Between the Sheets by Molly O'Keefe Page A

forgotten about it already.”
    “I can’t.”
    “You can and more importantly, you should.”
    “How do I—?” She stopped, swallowing the words and the tears.
    Deena took a deep breath. “You need to think about care, honey.”
    The tears again, and she had to look away or fall to pieces in Deena’s soft, strong arms. “She hasn’t had an episode like that in a long time. I think … I think it’s just because I’m dressed this way.”
    “So you should never dress up again?”
    Shelby shot her an arch look, because Deena knew it was more than that. It wasn’t anything that could be simplified into a question of either/or.
    “You look beautiful, honey. Just beautiful.” She smoothed Shelby’s hair down and handed her a Kleenex to clean up her mascara.
    “Thank you,” she said, gathering up the edges of herself, but they were jagged and sharp and she felt herself shifting under her skin. Writhing and squirming. Distressed and out of sorts. “But I really don’t think I can—”
    A loud knock at the door interrupted her. “Damn it,” she muttered. It had to be Ty. It was seven forty-five and he must have crossed the street to get her. She ran to the front door before he knocked again, setting Mom off.
    She took a deep breath at the door, formulating a lie about a stomachache or a sudden migraine, anything that would keep her from having to sit at a table with him and pretend everything was okay.
    Hoping her smile didn’t look as bad as it felt, she pulled open the door.
    It was Ty. Ty in a denim and shearling coat over alight blue sweater that made his eyes look like the sky in August. His breath steamed in the cold air, small puffs from his beautiful lips. Sudden, sharp, and unpredictable lust lit a dangerous spark and the combustible emotions in her chest, her heart—they went up in flames.
    “Wow,” he breathed, taking her in. “You … you look great.”
    “Thank you,” she managed to say, past the sudden horrible raging heat in her blood. “You, too.”
    “You ready? I don’t mean to rush you or—” He tilted his head, the smile draining from his face. Those blue eyes, they turned cold. The color of ice. “Are you okay?”
    He lifted a hand, as if to touch her cheek, where perhaps there was a pink mark from her mother’s hand, but she shifted away, unable to be touched like that by him.
    With compassion. With kindness. She would shatter like glass under his kind touch.
    She swallowed down a thousand responses. The truth, versions of the truth, outright lies. She swallowed down all of them. Where they boiled and burned in her stomach. She felt her own break with reality coming and she needed to change her clothes, put her hair back up in a ponytail. Remind herself who she was. I am my mother’s daughter. Her caregiver. Everything else has to slide in around that .
    “I’m sorry, Ty,” she said, closing a door between them, one she never should have opened. “I don’t think—”
    Suddenly, she was pushed from behind out onto the porch. She turned, only to have her coat thrown over her head. She yanked it off to see Deena grinning in the doorway.
    “Go,” Deena said. “Get drunk. Don’t come back for at least two hours.”
    And then the door slammed behind her. Ty and Shelbystared at each other under the porch light. Which then blinked out.
    Ty’s laughter rumbled through the partial darkness.
    And she couldn’t help it—she just gave up holding onto who she was. She just dropped every jagged edge she’d been clinging to and she let her world fall away. All of her pretenses.
    This is Dean all over again , she thought, panicked. This is some kind of awful self-destructive behavior. I use sex with inappropriate men as a coping mechanism. How can this be okay?
    But she knew in her gut that Ty wasn’t Dean. Ty wasn’t going to hurt her, not the way Dean had.
    “I don’t want to go on a date,” she whispered, staring down at her boots.
    “Oh.” He sounded surprised.