I don’t mean to tempt him so early.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day—the building block for the rest of the grueling twelvish hours until bedtime. A glass of orange juice and a nice piece of toast can make one’s outlook A-okay.

Not red journals filled with secrets and lies.

Those could make a man choke on his morning glass of wine once he spots said sinful object, his eyes narrowed dangerously. Smiling wide, I prop my book against my plate and munch on scrambled eggs. I’ve got to give him credit, he attempted a real meal today, Thorny.

We even eat together at the table like a proper family. Minus the animosity. It adds flavor, like salt, coloring the way Thorny does everything he can to ignore me.

Until he can’t.

He snatches my notebook when I’m only partially through my eggs. Upon flipping it open, he scours the latest entries. As he turns the page, my Polaroids land on the table like confetti. Surprise!

“What in the…” His face gets hard, his shoulders stiff. Cautiously, he lifts the one of my mouth, observing it with a calculated frown. Then he laughs, flicking it aside.

I blink. The real, deep chuckle was unexpected.

“Pathetic,” he says, tossing the one of my shoulder. He grabs the shot of me in my nightgown last, observing whatever secrets may lurk inside. They make him scoff with disinterest. That one he throws so hard that it lands on the floor.

“I’m beginning to seriously doubt your skills of manipulation,” he tells me, his final verdict. I’m not even worth the time he could have spent drinking his breakfast. He takes two deep sips to make up for it and pours himself more right from the bottle. “I mean, for fuck’s sake, if you can’t stage seductive photos, then what can you do properly?”

“You should know,” I counter, my face hot. “You took them.”

That’s what my diary entry claims. Oh no. Thorny lured me into his room at night. He wanted souvenirs. My face may not be pretty anymore, but who cares?

He’s a dirty, dirty old man.

“I’d never take those glamor shots,” he sneers, insulted by the prospect. “Anyone with eyes could see that. If I were the lecherous uncle, sneaking into your bed, I’d want something real.”

Real. I mull this mythical word over, trying to put an image to it. Real like Elaine, who needs a shovel to remove her makeup. Real like flowy, flimsy dresses with waist cinchers built in.

Real like a beach house overlooking a cliff, where the perfect married couple within doesn’t even share a bedroom. Eventually, they can’t even coexist in the same environment. They simmer through the phone lines, blaming everyone else for their fucking problems.

“James?”

He hunches his shoulders at my sweet tone.

“What does real love feel like?” I bat my eyelashes innocently.

He grits his teeth in warning. “What?”

“Love. I’m so broken and crazy I’ve never felt it for myself.” I form a steeple with my fingers and perch my chin on top, giving him my undivided attention. “Describe it for me.”

“Fine.” He grates out a sigh, accepting the challenge. “It’s when you care enough about someone that what you want doesn’t matter anymore.”

Hmmm. That definition doesn’t resonate. L O V E. Sacrifice, he claims?

No. Love is inherently selfish. It’s about wanting someone more than everything else. Nothing matters anymore. Just them. Their thoughts. Their opinion. Their affection.

Their hate.

You’ll take it all; it’s a zero-sum game.

“James, what is sex like? In your own words,” I clarify, licking my lips. “I’ve had loads and loads and”—my dramatic pause makes him take another gulp of wine—“looaaadddsssssss…”

“It’s hell,” he says the moment I trail off. “It’s dragging someone else down with you because you can’t imagine anything else. It’s base, wild instinct. Something more than letting a boy screw you over a principal’s desk in a desperate bid for attention.”

“It wasn’t over the desk,” I explain, eyeing my bitten, broken nails. “He was seated in Mr. Gammer’s chair, you see.”

I let him picture the scene. A stuffy school office. A horny young boy. A girl with no thoughts in her head other than the need to have all eyes on her always.

“I was on my knees. They found me with his penis in my mouth.” Near my mouth, actually, but Thorny doesn’t need to know that. “I had no clothes on,” I add for dramatic effect. “The whole school was scandalized. And do you know what I felt?”

I lean forward, letting him flicker through the possible answers. I can see them dart across his gaze, gone in a flash. Did I feel satisfied? Proud? Slutty? Whorish?

“I felt...like I had a sore jaw,” I say.

“Maryanne?”

Uh-oh. The ball is in his court now. He whams it over the figurative net. Swish. I’ll have to dive in order to hit it back.

“Why do you take pride in pulling stunts like that?”

Pride. It must be something in my smile. The one that’s making my mouth ache in the corners. The one I have to struggle to maintain, ensuring that it never goes slack, even for a second.

“Because it’s genetics,” I parrot. “Like Mommy, like Mary. Or Marie. Same difference. Tomato, tomahto.”

“You think your mother did things solely for the attention?”

Oh. We’re in therapy-land now. Thorny’s steering this crazy train with no idea as to the cracks in the tracks lurking ahead. Bang! We crash-land into one.

“She left,” I tell him, shrugging. “In broad daylight, like you said.”

No calls. No postcard. She had another man, I think. Another family. Another life.

It’s all details, details. The fact is: she’s gone. Good riddance. Though Grandmama always did boast, “If I’m alive when Maryanne turns eighteen, I’ll bet every penny I own that tramp will remember her daughter then.”

“And you think you’re like her?” Thorny phrases it as though it’s a concept he’s only just thought of. Give the man a medal; he’s cracked the code years of therapy couldn’t.

“James. Does it bother you that Elaine might be having sex with someone else? Getting all hell-sweaty.” I gasp at the thought. “Soiling her own hypothetical principal’s desks?”

“No,” he says, his eyes narrowing further. “I never put it past her. I just never thought she’d do it with him.”

