So when they were finished eating and were lounging on the quilt side by side, watching the sun sink behind the hills with their second round of cold beer bottles sweating gently in their hands, he didn’t pull any punches.
“You read my medical records, so you know I had a bout with cancer, right?” he asked, taking a pull on his beer.
She nodded seriously. “Yes. And that you lost your dad to the same cancer. I’m so sorry. That must have been hard.”
“It was,” he said. “But the hardest thing about it wasn’t the diagnosis or the treatment; it was the way it changed the way I looked at the world. For the first few months, all I could think about was all the people who should have cancer instead of me. All the lazy, mean, lying, hurting, warring wastes of human flesh who deserved to suffer and die in my place. If I could have, I would have passed my cancer on to one of them in a heartbeat.”
Unexpectedly, Yasmin smiled. “Is that your deep dark secret?”
“One of them,” he said, brows drawing together. “It’s an ugly time in my life that I’m not proud of.”
She put a hand on his thigh. Her fingers were cool from holding her beer, but her touch still sent heat pulsing across his skin. “We all have thoughts like that. Or at least, most of us do. We know that the world isn’t fair—that good people get cancer, and bad people make millions running corporations that are destroying our planet—but that doesn’t mean we can’t wish it were different. That doesn’t make you ugly inside, that makes you human.”
He grunted softly. “Maybe. But I was still ashamed of myself.” He spun his beer between his fingers. “And I was a little surprised that someone would want my sample, honestly, knowing that I had a history of cancer in my family.”
“Every sample I looked at had a genetic downside in one area or another,” she said. “And you beat cancer. You took it to the mat and came back healed and whole. To me, that was the sign of a fighter, someone strong enough to take the blows life deals out and come back swinging.” She looked up, studying him in the fading light. “And now that I’ve met you, I know that I was right.”
His lips curved, wondering what she would think if she knew she was what he was most interested in fighting for at the moment.
“What?” Her lips curved in an uncertain smile as she brushed a finger down either side of her pretty mouth. “Do I have food on my face?”
He shook his head. “No, you have beautiful on your face.”
Her cheeks flushed, but she didn’t look away. “Thank you. You’ve got some of that on yours, too. But don’t think you’re going to wiggle out of secret time that easily. I want a dark secret, O’Sullivan. Something that will make my eyebrows lift at least a little bit.”
He sighed, shaking his head. “Okay, but I expect quid pro quo after this one.”
She nodded. “Done.”
“So, when I was in undergrad, there was this girl I really liked. Kimmy Smith,” he said, the skin at the back of his neck prickling with shame. “But she was dating one of my fraternity brothers. A guy named Rick who had a habit of bringing girls who weren’t Kimmy back to his room on weekends when she went to visit her grandparents in Santa Barbara.”
“Rat,” Yasmin said, wrinkling her nose. “And she had no idea?”
He shook his head. “None. He was her first love, and she assumed they were in it for the long haul. I think he thought so, too. He’d given her a promise ring, and they talked about where they were going to live after graduation, but I couldn’t stand the thought of her building a life with a man who had been cheating on her for years.” He sighed. “So one weekend I set up a camera in Rick’s room. I edited out the more graphic stuff before I sent Kimmy a copy of the footage, but she still saw way more than she wanted to see of her boyfriend and another naked girl. She broke up with him as soon as she got back on campus from her weekend away.”
“Good for her!” Yasmin nodded firmly. “No less than the jerk deserved.”
“Yeah, well…maybe. But Kimmy didn’t deserve to have it shoved in her face like that. She wasn’t the kind of person who could handle ugly things.” He set his beer down in the grass beside the quilt, watching a drop of condensation dribble down the amber glass. “She tried to kill herself that night. Slit her wrists. If her roommate hadn’t forced her way into the bathroom and called 911, Kimmy wouldn’t have lived through her first heartbreak.”
Yasmin’s breath rushed out. “Damn. That poor kid.”
“Yeah,” Noah said, propping his elbows on his bent knees. “So that’s my deepest, darkest secret.”
Her arm went around his shoulders, comforting and sweet. “You didn’t know she would react that way, Noah. And she shouldn’t have. I mean, I remember how overwhelming that first heartbreak can be, but most of us know it’s not worth dying over. She clearly had issues that went deeper than having a scumbag cheater boyfriend.”
“So what about you?” he said, not ready to be absolved of his guilt just yet. Sometimes guilt was a good thing. It kept you from making the same dumb mistakes twice. “What’s your deep dark secret?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I mean it, Noah. That wasn’t your fault. You shouldn’t carry the weight of that on your soul. It happened so long ago, and your heart was in a good place.” She rubbed a hand in soothing circles on his back. “Even your deep dark secrets are very knight in faded blue jeans.”
“You’re sweet.” He brushed the hair from her temple with two fingers. “Do people tell you that a lot?”
Her lips twisted. “No. They don’t. I usually do a good job of hiding the sweet beneath my feisty outer shell.”
“I guess I just see through you.” He held her gaze, feeling the air between them grow thick with possibilities.
“Maybe you do,” she said softly. “But if that’s true, then you know that I haven’t given up on getting what I want from you. That’s probably my deepest, darkest secret right now, Noah. I like you, and I want to be your friend, maybe even more than your friend, but I also want my baby. My baby, with no baby daddy strings attached.”
He smiled. “Is that your way of telling me you aren’t interested in getting into the hammock with me and seeing what happens?”
“The hammock?” she asked, lips curving wickedly. “An acrobatic choice, Mr. O’Sullivan. Sounds dangerous if you ask me.”
“We could stay on the quilt, but I think you enjoy a little danger, Miss North.”
A light sparked in her eyes. “You’re not serious.”
He shrugged, the casual gesture at odds with the pounding of his heart. “Probably not. I shouldn’t be; I know that. Just like I shouldn’t tell you that from the moment I met you something in my gut has been shouting that I can’t let you walk away. Not until I find out where this could go between us.”
She shook her head even as her face drifted closer to his. “That’s crazy, Noah. We barely know each other. And you live in San Francisco and I live here, and—”
“And this conversation should wait,” he said, reaching up to capture her chin lightly in his fingers. “Until I tell you one more deep, dark secret.”