The Slow Burn (Moonlight and Motor Oil #2) - Kristen Ashley Page 0,75
be your first date, baby,” she said softly. “This is gonna be mine.” She tipped her head to the side, hesitation coasting over her face before she went on, “You’ve been out there with me. Now do you want my real?”
He wanted everything from her.
“Yeah,” he whispered, “I want your real.”
She went right for it, gave him her real.
And he would find, in the end, just like everything about Addie . . .
It rocked his world.
“Outside of being Daphne Forrester’s daughter, I realized today I never knew who I was.”
Toby couldn’t believe that. She seemed to totally have it going on.
“Izzy, she knew who she was,” Addie continued. “She likes nice things. She likes clothes and stuff around her. She likes order. She wanted to make something of herself. She earned a scholarship and went to college and got a good job and worked hard and got what she wanted, built the life she’d dreamed of, found the man who loved her just for her. Today, I began to understand what makes me.”
“And what makes you, honey?” he asked when she didn’t go on.
“I don’t want any of that. I dig that our first date ended with a food and movie binge on my couch with your hand down my jeans, but it did after I’d slept beside you six nights in a row. It wasn’t conventional. It wasn’t storybook. It wasn’t romancelandia. It was real. It was unique. It was ours. It was Toby and Addie.”
At that, Toby started to have difficulty breathing.
Because he loved she dug it like that.
Since he dug it too.
A lot.
It was him.
It was her.
It was them.
And she got off on that.
Like he did.
Addie wasn’t half done.
“I want a job that pays the bills and gives me time to be with my son,” she tunneled her nails into his beard, “and be with you. But that’s it. Mostly, I want the opposite of what Izzy craves. I want what my mom thrived on. I want chaos. I want to be busy. I want experiences. I want adventure. They can be simple adventures, but they have to keep coming.”
She lifted farther up on him and sifted her fingers through the bottom of his beard, still talking.
“I want to get a cat because I want my kid to be comfortable around animals and love them like I do. And I don’t want to start an Etsy store because I don’t want to be tied down to making cards, since I relax when I do that. But I want to see if I can get cards in more shops around the county so doing something I enjoy can make me some extra cake. And I want to hang with Lora and her posse and find some girls close who are my girls and I can let loose. I want to dance in the rain and play in the snow and lie in the moonlight and stare at the stars. And I want to take off to ‘See Rock City’ just because it’s there to be seen. Or go to the Christmas Fair and buy an atrocious wreath that totally works for me.”
Toby stared up at her, feeling her fingers in his beard, warmed by the light shining in her blue eyes.
A light, until right then, he’d never seen.
Jesus Christ.
She was gorgeous.
But that light was stunning.
She kept shining that light on him.
“Thanks to you, the pressure is off. I got weighed down by it and forgot important things. I forgot what my mom taught me. I forgot that it’s about Brooks doing a chocolate wiggle. It’s about taking my son out in the snow and accepting God’s offering. It’s about holding on to those traces for as long as you can. I can’t lose sight of that. And since you helped me, I have room to breathe and make the right decisions about what’s next for me. Today, I went to the Fair with you and my boy and doing it, I remembered who I am. I stopped walking the path I’d veered onto and got back to the path that’s me.”
She dipped her face closer to his and kept talking.
“I’m a witchy woman, a rock ’n’ roll gypsy who’s all about embroidered jackets and nut clusters and the joy of knowing my son saying ‘sissis’ is him trying to say Christmas, and sleeping beside a man who’s not afraid to fuck me hard or joke about sex stores.”
“I’m not joking about sex stores,” he thought it important to