All Broke Down (Rusk University #2)(38)
Author: Cora Carmack

He stands like he’s got twenty pounds on his shoulders instead of a whole person, and I lock my legs tightly around him, hooking my feet around his sides, and sinking my hands into his hair while I try to find my balance.

“Not how I pictured having my head between your legs for the first time.”

I slap his shoulder hard, and he laughs. “Just being honest.”

“Honesty is not one of your issues.” I mean it to be a joke, but he stills beneath me, and I know I’ve brought up the memory of our earlier argument, and it must bother him, no matter how much flirtation he hides behind.

His arms lay against my calves and his hands hook over the top of my thighs to hold on, and he starts walking back to our work area. He lets me direct him to stand where I want him, and then with my legs squeezing tightly to hold myself in place, I reach up and begin to pull.

My first lump of freed vines falls all over Silas’s head below me, and I make an idiot of myself apologizing again and again, like somehow he might know I’m really apologizing for everything.

“Just be glad it isn’t poison ivy,” he says.

I gasp because I didn’t even think of that, nor do I know for sure it’s not. Maybe that’s why Greg gave me the gloves.

“Oh my God. What if it is?”

I lean over to look at his face, checking for reddening skin, and he has to reach out one of his bare hands to balance himself against the house in response to my movement. And now his na**d hand is on the vine, and he’s going to hate me by the time this day is over if I keep this up.

“It’s not,” he says.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. The stuff was all over the house and yard I lived in during high school.”

I pause, going over his odd choice of words. The house he lived in during high school. Not a home. Not his childhood. He talks about it like I talk about growing up in foster care. And I wonder, maybe, if we have that in common. If maybe he wasn’t quite as lucky as I was.

“Ask me a question,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because I want to ask you one, but it’s not my turn.”

“Even though I didn’t answer your last question?”

“Oh that one’s still on the books. I’m just kind and generous and am willing to give you some time before I cash in.”

He laughs and shakes his head, and his cheek rubs against the inside of my thighs. The movement makes something warm curl low between my hips, but it’s doused seconds later when he asks his question.

“Fine. Why did you and Henry break up?”

I stiffen, but fair is fair. So I answer, “You’d have to ask him to know for sure, but he told me he just didn’t feel the same way about me anymore.”

“He broke up with you? Are you f**king kidding me?”

I shrug and pull on another vine.

“Well, I say good goddamn riddance.”

I can’t help my smile. “Bad Boy Rehab task number two—maybe try to cut back just a bit on the cussing.”

He draws a thumb down the side of my thigh into the sensitive hollow at the back of my knee.

“I’ve got a dirty mouth, babe. No changing that. You’ll just have to count it as part of my charm.”

Charm. I resist the urge to snort. Charm is smooth and subtle. Silas Moore is a force of nature. A freaking avalanche. He doesn’t have a subtle bone in his body.

I let the cussing go for now, and take my turn.

“Where are you from?”

“Nowhere that matters. Out in the middle of nowhere in West Texas.”

“Where?” I try again.

“You wouldn’t know it even if I told you. Between Odessa and Lubbock. The whole place is an ever-expanding pit of nothingness. Just dust and mesquite trees and deadbeats who always talk about leaving, but never do.”

I swear to God, even with this question quid pro quo, getting information out of this man is harder than finding the perfect pair of jeans.

“What’s the harm in just telling me where it is if I won’t know?”

“Because I got out, Dylan. I’m one of the few, and I’m not going to spend my time talking about it like I never left. I’d rather pretend it never existed.”

I swallow all the questions I still have and postpone them for another time. Asking questions doesn’t work with him . . . at least not yet. The more I ask, the more he fights back. I guess we’re kind of similar in that way. I don’t like answering questions, either.

I need him to trust me first.

I concentrate on the vines again, and I develop a system where I pull out and to the right, so if anything falls it doesn’t fall into his face. As I pull the vines away, they take the paint with them, leaving these patterns on the wood where the vines used to be. It looks almost like the vines are still there because every little leaf has left an imprint.

Silas might want to forget where he came from, but he’s just like this house. He can strip away the town, his past, his upbringing, but they all leave marks behind. And like we’ll do to this house when we’re done, Silas has painted over those marks, and he doesn’t want anyone else to know they’re there.

Another thing we have in common.

Though I’ve never exactly fit comfortably in my new life, I try not to acknowledge my old life, either. I was in foster care from three years old on, and I don’t remember anything before that. I suppose most people like me hit that stage in their teens or twenties when they’re filled with a desire to know where they came from, why they were dealt the hand they have. They go looking up their birth parents or other family.

There’s no point in that for me. Richard and Emily told me when they adopted me at nine years old. Even then, they’d treated me with a rational practicality, like I was an adult who just happened to be two feet shorter than them. They didn’t give me all the specifics of my birth mom’s death, but I think it was something messy. Drugs, maybe. Or suicide. If it were something like a medical issue or a car accident, they would have told me. I could ask now, and they would give me whatever information I want. But do I really want to know if it’s that bad? I don’t remember her. And it’s easier that way.

I work in silence for a while, and eventually I notice that Silas has started working below me, too. He still has one arm wrapped around my shins in case I were to lose my balance, but with his right hand, he’s pulling away vines and adding to my pile.

“There’s an extra pair of gloves, you know.”