Free Razor by Ronin Winters Page B

the day, and while that might not have been enough by itself to keep her away, the added knowledge of the secret she was keeping would have weighed on her enough that Razor would pick up on it, and would keep asking her what was wrong until she broke down and told him.
    As necessary as this was, she didn’t want his sixteenth birthday tainted by this parting.
    “I’m sixteen now,” he said, an echo of her musings, putting his now empty plate down and taking too many steps towards her, leaving her no personal space.
    She wasn’t short, but he still was a head taller than her, and while she was honest in admitting she was a big girl, he was bigger and broader and had the ability to make her feel delicate.
    Especially now, so close he seemed to surround her, that devilish grin entirely too seductive on a boy who was not yet a man.
    Aaliyah stepped back, refusing to allow him to get comfortable surrounding her like that, like he’d been attempting more and more lately.
    He stepped forward, more blatant in his moves than he’d ever been before. “Please, Aaliyah, I need your help.”
    “What help?” She moved further from this boldness, a split-second desire to run striking through her.
    No.
    Certainty came over her. If she ran, he’d catch her.
    “Sweet sixteen and never been kissed,” he continued, stepping closer to her in response to her stepping back. “You can’t leave me hanging with that. It’s got to be you. I don’t want anyone else. I’ve been waiting to be old enough for you.”
    Mistake. It had been a mistake to ask him here. If she hadn’t, they could have avoided this proclamation that would only make her news infinitely more difficult for him, now that his pride was involved.
    Maybe she could still salvage this. She stepped forward, creating a circle of intimacy around them that hopefully retained the sense of being friendly and not romantic. She took his one hand in both of hers, the way she did when trying to calm her nieces and nephews. “Razor, I know you don’t believe this, but there is a world of difference between sixteen and twenty-six. You are talented and sweet and responsible, but there is so much growing for you still to do. I’m honored that you care for me enough to want to give me that gift, but it would be nothing but wrong for me to take it.”
    He was shaking his head before she even finished, the argument flashing in those eyes now, within the tenseness of his body. “I’m not a kid. I take care of everyone. I’ll take care of you too.”
    “No, you’re not a kid.” He relaxed at her words, only to tense again as she added, “but you’re not an adult either. You’re growing, just like you should be, but you’re not grown, and grown women have no business messing around with still growing men.”
    “Fine!” He pulled his hand away, his big yet still awkward body now beginning to pace through her kitchen and into her living room. “Fine, I can wait. Eighteen is only two years away, and then no one can say a damn thing when we’re together!”
    She’d been right in her fears. He wasn’t going to let her go, and maybe there was a part that mourned the impossibility of what he’d been thinking, but right now her responsibility lay in getting him to see life after her.
    “Razor.” She walked up to him, reached up and cradled his face in her palms, the gesture near instinctive now, having been used many times to calm him, times when he came to her bone-weary from dealing with burdens of raising his younger brothers because the man who should have been a father instead decided to live at the bottom of a bottle.
    No wonder he has a crush on an older woman. He had so many responsibilities on his shoulders, there was no doubt he felt far older than his age. She’d been the one he turned to, asked for advice sometimes, other times wouldn’t say a word, but buried his head in her shoulder and kept her close.
    He never cried, only held her, pain written over every