Free Hot Mess by Anne Conley Page B

Instead, he whispered against her lips, "I missed you this week." Her eyes flickered as their breath mingled, and he was pretty sure that she reciprocated the feeling, but until she said something, he would abide by her wishes.
    For now.
    He fished around a drawer next to her and found a knife to help her cut the broccoli.
    "I'll help you, kay?"
    "Sure. Cut them small, I'm just blanching them, before I put them in the sauce. Don't want soggy veggies."
    "Okay. I don't know what blanch means, but I can cut small."
    "You don't cook much, do you?" She asked with a small laugh.
    "I cook breakfast." His eyes shifted sideways and caught her blushing. "I didn't mean that like you're thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter. Sheesh." He was teasing her, and he loved the look of shock on her face, when she realized how transparent her thoughts were. He nudged her with his shoulder, and she gave up and laughed. Tossing her head back, he was overwhelmed by the memory of the dance-off last Saturday. Again. It lit a fire in his stomach, and he vowed to do whatever he could to make her do it more.
    "You don't do that much, do you?"
    She turned to look at him. "Do what?"
    "Laugh like that."
    She looked thoughtful. "No, I guess I don't. I tend to take things pretty seriously, I guess." She went back to chopping carrots.
    "It's too short to take too seriously. You have to find the humor, or it'll get to you." He was thinking of Marisol, and his job.
    "What's too short?"
    "Life, of course. Life's too short."
    She stopped chopping and turned to look at him. Her little bow mouth opened to say something, but she stopped herself again. He reached out to touch her mouth, willing it to talk, to tell him what she wanted to say. But she clamped it shut.
    He decided to take the initiative. Maybe if he opened up, she would.
    "I divorced Amanda's mom two years ago. She was into pills really bad. Marisol had been in a car accident, that's how we met, actually. And the doctor prescribed her pain pills for a neck injury. She got addicted and couldn't get off them. The next thing I knew, she was taking fifty to sixty hydrocodones or vicadin, or xanax, or whatever, a day. I left her, and tried to get custody of Amanda, but she moved in with her parents and got to keep her."
    "You didn't call CPS? Surely with drug use in the mother, they would have let you have her then?"
    This was harder than he'd thought it would be. He took a deep breath, thinking that if he told her about his demons, maybe she would tell him about hers. Then they could get on with this relationship.
    "No. Foolishly, I thought that living with her parents would straighten Marisol out. And I didn't want 'Manda subjected to interviews and questions and the whole 'he said, she said bullshit that CPS likes to engage in. I didn't know what kinds of lies Marisol would tell about me, and there's always the chance that 'Manda would have ended up with foster parents…"
    He ran a hand through his hair, surely making it stand straight up. "Anyways, it took a long time for 'Manda to get over the divorce and get used to visitations around my shifts at the firehouse in Jacksonville. Marisol couldn't keep up with her habit and got into a lot of financial trouble. She couldn't find a way out of it, and she killed herself."
    Rachel was staring at him, tiny little mouth wide open in that precious little "o" that Sam had wanted to see, though not under these circumstances.
    "Why would she kill herself over money?"
    "Who really knows? The pills did something to her brain, made her feel completely hopeless about her life. She couldn't see a way out of her situation. She was a completely different woman from the one I had married. I didn't recognize her anymore. She seemed to be functioning, holding a job, but it wasn't a well-paying job, and she couldn't keep up with her bills and her addiction at the same time."
    He got quiet, deep in his own thoughts of Marisol. He had married a vibrant, care-free woman, and