Built

He wiggled his eyebrows up and down at me in his usual cavalier way, and I fought the urge to throw a chip at him. Going after Rowdy was the first completely out-of-character thing I had ever done. It was a compulsion, a craving for family and a place to belong and be loved, which was something I never had before. I couldn’t resist the pull any more than I could resist the draw and tug of endless attraction between me and Zeb. When I took Poppy in it wasn’t just because she was important to Rowdy, and he had become so very important to me . . . no, it was because I saw so much of myself inside the broken shell of the young woman. I knew exactly what it felt like to have someone try to strip you of your value and humanity. I knew all too well what it felt like to never measure up to someone who was supposed to love you unconditionally and yet all they did was tear you down. My father had never been uncouth or out of control enough to raise his hand to me or to my mother . . . but his words and his pitiless, dismissive actions . . . those nasty suckers had fallen just as heavily as the mightiest of blows. Poppy had her whole life ahead of her. I didn’t want her stuck in place and stuck unmoving from the past’s embrace like I was. I didn’t want her to shut off her heart. It was too beautiful and needed to be shared with someone who would cherish it. She deserved that.

“If you don’t put yourself out there to risk the hurt, then you won’t ever feel the pleasure either. There is no good without the bad, Sayer. Just look at the way I came into this world.”

We both got quiet for a second as he sucked in a sharp breath. “My mom was young, too young, when she had me. Your dad was older, knew better, and was married, with you at home when she got knocked up. The only two people that can tell
us what actually happened between the two of them are gone, but we both know that whatever the circumstances were, my mom was taken advantage of and left to deal with the consequences on her own.”

I gulped a little because I never wanted to admit to him just how manipulative and hateful my father could be. I didn’t want to think about the man who had raised me taking advantage of a helpless teenage girl, but it was impossible not to when the proof was sitting across from me sipping a beer.

“Regardless of the hurt my mom may have suffered, she loved me. She took amazing care of me and never let me go a single second without knowing I was loved and the center of her entire world. She focused on the joy I brought her, not on the pain that she had to go through to end up with me in her life. You have to be wounded in order to heal.”

Rowdy’s mom had been killed during an armed robbery when he was just a little boy, so I was surprised he had such bright and clear memories of her. My mother had killed herself when I was slightly older and yet most of the things I remembered about her were fuzzy and covered in a tint of gray and sorrow. There was no joy and pleasure when I thought about her, only sadness and resentment. I wanted her to be stronger for herself, but more than that I had longed for her to be stronger for me.

“Some wounds go so deep and reach so far down into the basic parts of who we are that they can never be healed, Rowdy. They just bleed, fester, and trickle really nasty stuff out of the person bearing them forever.”

He shook his head and I was amazed that the styled front of his hair didn’t move so much as an inch. I guess it took a lot of skill and a lot of product to keep that modern-day James Dean look in place.

“You’re wrong. You know how I know that you’re wrong? Because I used to think the same thing. I had a heart that was broken and, I’d thought, beyond repair. I was hung up on what I thought I always wanted instead of what I actually deserved. The wound might be deep, so deep that you feel it all the way to your bones, and that means you get comfortable with the pain, the hurt becomes familiar, and you don’t know what to do without it. But then someone else comes along and sees you suffering and it hurts them to watch you ache within the walls of that pain. Your wound wounds them and you realize really fast that maybe you weren’t able to heal the hurt on your own, maybe you are, in fact, immune to how shitty it feels, but for them and with them you work to get better because that person makes you realize that you shouldn’t be comfortable or complacent with something that feels awful no matter how used to it you are. It just takes the right person to see it. No one except for Salem was able to put my heart back together and she had to fight to position each and every single piece in the place it was supposed to be. She healed me not only for me but for her as well.”

The sentiment was so sweet, so brutally honest about how he felt about his girlfriend, that it made a heavy ball of emotion form in my throat. Mostly to break some of the feelings that were sneaking up on me that I wasn’t sure what to do with, I lifted an eyebrow and jokingly asked him, “Aren’t you supposed to be doing the brotherly duty thing and warning me away from a guy with a criminal record and a history of sleeping around? Isn’t he the last kind of guy who we should be talking about fixing what’s broken inside of me?” It was a silly question to ask considering Zeb fixed broken things for a living, but houses weren’t people and it would take more than some new paint and refinished floors for the ice that surrounded my insides to fissure and thaw.

“If Zeb is the right guy then he’s the right guy and none of that other shit matters. At first when I saw him watching you it made me really uncomfortable, but not because I don’t trust him or think he’s a good dude. I’d just gotten you and I don’t think I was ready to share you with anyone else yet, but now that you’re obviously here to stay and I get to keep you forever, I want you to be happy, Sayer.”