But home?
The lock opened on my suitcase, and everything tumbled into a mess on the floor.
“Damn it.” I knelt and went through my things. Every single object was foreign in my hands. My fuzzy slippers. An old pair of jeans with a hole in the left knee. They were my weekend jeans, my favorites. T-shirts. The paperback novel I’d been reading and left on my bedside table. Some of my panties and a lingerie set I’d purchased two years ago when I’d thought I was in lust with a coworker who had turned out to be an asshole before I’d had a chance to wear them.
“I had hoped to see you wearing that one.” Alex’s voice interrupted me, and my hands froze with the lingerie in midair. I looked up at him, so gorgeous and dripping in only a towel about his lean waist.
“Of course you did.” Such a man thing to say. A man who wanted sex. Not love.
I dropped the lingerie with a gasp as I saw a small, fuzzy ear peeking up from the bottom of the pile. “Mr. Snuggles?”
Shaking now, I pulled the small, ragged teddy bear free and clutched him to my chest. He’d been the color of golden honey once upon a time, with dark brown eyes and a little brown vest. The vest was long gone. The golden yellow was now a dingy, aged beige. But he was soft and familiar, the only physical remnant I had from my childhood, the friend who’d kept me company when I cried myself to sleep because my mother had not returned from the bar, or when she had and passed out drunk on the bathroom floor.
Seeing my old friend broke me wide open, and I cried, rocking on my knees, back and forth in nothing but a towel.
“Enough.” Alex scooped me—and Mr. Snuggles—into his arms and carried us to bed, settling me on his lap, my cheek against his chest. “You will tell me what is wrong, and you will do so now.”
I fought to calm myself. “I’m fine.”
With gentle fingers, he tilted my chin up to his. “You are forbidden from using that word. Do you understand?”
“Fine.”
“Jamie.” The word was dragged out as a warning.
I couldn’t hold his gaze. “It’s nothing, just stress from the last couple days.”
He tilted my face up again, holding me in place this time with a warm hand at the side of my neck, right over my Starfighter mark that matched his. “I cannot accept this pain. Share it with me.” He gave Mr. Snuggles a gentle squeeze. “Who is this?”
I sniffed and grinned. “Mr. Snuggles. My best friend gave him to me for my sixth birthday.”
“Where is this best friend now?”
My sigh was deep and reeked with old, settled pain. “Her mom decided I wasn’t the right influence on her daughter. She told me we couldn’t be friends anymore in third grade because one time my mom showed up at the bus stop hammered. She’s in college somewhere in New York. Top-tier school. Top of her class. All the right clothes and all the right friends.”
“And your other friends?” His voice was gentle now. Coaxing.
“Don’t have any.” I shrugged. “Well, Mia and Lily from the training program, but I’ve never actually met them. They live thousands of miles away from me. And being dumped once was bad enough.”
“Siblings?”
“No. Thank God.” I sighed. “To be honest, my mother shouldn’t have had any children at all, not if she couldn’t…”
“Couldn’t what?” he asked.
“Love them.”
His eyes widened, and his thumb slid back and forth on my neck. It was a soothing gesture, perhaps for him as much as for me. “Your mother did not love you?”
I cleared my throat so I wouldn’t break down again. I was just getting myself put back together. “If she did, she never told me.”
“She did not say the words?”
“No.”
“Did she care for you? Make sure you had what you needed?”
“I guess she did the best she could.” I sighed and looked deeply into Mr. Snuggle’s shiny, lifeless eyes. “No, that’s a lie. She could have done better. Put me first, or at least second. She chose not to.”