Page 75 of Jonas

Part of that everything went beyond the kissing, and the ass grabbing, though unfortunately I didn’t get to cop a feel before Jonas put an end to making out. At the risk of sounding like a whackadoodle, his honesty fed something inside of me I knew had been starved, I just hadn’t known how hungry for it I was. I’d always known I was missing something, I just never understood what it was—not fully. I’d thought it was simply love and attention. Those were part of it, but what I’d really been missing—what I’d been ravenous for—was to be seen, to be understood. I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, I didn’t want sympathy or even empathy. What I needed was someone who understood that I am not who made me, I’m not the circumstances of my childhood, I’m not defined by the abuse, and I’m most certainly not responsible for my father’s hate.

And that was what Jonas gave me.

Different circumstances. Different dysfunction. Different hardships.

Same pain, rejection, and distrust.

We weren’t in the ‘same boat’ but we were in the same water and we’d both found a way to make it ashore.

I’d been so lost in thought, I startled when Jonas’s phone vibrated in my hand.

I glanced down at the screen and announced, “You have a text.”

“Thirty. Twenty-seven. Seventeen.”

Holy shamoly, did he just give me the code to unlock his phone?

When I didn’t immediately tap in his password, Jonas prompted, “Check it.”

I got it, everything he’d said about trust and honesty. But this was too much.

“Here.” I held out the phone.

“Dee Dee⁠—”

“There’s honesty then there’s invasion of privacy,” I cut him off. “This.” I shook the phone. “Feels like an invasion. Trust is trust and it isn’t real if I need to check a phone.”

Honestly, I couldn’t even remember why he’d given it to me in the first place.

I couldn’t read the expression on his face. It was somewhere between casual and alert, and maybe a little uncertainty tinged the edges.

Sluggishly, he reached for his phone. Perhaps he was waiting for me to change my mind and decide I wanted a look after all. I wouldn’t and I didn’t. I meant what I said. And maybe that was something else I’d longed for—trust. I didn’t have that growing up, either. My father could go from happy to enraged in a blink of an eye, so I learned not to trust someone’s mood. My mother, a woman who had been sweet and kind in private but turned cold and standoffish in front of my father, had taught me not to trust someone’s actions. Everyone in my life had turned on me at one point or another. My brother’s betrayal had been the worst, the hardest to reconcile. At one time he’d been my playmate, my protector, my confidant. Then he wasn’t, and in the single worst act of cruelty committed against me, he’d used my deepest, darkest fears as weapons, teaching me never to trust anyone with my secrets.

Secrets were weapons.

Trust was the blade that would sink into your back and kill you.

I learned these lessons well.

Yet there I stood, desperately wanting to trust Jonas.

I also desperately wanted a shower now that the mud was dry and starting to crack.

“Fuck.” Jonas’s outburst sent my attention from the cabin, which had just come into view, straight to his scowl.

“What’s wrong?”

“Anson Sutton is dead.”

Oh shit.

“How?”

“Home invasion. Wife came home from dinner and found him.”

Um, right.

“Well, if that isn’t bullshit I don’t know what is.”