Him. The man on the phone she spoke to with simpering eyes. The man in charge of her sudden “work”-related trip. It’s not the fact that he lost her that makes him so upset during his many liquid meals. It’s the fact that he lost her to someone else. Elaine’s just a shiny token in a game, but now, she’s beyond his reach.

Poor Thorny.

“Are you getting divorced?”

His eyebrows furrow as if he hadn’t considered the possibility until now. Divorce. How unseemly. “What would be the point?”

I can’t answer that. So I push my eggs around my plate with a fork and devise a change of subject. “James, if you were to take naughty pictures of me, what would they look like?”

“You shouldn’t be asking questions like that,” he warns. But he doesn’t deny me outright. He merely waits long enough to make that boundary known. “I’d want something real,” he says when a few more seconds have passed. “A side of you no one else has seen.”

“Real?” I’m oddly curious. “Like my boobs?”

“No.” He eyes me more intently than before, searching hard for an answer. His tongue taps his lower lip in warning.

He doesn’t want to say it—I can tell.

“Your eyes…when you aren’t pretending,” he finally admits, his voice a dangerous rasp. “Your face when you aren’t putting on a show. Your soul,” he adds, flicking his gaze up to mine. “I’d capture that.”

Those three words linger in the air, uttered in that deep, thoughtless cadence that betrays he’s thinking. It’s the tone that launched a thousand bestsellers, and it’s directed at me. My words. My lies.

My soul.

I hug myself tight, electrified by the prospect. Souls are things people like me don’t have. We’re too damaged. Too guarded. We imitate empathy and compassion, but we can never feel them for ourselves. Love is a currency collected from others to prove how valuable you are.

It goes both ways, positive and negative. Turn the whole world against you and at least they care. Somehow. Someway.

They fucking finally see you.

“So.” Upon clearing my throat, I change the subject a second time. “Is my writing getting better?” I reach across the table for my journal, but he grabs it first, holding it hostage.

“Better. But my character is still lacking something. A motive.”

“Motive?” My tongue tingles as I parrot him. It tastes like such a dirty word.

“Yes. A reason for his behavior,” Thorny explains. “Preferably what makes him stupid enough to prey on his young niece.”

Ah. “But what if it’s love?” I ask, pleased with my newly creative brain.

“Love?” His frown isn’t as disapproving as it should be. Shrugging, he slides my book toward me and stands. “I’d love to see you try it.”

A dare is a dare, and I take his seriously, seeking him out only when I’m ready to spar again. Words are my weapon of choice, slaved over for hours.

He’s in his office. I find him gazing out of one of the bay windows, wearing that pensive expression that makes me ball my hands into fists. Piercing, blue eyes all stormy and narrowed, clenched lower jaw, and bottom lip skewered between two perfect rows of teeth.

I’m tempted to touch him the most when he’s like this: brooding. So damn surly. A part of me itches to run my fingers through his hair and count the many ways he makes my body react: pulse hammering, palms sweating, heart swelling.

“What is it?” His eyes find me as I creep to the threshold of the room, my bare toes grazing the polished floor.

I lift my journal and watch his gaze sharpen with renewed interest. “I’ve finished.”

His grunt beckons me forward, close enough to set my book on the desk and then scuttle beyond his reach. Hidden in the shadows, where the light of his desk lamp doesn’t reach, I’m protected from his scrutiny.

Not that what he thinks matters.

It doesn’t.

Not even as my breath sticks in my chest while he mulls the request over. I’m selfish, biting into his time, desperate for any bit I can chew off. It’s only lately that he’ll let me nibble. A minute there. A few seconds here. Writing is the one trick I’ve learned to get close to him, even if it’s only through crumpled notebook pages.

“I’m busy,” he says finally. It’s the truth.

A laptop is open before him, and his fingers are studiously tapping the keys—the first hint of writing I’ve seen from him since arriving here. Gradually, the typing slows as he eyes my journal a second time. Sighing, he picks it up and flips it open.

The longer he scans the pages, the harder my teeth clench. It could be because he keeps it ice cold in here. To think better, I guess. The cold makes everything sharper. The view of the ocean seems more expansive than usual, a bloody sunset and stormy, gray clouds. Even the décor is enhanced by the atmosphere; the black leather of his chair gleams, as unreachable as the waves churning in the distance.

Finally, his eyes still over my final scrawled sentence.

“Maryanne…” He looks up, and I hate the way my stomach lurches. Like it’s connected to a hook, yanked at the whim of his gaze. When he’s surly and disinterested, the pressure loosens. But when those irises darken with an unreadable emotion, I’m jerked forward, on the tips of my toes. “I—” He swallows hard and looks from me to the pages and back again. Then he sets them aside.

I know better than to reach for the journal. I know better than to ask him out loud for his verdict.

The way he glares at his computer screen, says it all.

Some boundaries aren’t meant to be tested.

They might break, and we aren’t the type of family that fixes their problems.

We ignore them, inching backward out of rooms we aren’t wanted in, leaving our words behind to stain the silence.

He’s the only one who sees me, dear diary.

I’m the only one who sees him. Really sees. I know why he watches the ocean late at night. Elaine was wrong. He doesn’t hate the beach.

He craves it. The water calls to him, and ignoring its lure is the only way he can still feel alive. If he gets too close, dips one toe inside…

He might never stop walking and he doesn’t intend to swim. Drowning is sweet, tempting bliss.

He didn’t leave me behind because of the responsibility. He lied:

It’s because he is my ocean. He always has been.

He always knew.

And that terrifies him.