was a question.”
“No,” she said. “Not after...not after they died.”
He nodded slowly. “Me neither. Sleep well.”
And then he turned and walked away, not sure what he should have done differently, but sure it should have been something.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PANSY WENT INTO her house slowly, and stripped off her clothes as quickly as she had put them back on at the barn.
A little bit faster than she had stripped them off the first time with West.
She felt numb. Numb and buzzing all at the same time.
She stumbled toward her bathroom on feet that felt like they weren’t quite connecting with the ground and turned on the hot water in the shower. She stood in front of the mirror and stared at herself.
Her ponytail was wrecked. Her eyes were red, but she hadn’t cried. Her lips were swollen. It made her mouth look funny. Like not hers.
She touched it, pressing her index finger down on her lower lip.
She wanted to hide. And she wanted to talk to someone.
But she couldn’t talk to West because they didn’t have an actual relationship.
They’d just had sex.
That made her eyes feel scratchy.
She got into the shower and let the water slide over her skin.
She wasn’t washing him off. It wasn’t like that. It was just that her body felt sore and strange, and she thought if she could be somewhere familiar it might make her feel grounded.
It didn’t.
She wondered if she would have talked to her mother about this.
Something turned over inside of her and she had the sudden realization that it was possible she had put it off for so long because she knew she would have wanted to talk to her mother about this.
Her mom had been free and easy. A contrast to her father and his uptight, brusque demeanor.
He had been constant certainty. Her mother had been the laughter.
How would having her for longer have made Pansy different? Would she have made all this seem easier?
Would Pansy have lost her virginity at seventeen instead of twenty-seven? And would her mom have held her and told her it was going to be okay? That it was part of life and she was a woman now, or something like that?
Maybe that would have happened after she got her period for the first time. Her sister had tried, but she’d been awkward and embarrassed because she was barely used to the whole thing herself.
There was a sudden rush of milestones going through her head. All the things that she’d missed. She didn’t think about her mom as often as she thought about her dad. It was a side effect of following in his footsteps.
When she put on those standard-issue shoes every day, she was quite literally walking in those footsteps. She thought about making him proud a lot, and it hit her then she had never thought about making her mother proud.
Because she already had.
Her mom had been proud of her from the beginning and she had always known it, a constant, easy love that she had taken for granted until this moment.
Even when she’d misbehaved, even when she’d had to scold her, her mom had picked her up after and held her.
And told her she loved her.
Tears filled her eyes, and one rolled down her cheek, joining with the shower water.
It was an easy place to cry.
Because she could hardly tell. Except that her chest felt like it was splitting apart.
She had just tried so hard, so very hard not to do this. Not to show weakness. Because each and every one of them had been going through insurmountable pain when their parents had died. Because Iris and Rose were in their own kind of pain, and Ryder had done his best to take care of them, while being in the exact same position of grief they all were.
So no.
She had never asked anyone to tuck her in. They had all been missing those people from their lives.
They’d had each other, but it had been different.
It had to be.
But all she wanted right now was her mom.
And to be tucked in.
She got out of the shower and wrapped up in a giant towel, then fell down on her bed. She lay there for a moment, swathed in terry cloth and still damp with tears, before she grabbed her phone. She looked at it for a long moment.
She could call Sammy. Sammy would tell her it was okay. Sammy would tell her it wasn’t a big deal.
In some ways, Sammy was a lot like her mother. Though,