Read Online Between the Sheets by Molly O'Keefe - Free Book Online Page A

wiped his hands off on a rag, fixing his feet to the ground to absorb the hit he’d somehow known was coming.
    “I’m her kid,” Casey said. “And I think you’re my dad.”
    He’d stepped back, putting his weight against the red tool cart behind him, because his knees had buckled.
    “What makes you think that?”
    “She told me. Like a million times.”
    “A million times,” he’d said, because his mind was blown blank. Funny. She hadn’t told Ty, once.
    “Hey, you got a bathroom around here I can use?” Casey had asked, and Ty, on legs that did not feel the ground, walked the boy through the shop to the can in the back.
    Casey had gone in and shut the door, and Ty stood outside listening to the kid vomit his guts out and felt his life irrevocably change.
    That day seemed like it was both yesterday and a hundred years ago.
    “Yep,” he told Shelby. “Four months.” He stretched his arms out wide because he felt the need to move. It was a current under his skin that he didn’t know what to do with. The current came and went, part stress, part anxiety, part guilt, and the knife’s edge of failure he feltagainst his neck. Part wanting to get the hell away from the constant, grinding fear that he was screwing things up for Casey. The current made him want to drink until he forgot everything. Or find a soft, willing woman to make him feel good.
    It made him want to leave.
    “So, as you can see, we’ve got some issues.”
    He tried to make it a joke, but Shelby wasn’t laughing.
    “That’s a lot of change in a short time. It must be so difficult,” she said.
    He didn’t like pity. There was nothing about his life that was pitiful. Pops taught him that; as long as you were trying, as long as you were fighting, no one should pity you .
    But it wasn’t pity on her face and fuck if he didn’t wish it was, because compassion just wrecked him.
    He folded his hands together, turning his knuckles white. When he’d moved in with Nana and Pop after his parents’ accident, Nana had made him hot chocolate. The real kind, on the stove with milk and melted chocolate—he’d only ever had the powdered stuff. And that only once or twice. Nana put in a whole bunch of marshmallows and she hummed while she did it. Didn’t make conversation, didn’t try to pretend that everything was great. She just let everything suck, because she knew nothing she said could change it.
    But she put that mug in front of him, looked him right in the eye, and cupped the back of his head in her hand and he’d fallen apart. Bawled like a baby.
    Shelby’s level eyes had the same effect.
    So he looked down at his blistered and callused hands. At the grease stains caught in the ridges of his thumb that never came out. Would never come out.
    “It hasn’t been easy,” was all he said. “I had just moved back to West Memphis, too. Like a year and a halfbefore he came and found me, and some nights I can’t sleep thinking—what if Vanessa had been busted earlier, and I missed him? What if he walked all that way and I wasn’t even there?”
    “But you were,” she said, emphatically. Still, nightmares were nightmares and not so easily banished.
    “Mrs. Jordal says Casey is a good kid,” she told him as if she knew he still didn’t have any clue what kind of kid he was.
    He pressed the pad of his grease-stained thumb against the edge of the table, hard enough that his finger went white. “That’s great.”
    Again, he was bitten by this terrible loneliness and it seemed she was the perfect antidote for it. Before in his life, moving around so much, when he was lonely, he went to a bar. Met a girl. Met a group of guys watching whatever game was on TV. Ty had taken his easy way with people for granted. The way he made friends everywhere he went. Until moving to Bishop, where he didn’t know anyone and he was so deeply off balance, so terribly raw and irritated, he couldn’t seem to remember how to talk to people.
    But somehow this