I laid my arms across his chest, resting my chin on them as he played with my hair. “So, yeah, at first I was stoked. I didn’t have to deal with all the creepers anymore. Mom and Gator were barely ever home, so that was a plus. It took a couple of years before he started creeping me out, though. Like, this one time, he came up behind me in the kitchen and sort of pulled my hips back against his, and his tiny dick was hard. I was, what, fourteen? Yeah, I think I was like fourteen by then, because it was the summer before high school. Anyway, it was fucking gross, and he tried to play it off like he’d thought I was my mom or some shit. But then he started talking about my boobs and how I’d filled out, blah blah blah.”

I shuddered in revulsion, feeling Cody’s body jerk. What I didn’t tell him was that was when I’d started deliberately losing my curves.

“Did he touch you?” he asked, his voice deep and rough.

“No, no. He never got far. By then I’d started hanging out with some people outside of school, so I wasn’t around much,” I assured him, trying to hide the lie.

There had been one other time, after I’d met Callie and had started hanging out at her place more than I was home. Gator had stopped making excuses for touching me, and one night he’d thrown what little control he had out the window and attacked me.

I’d fought him—hard—and he hadn’t gotten what he wanted, but it had started a chain of events that I could have never imagined. I’d wondered back then if I would have just let him, if I’d just lain back and pretended I was anywhere else, if my life would have been easier. I remember scratching up his face, pulling at his hair, and finally kneeing him in the balls to get him off me. When he’d let me run out the front door, I thought I’d won.

What a joke.

Gator had left my mom after that, telling her that he didn’t want to be around me because I was disrespectful and rude. He’d talked around her, stroking her bruised ego by telling her that he’d been drawn to her because she was such a good mom, but he just couldn’t handle me anymore. It had left my mom in a situation she didn’t want to be in. The man she’d depended on for years left because of me, but she couldn’t kick me out because the reason he’d liked her in the first place was her mothering skills. It was a complete crock of shit, but it had worked, just like he’d planned.

After he left, my mom became the partier she’d been before, with people in and out of the house at all hours, and random men stopping by as they got off their shifts at work. The indifference she’d treated me with before turned into hatred so vile it made my stomach turn to be in the same room with her. That had also gone exactly how Gator planned it would.

It had been a simple yet brilliant plan, and I’d been surprised that an idiot like Gator had manipulated the situation so well. He’d left blaming me, cutting off all contact with my mother including the drugs he’d been supplying her with, but he’d made sure that she couldn’t kick me out. So when he decided that maybe I wasn’t so bad and decided to come back, my mother was willing to back him on any situation concerning me. I’d been a lamb in a house of wolves, and they’d nearly devoured me.

I swallowed the bile in my throat from the memory and smiled at Cody, who was watching me closely. “What about you? What’s your story?”

He laughed a little and shook his head. “No story. Grew up with two parents and Callie. I was fifteen when my parents died, and Gram became my legal guardian. Now, here we are.”

“I know all that, dumbass,” I told him, rolling my eyes. “What about the rest of it? Weren’t you away at school most of the time? How the hell did you wind up with the Aces?”

“Yeah, I got sent to a private boarding school on the East Coast when I was seven.”

“Holy hell!” I gasped. I hadn’t realized that he’d left home so young. It made my stomach cramp to think of Will moving that far away in only five more years.

“It was all right. I was way ahead of all the kids in public school, and my parents couldn’t afford to send me to a private school in San Diego.” He shrugged, and pulled me higher on his chest. “My mom came from Mexico, hoping to go to college up here, so when they knew I was really smart, she started applying for all these scholarships and shit. School was really important to her, and she wanted to make sure that Callie and I got every advantage. It turned out that the one scholarship I was accepted for was set up by this old dude who didn’t have any kids, and wanted to send one to all of his old prep schools on the East Coast.”

“That’s crazy. I can’t imagine sending my kid across the country.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t do it, but I can’t really complain. I had it a lot better than a bunch of other kids in the world, you included.”

Cody looked uncomfortable at the thought of comparing our childhoods, and it made me feel like shit.

“It’s not a competition, handsome,” I told him, leaning up to give him a slow kiss. “I hit the shitty parents jackpot, but that doesn’t mean yours were saints.”

“Yeah, well, they weren’t bad.”

Silence fell as we looked at each other, and for once, I wasn’t sure what to say. I couldn’t understand how we’d ended up where we were, lying together in bed and sharing secrets. I’d never talked to anyone about my mother, ever. I hadn’t even told Callie about the stuff I’d dealt with growing up, and she’d never pressed for information. I had a feeling that would not be the case with Cody.