I had just opened the bathroom door when I heard, “Van?”
“Aiden?” Okay, that was a stupid question. Who else would it be? With my dirty clothes under my arm, I walked down the hall. His door was open. Usually when he went to sleep, he closed it, and I guess I hadn’t glanced over when I’d come upstairs.
Sitting with his back propped up against the headboard, a bedside lamp illuminated part of the room. Half of his body was under the covers and the other half was unfortunately covered in a T-shirt by one of his endorsers. Aiden gave me a speculative look.
“Are you okay?” I asked, resting my shoulder against the doorframe.
“Yes,” he answered in such an earnest, easy way that I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Huh. “What are you doing?” The television wasn’t on and a book was set on his nightstand.
“I was thinking about the game last week, and what I could have done differently.”
Of all the things in the world, why did that just happen to reach straight into my ribs and grab my heart? “Of course you were.”
Aiden lifted one of those big, brawny shoulders, his eyes going to the super, sexy long-sleeved button up flannel pajamas I had on. “Are you going to sleep?” he asked, even as his gaze raked its way back up to my face.
“I’m not that tired. I’ll probably watch some more TV or something.”
Even in the dark light, I could tell his cheek twitched. “Watch it with me,” he suggested easily.
Wait. What?
“You’re not tired?”
“I took a long nap. There’s no chance I’m going to sleep soon,” he explained.
I smiled and rubbed my foot along the edge of where the hardwood floor hallway met the carpet of his bedroom. “Are you sure you don’t have more plays to think about?”
Aiden gave me a sour look.
He was inviting me to watch television with him. What other answer was there besides, “Okay”？
By the time I got back to his room after depositing my dirty clothes in the hamper in my room, the big guy had scooted over to one side of the bed and turned on the forty-something inch television propped on one of his dressers. With his hands linked behind his head, he watched me as I came in, feeling just slightly awkward.
I gave him a tiny smile and kept eye contact as I pulled the comforter up and slipped under it, waiting to see if he’d complain. He didn’t. There was about two feet of space between us on the California King. I moved the pillow against the headboard and settled in with a sigh.
“Van?”
“Hmm?”
“What’s wrong?”
Tugging the sheets up to my neck, I blinked at the ceiling. “Nothing.”
“Don’t make me ask you again.”
And that only made me feel bad. It was easy to forget how much he knew about me. “I’m fine. I’ve just been feeling pretty mopey today for some reason, maybe it’s hormones or something. That’s all.” I wrung my hands. “It’s dumb. I love Christmas.”
There was a pause before he asked, “You don’t visit your mom?”
“No.” I realized after I said it how dismissive I sounded. “My sisters spend it with her. She’s married now and has step-kids that go over there. She’s not alone.” And even if she were all by herself, I would still not go. I could be honest with myself.
“Where’s your brother?”
“With his friend.”
“Your friend? Diana?”
With how busy he’d been, we hadn’t spent much time together other than saying ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ and catching some TV at the same time. “She’s with her family.” After I said it, I realized how it sounded. “I swear, I’m usually okay. I just feel off, I guess. What about you? Are you fine?”
“I’ve spent most of my Christmas’ alone for the last decade. It isn’t a big deal.”
Of all the people to spend the holidays with, it was with the one whose history was a little too similar to mine. “I guess the good thing is, you don’t have to spend it alone anymore if you don’t want to.” I’m not sure why I said what I said next, but I did. “At least while you’re stuck with me.”
Could I sound any more pathetic?
“I am stuck with you, aren’t I?” he asked in a deceptively soft voice.
He was trying to make me feel better, wasn’t he? “For the next four years and eight months.” I smiled over at him even as this incredible sense of sadness filled my belly like sand in an hourglass.
His head jerked back. The action was tiny, tiny, tiny, but it had been there.
Or had I imagined it?
Before I could wonder too much about whether he’d reacted or not, the big guy who seemed to swallow up his bed, bluntly asked, “Are you finally going to tell me what your sister did to piss you off?”
Of course he would ask. Why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t like I considered it a secret. I just didn’t like talking about it. On the other hand, if there were someone in the world I could talk about Susie with, it would be Aiden. Who would he tell? The thing was, even if he did have someone to, if I really thought about it, he was more than likely the most trustworthy person I knew.
I wasn’t sure when that had happened, but I wasn’t going to wonder about it too much, especially not on Christmas Eve when he’d invited me to his bed, and I was feeling lonelier than I had in a long time.
Shifting a little on the mattress, I propped my head up on my hand and just went for it. “She hit me with a car when I was eighteen.”
Those incredibly long black eyelashes hovered low over his eyes. Were his ears going red? “The car accident,” his voice was hoarse, “the person that you told me ran you over…” His blink was so slow I might have thought there was something wrong with him if I hadn’t known otherwise. “It was your sister?”
“Yes.”
Aiden stared straight at me, the confusion apparent in the slight lines that crept out from the corners of his eyes. “What happened?” he ground the question out.
“It’s a long story.”
“I have time for you.”
“It’s a really long story,” I insisted.
“Okay.”
This guy. I had to stretch my neck as if warming up for this crap storm. “All of my sisters have issues, but Susie’s always been something else. I have anger problems, I know. Surprising right? The only one of us who I think doesn’t have problems is my little brother. I think my mom was boozing it up while she was pregnant with us or maybe our dads were just different levels of assholes, I’m not sure.”
Why was I telling him that? “Anyway, things have always been bad between us. I don’t have a single decent memory of her. Not one, Aiden. There was the closet thing, her coming up and smacking me in the face for no reason, yelling at me, pulling my hair, breaking my things for no reason… I mean, all kinds of crap. I didn’t fight back for the longest until I got tired of her shit, right around when I grew to be bigger than she was, and I finally had enough. She had already been drinking and doing drugs by then. I know she had been for a while. But I didn’t care. I was tired of being her punching bag.