Yeah, damn it, they would.
As tired as she was, sleeping in Michael’s bed just wasn’t happening. She beat the pillow under her head and attempted to twist it into a comfortable position. Nothing worked.
Finally, she slipped out of his bed, padded through their joined bathroom, and grabbed the book sitting on her bedside table and returned to Michael’s room.
Some of the kids at the club had to read the classic in her hand for finals. It was taking serious effort to read the book, and she was an adult. Why didn’t high school English teachers figure out that reading outdated books put their students to sleep?
Sure enough, her eyes drifted closed after half a chapter.
The sound of the door opening brought her awake and the book slid to the floor.
“Hey?” Michael said as he walked over to the bed. The normal smile on his face wasn’t there. Strangely, Karen was pleased he didn’t pretend with her.
“Was it bad?”
He sat on the edge of the bed, toed off his shoes. “Not bad. Just complicated.”
“We’ve avoided your family for a year.”
“Yeah. A few months more would have been nice.”
Karen leaned over, picked up her book, and put it on the nightstand.
“Wanna talk about it?” He hadn’t in the past, but his hesitation made her push. “C’mon, Michael.” She lowered her voice. “You don’t have a lover, and you know you can trust me. Who else can you talk to?”
There was his smile. He reached over and laid a hand on her leg through the blankets. “It would be so much easier if women turned me on. I’d marry you all over again.”
“You wouldn’t have met me if women did it for you,” she teased.
“Still would have been easier.”
She couldn’t argue that. “Tell me about your family.”
Just like that, the gates opened. He leaned against the bedpost and kicked his feet up on the bed. “Rena is the oldest, married her high school sweetheart, has two kids. Zach is older than me by a year and a half. Total jock in school. Then there’s me. After a few years, we didn’t think there would be any more of us, then Judy arrived, and a handful of years later came Hannah. Jesus, Karen, I forgot how old my youngest sister was.” He shook his head in what looked like disgust with himself.
“What about your parents? Happy?”
“June and Ward had nothing on my parents. Cookie-baking mom, dad worked hard, built his business.”
Karen reached deep in her memory to what she’d read in Michael’s profile before she agreed to meet him. “Hardware store?”
“Yeah. Zach runs a small construction crew now. It’s a small town, didn’t take a lot to be the go-to guy for a team. I think my dad wanted some of that for me. My dad was disappointed in me from the beginning.”
Karen waited for him to elaborate. For a while, she thought he’d stop talking. “I tried, Karen. I can work alongside my dad, but never liked it. I like cars, but didn’t want to work on them. Zach was always working on his car, trying to drag me under it.”
“Other than Neil, I don’t know one guy who willingly works on his own car.”
“Yeah, but it was more than cars. It seemed everything that defined Sawyer Gardner didn’t define me.”
“Did you and your dad fight?”
“We didn’t have to fight for me to understand his disappointment.”
In that moment, Karen knew why Michael worked so hard to be America’s bad boy on screen.
“It didn’t help that Hilton, Utah, is about as backwater as it comes for small towns. The running joke is Hilton isn’t big enough for a Hilton.” He laughed at that, as if it brought him a pleasant memory. “And Utah…Jesus, have you ever been there?”
“You’ve seen where I’ve been.” She’d not traveled outside of California before meeting Samantha and hooking up with Alliance. Since then, she’d traveled to Europe a couple of times, Canada, where Michael had shot more than one film in their brief marriage, and Aruba for one more wedding in their circle of friends.
“You can’t get a drink in Hilton, Utah, on Sunday.”
“Really?”
“Backwater. I’m telling you. Everyone knows everything about everybody.”
“I’m starting to understand why you left.” She did. Michael’s sexuality would never have flown there. But it wasn’t exactly flying here either.
“If it’s so ass-backward, why does your family stay?”
He sucked in a breath. “I don’t know. Good people. It didn’t suck growing up there. Crime isn’t off the charts.”
“Small-town America.” Where secrets are hidden and the kids run to the city at the first opportunity they get. Karen glanced at the hands in her lap and fiddled with the ring Michael had placed on her finger.
Damn. Michael was like one of her kids at the club. One that needed direction to find himself, to forgive himself for not being just like the other kids. She wasn’t sure he would ever give himself permission to be himself, to give up his tough-guy image…but she wouldn’t live with herself if she didn’t try. “We should visit your family.”
His silence made her look up.
“You’d do that?”
“Michael, I said I was in this with you, and I meant it.”
He wore a strange expression on his face. It was laced with question and concern. “We’d stay with my parents.”