Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
M erle lay next to Liberty as she slept, working and checking on any new leads for John Jones.
It was funny how they both had certain things they wanted to avoid. It was impossible not to notice that she was using sex to distract him, to keep from answering any of the intimate questions she didn’t want to entertain.
Because he’d been so open about his parents, he almost thought it would make her talk about hers. But his issue was different. He’d grown up with both of his parents and had somehow, over time, come to believe they didn’t really give a shit about him. Liberty only had one parent but never questioned her mom’s feelings.
Poppy sometimes said he was exaggerating. He saw her point. His parents did call him once a month and they always talked for twenty-five minutes. His brothers were different; he mainly talked to Marcus because Manford was busier, and even Man usually texted a couple of times a month to chat. They didn’t talk about the hard things, but they were still brothers and stayed connected.
Liberty didn’t know if her dad was a dick or not. She knew nothing about him, other than he didn’t want to be in her life... So yeah, he got why she might not want to talk about it.
But he was struggling a little, because tonight it had felt like they were growing closer. If she really wanted his help, she was going to have to ask for more. The last thing he wanted was to shoulder his way into her life and have her shove him out.
He opened another window in Linux, entering the information he’d pulled on the first of the John Joneses who might be Liberty’s biological father. The code he used was pretty common in hacker circles, but it would pull from sources and databases that most people were unaware of or couldn’t get access to.
Liberty was curled next to his side, sleeping. Her hair was spread around her pillow in a halo and a few strands curled around her neck, grazing her breast. His heartbeat sped up at the sight and he felt that warm feeling in his stomach. Yearning.
God, he really hated that he wanted her this much. This need to have her in his bed—not just tonight, but more and more—even though he might just be a distraction, wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t want to go all in while she was still figuring out her own life.
So he had to keep his emotions in check.
Which had never been an issue before. Maybe it was the anger that had pushed him away from his family, or the techniques he’d learned in therapy, but he never really had a problem keeping a wall up between himself and others.
Then again, that wasn’t working too well for him either.
There were a few people he’d let in over the years like Poppy and Darren. Now maybe his brothers, and of course Liberty. He wanted to play like he was cool with whatever she decided she could handle. But from the moment he’d seen her in her black clothes, her creamy pale skin and that fiery red hair, he’d been drawn to her.
There was no more chill where she was concerned.
He ran some more codes and eventually found a reference to a John Jones in Birch Lake. He started tracing further and found it was a library article that hadn’t been placed in a public database. Maybe the library would have it in their old files. He opened the notepad on his computer and dropped the snippet he’d been able to read into it.
There was a grainy photo accompanying the scanned article. When he tried to zoom in on the faces, all he saw were pixels and shades of gray. He copied the photo into the file anyway.
Liberty made a soft sound in her sleep and slid closer to him, her arm coming up as if to grab him, so he closed his laptop and set it on the floor next to the bed. She embraced him and he switched off his light, turning on his side to pull her into the cradle of his body.
“Merle?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Did you finish working?” she asked sleepily.
“Yes, go back to sleep,” he said.
“I can now that you’re here,” she said, rolling back on her side so that he could spoon her. He wrapped his arm around her waist. Trying to still his racing heart. But it wasn’t working. He wanted those words to be more than something she said when half-asleep. For him to be one of the reasons why she could sleep at night. Hell, he wanted to be her white knight and he didn’t even believe in shit like that.
He gazed down at her in the dark. The faint light provided by the night-light in the bathroom didn’t really give him enough illumination to see her features, but it didn’t matter. He’d memorized them long ago.
More than anything, he wanted this to be real.
He was so afraid it wasn’t.
Just a temporary aberration, a moment where their lives had hit a crossroad and they were both walking it together until things diverged again.
Her pushing him to talk about his parents had forced him to admit out loud, and more so to himself, that it was past time to resolve things. He was tired of always feeling like he didn’t measure up. And he wanted to be able to bring women home with him—if he still wanted to go home. He wanted to be able to be himself around his parents and be accepted.
That was a big ask and something he’d been afraid of...until he had Liberty in his arms. Now it was something he had to do because he wanted his life to be in order so he could be the best version of himself for her.