Page 191 of Psycho

The question was, did I love him?

I didn’t know.

I couldn’t… could I?

The waitress took that moment to come back with our food. She avoided looking at us, and once the plate was down, she muttered a quick,enjoy, and all but ran out of there.

Micah grabbed my plate and pulled it in front of him.

I watched as he cut the steaks into small, bite-sized pieces for me, and the sudden image of him doing this for me well into our old age popped unbidden inside my mind.

He pushed the plate in front of me and placed the fork in my hand. “Eat, sweetheart.”

I mutely obeyed, thinking.

We were silent for the first fifteen minutes of the meal. I looked around the restaurant, my eyes coming to a stop at a table of three down from us—a family, the parents and a little girl that was probably about five.

She had dark brown hair and big, bright green eyes.

And I wondered, had my life been different, I wouldn’t be sitting here with Micah and, instead, my own parents.

Would I have wanted that?

I gazed up at Micah as I ate another piece of steak.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked softly.

“If I would have traded this moment with you for a better set of parents.”

He was quiet as he took in my words, his body tensed beside me. “And the verdict?”

I smiled. “No, I wouldn’t change a single thing about my life as long as it leads me to this very moment with you.”

Fuck me, but I was in love with Micah Stone.

He relaxed against me and cut into his steak. I watched as he expectedly stabbed the small piece he just cut for himself and plopped it into his mouth.

“Do you miss your parents?”

I shook my head. “I don’t love my dad. Not anymore. Not for a while now. And my mom…”

“Yes?”

“Even when she’s not in my life, she ends up causing trouble for me.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know what she does for a living?”

I would be really surprised if Micah didn’t know. Although, somehow, I doubted there were many things that he didn’t know.

He confirmed that when he nodded and said, “Sex work.”

“She, uh, one of her clients was a dad of one of my classmates. Their parents are getting divorced. It’s, uh, Josh’s parents.”

Something calculating moved in his eyes.

I could almost see him put two and two together, but whatever it was that he just figured out, he didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask.

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