The First Taste (Slip of the Tongue #2) - Jessica Hawkins Page 0,117

ignore her, the harder she’ll try to get my attention. “Just give us a few minutes,” I tell Denise.

Denise storms off, and I can tell I’ll pay for dismissing her. She’s a good friend, and I don’t want to hurt her, but I can’t have any distractions while taking on Shana.

I look down at my sleeve. Shana’s playing with the edge of it. “It’s true, you know,” she says.

I take a long pull from my beer to cool off. “What is?”

“You and me. We’re made for each other.”

A fiery anger rises up my chest—outrage, injustice, frustration. It flames out before it reaches my lips, though. Why? For so long, I’ve wanted the opportunity to rail at Shana. There’s so much to say, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m afraid if I say one thing, it’ll all come pouring out, and I don’t want to give her the satisfaction. I’ve never been good at controlling my reaction to her. What if that hasn’t changed? If she can still get under my skin, does that mean I still love her?

“Andrew, babe. Look at me.” She’s close enough that I catch a hint of her scent, the same passion fruit-something-or-other shampoo she always used. Again, it’s as if she never left. I glance into her eyes knowing I’ll find that familiar twinkle. It was there more often than it wasn’t, whenever she’d try to get me to do something. “No one will see,” she would say, smiling mischievously and unbuckling my pants as I drove the two of us back from a day at the shore. Or, more soberly, “A one-year-old won’t know the difference,” when we’d argue over the quality of baby products to buy.

“I got scared,” she says to me. “Can’t you understand that?”

“You think I wasn’t?”

“Nothing scares you.”

How wrong she is. My conversations with Amelia and Nathan are still fresh in my mind. Fear of the future is the reason I’m not with Amelia right now. Fear of abandonment has kept me from letting anyone into our lives in years. If Shana only knew how the love I have for Bell sits in my chest like a bowling ball all the time, crushing my organs, my lungs, my heart. I have the fear of a parent, the most potent, pervasive, life-altering kind there is. “What do you want, Shana? Why are you here?”

“I want my family back.”

I would throw my bottle against the back of the bar in blind rage if I weren’t laughing. The gleeful noise travels up my throat, filling the space between us, and Shana looks appropriately confused. “You don’t know what you want,” I say. “Because you don’t know what you’ve missed. You have no idea what the last few years have been like.”

“It must’ve been terrible.” She grazes her thumb under my sleeve, and my traitorous skin breaks out in goose bumps. “I can’t even imagine the hell it’s been, raising a child on your own—”

I pull back, curling one corner of my mouth into an easy smile. “Hell? They’ve been the best years of my life.”

Her eyebrow lowers as she opens her mouth. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Then don’t,” I say. “Really, don’t believe it. Go back to thinking children are demons.”

“I don’t think they’re demons. Just because I wanted something different doesn’t make me a villain.” She waits for me to agree with her. It might be true, but I’m not ready to concede anything yet. “You and I had some good times,” she says. “They got me through a lot of lonely nights.”

“Being with Bell is better than all of it. That little girl is everything to me.”

She bites her bottom lip, shaking her head in disbelief. “I want to feel that way too,” she says. “I do. I didn’t want to be a mom then, but as my family gets further away, and I get older . . . I need to feel grounded again.”

“A phone call now and then would’ve been nice,” I say. “Just to let us know you were okay.”

“My mom—”

“I spoke to her right after you left. She said you were safe. Honestly, after I heard that, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know. It meant there was nothing wrong, no reason for you to leave. Just me and Bell.”

“It wasn’t what I expected,” she says carefully. “Motherhood. I didn’t want it, but it was even worse than I thought. My options were to stay and torture all of us or leave. What