MY girl.

“Can we just…for today, can we just, pretend?” she asked, rocking back on her heels and biting her lip.

“Pretend? Pretend what?” I took a drag of my smoke and slipped my other hand into my back pocket, leaning up against the side of the garage.

“Let’s pretend that I’m just Thia Andrews, a girl whose parents aren’t…” She looked away and sniffled, shaking her head. “And you’re just Bear, and you’re not pissed off at the world.” She smiled and cocked her head to the side. “Not today anyway.”

I searched her face for the punch line, but there were no signs of a joke.

She drew a circle in the gravel with her flip flop. “Today I want to be a normal girl and you can be a normal boy and we are going to do whatever normal people do so we don’t get stuck thinking on all the bad shit that’s been happening.” She closed the distance between us and came to stand under me, looking up with pleading pale green eyes. “Please, Bear. Please. Just give me today. Be normal with me. Just for today.”

The idea was ludicrous, I didn’t even know what normal was. Normal was what I’d been battling since I’d left the club. I didn’t know how the fuck to do normal. I opened my mouth to tell her just that, but the hurt in her eyes when she saw the rejection coming broke me.

She shook her head and turned around. “Never mind. I knew you wouldn’t…”

I reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulling her back to me. “Go put some clothes on,” I said. “Be back out here in twenty minutes.” I sounded like an asshole again, giving orders to a girl who only wanted to hang out like a normal kid, but after years of actually being an asshole, it was a hard habit to break.

“Really?” she asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet and smiling from ear to ear. The girl didn’t have a stitch of makeup on, there wasn’t a false thing about her and yet she was prettier than any supermodel I’d ever seen on the cover of any magazine and not to mention the absolute most amazing fucking pussy I’d ever had the pleasure of sticking my cock in.

I really need to start thinking about something else…

“Twenty minutes,” I repeated, coughing when my traitor of a heart actually skipped a fucking beat.

Who are you? A fucking preteen girl?

With her new brilliant smile plastered on her face, she spun around and skipped back into the dark garage toward the apartment.

I stomped out my cigarette on my boot and headed up to the main house. “Wait!” Ti called. I turned around to find her back outside again. “Where are you going?” she asked.

I pointed up to the main house. “You want to be normal today, right?”

“Yeah?”

I started walking again, calling back to Ti, “Then I gotta go figure out what the fuck it is that normal people do.”

*     *     *

Bear

Ray had looked at me like I’d sprouted an extra head when I asked her where she thought I should take Ti. “Bear, I’m nineteen, technically widowed, and engaged with three kids. That’s not normal no matter how you look at it.” She’d said.

She had a point.

I couldn’t take Ti anywhere remote so I decided on the Rosinus State Park. It was public enough that if the MC did know where we were they still wouldn’t make a move.

“Here, wear this,” I said, handing her a plain black baseball cap.

“What? Is this supposed to be some sort of disguise?” she asked.

“Just put it on,” I said, watching her thread her hair through the opening at the back.

“Can you recognize me?” she asked sarcastically.

“Smart ass.”

“Okay so where is your brilliant disguise?” she asked.

I pulled the black v-neck t-shirt over my head. “Viola.”

“A shirt? Your disguise is a shirt?”

“Yep.”

“The funny thing is I can actually see how that could work,” Ti said, looking me up and down.

“Really?”

“Nope!” She opened the door and bolted out of the truck, jumping up on top of the nearest picnic table, her tits bouncing as she danced around.

The park was small, no more than five acres with a beach type area, except instead of sand it was covered with pine needles that butted up against a huge lake. Tall pine trees lined the edge of the water, every tenth tree or so had been removed to make room for a picnic table or bench. There were people around but not too many to make it crowded, just enough to make witnesses.