much as Gram did after he was all Preacher and he earned it.
“When I was a little girl and we moved here, Gram and Gramps had this old set of bunk beds. My mom and aunt slept in them when they were girls, but they were secondhand when they bought them, so when I say they were old, they were that old. Mom was…she was…you know, we lived with them. We lived with Gram and Gramps, but Mom took care of her kids.”
Preacher didn’t say anything, just kept playing with my hair and fingers.
“I don’t know what got into her. Maybe it was that me and Sonia were sleeping in the bed she slept in when she was a kid and she didn’t like that. Maybe she never really liked it that she had to sleep in a secondhand bed, so she liked it less her girls were sleeping in it thirdhand. Maybe it was just a wild hair. But one day, she went out and bought that wallpaper that’s on the walls and one weekend she painted the ceiling and put up that wallpaper, all by herself. Then she took us shopping for new furniture.”
I drew in a deep breath that went in rough and came out as words.
“I don’t think she knew, when we went to the store, how much furniture cost there. When we found a bunkbed that we liked, though, I remember how she looked at the price tag and her back got all straight and she got that look on her face she sometimes would get, and I knew she couldn’t afford it.”
I pressed my forehead closer to his neck and he fisted his hand gently in my hair and held my fingers in his without playing.
“The salesman saw it too and got all smarmy and told her, in