Free Give It All by Cara McKenna Page A

close.”
    “Huh.”
    “Why? Do I seem like the marrying kind?”
    “No, but you seem like the divorcing kind somehow.”
    His lips twitched. “I suppose that’s fair. I’m exceedingly difficult to date.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “I possess a winning combination of impossibly high standards and stunted empathy.”
    “At least you know it, I guess.”
    “Arrogance without self-awareness is unbearably gauche. No one’s cataloged my faults as studiously as I have. I wonder sometimes what I’m paying my therapist for.”
    She laughed. “You’re so weird. Weird and fancy. Easily the fanciest man who’s ever sat on that couch. What are your parents like? Crazy-posh?”
    His smile faded at that. “No comment.”
    “Fine. I’ll let it go, only because you’ve spent enough time getting interrogated for one day.”
    “Appreciated. As is this,” he added, and held up his cup.
    She shrugged. “Bringing people drinks is kind of my bag.”
    He turned to meet her eyes. “Just say, ‘You’re welcome.’”
    “You’re welcome.”
    Apropos of nothing—or perhaps apropos of the chemical crisis—he asked, “Why’d you end it with Church?”
    She shrugged, hiding her surprise. Surprise at the suddenchange of topic, and undeniable pleasure that he cared. “He wanted to make a decent woman of me.”
    “The cad.”
    She looked to the TV, fighting an urge to open up to him. She’d gotten deeper inside Duncan’s head than she’d ever guessed she might, and the imbalance it created felt cumbersome. After a long pause, she told him, “I don’t like feeling like I’m being taken care of by anyone.” With her father, she’d been both the child and parent, and as much as she’d loved him, she’d never felt entirely secure in his care. Never entirely trusted him. Not because he’d been mean, but because he’d been weak—flighty at the best of times, and straight-up useless when he drank. About as reliable as a teenage boy. Good intentions, poor results. “I’d much rather be needed than do the needing,” she concluded.
    “Ah.”
    She sought his gaze. “You want to analyze me?”
    He didn’t reply.
    “Feel free. Seems only fair.”
    “Go on, then.”
    She toyed with her tea bag’s string. “I loved my dad. I cared for him well before he was sick, and nursed him when he was. I relied on him and nobody else, when I was little, for better or worse. Confided in him. Lost him. Most of the things a woman feels for a man, I used up on him. My tank’s empty, for all the love that matters.” She met his gaze. “Any needs I have left over, any decent, convenient, good-looking man is welcome to satisfy. But my heart’s spent. And Miah wanted my heart.”
    Duncan’s reply was quiet and a touch earnest. “That’s rather tragic.”
    “Nah. Tragic’s giving everything you have to one man, then getting it handed back all banged up and smelling of another woman’s perfume.”
    Duncan looked back to the television. They drank their tea, watching the crap flashing by on the screen, not talking. She wondered if he felt as naked as she did, finding the two of them on this new level together. Not friends, but something above their usual bartender-and-customer flirtation. Kind of scary, kind of pleasant. Definitely doomed to flee once Duncan sobered up and the sun rose to fade the memory of this talk.
    And when he did leave, the fear would take his place—fear that the next time Raina watched him go, it could be the lasttime she saw him alive. Mutinous locals would be dangerous enough on their own if his accusation went public, but Duncan was on Levins’s bad side as well, and who knew if that shit still had coconspirators on the outside?
    Raina had lost Alex only two months ago. They’d grown apart in recent years, as his drinking had begun corroding him, a habit snowballing into an addiction she’d known all too well, as the daughter of a functioning alcoholic. It had felt too familiar, too scary. And too fraught,