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  So did my mouth.

  “What…? No. Oh…no, you shouldn’t have! You didn’t? You did. Oh, my God!”

  He’d bought me the camera I’d shown him in Mr. Cullen’s shop. A five-thousand-dollar camera, the one I’d been lusting after for years. Alex had given me a dream.

  “Hey…don’t cry.” He wiped a tear from my cheek but could do no more because I was squeezing the breath from him.

  “I love you,” I said.

  We both froze, cheek to cheek, the camera box between us. I hadn’t meant to say it, at least not like that. I’d meant I loved him for buying me the camera, the way you love vanilla ice cream, or horror movies. Not love the way you love a person.

  “I love you, too,” he said quietly and directly into my ear, so there was no way I could pretend I didn’t hear him.

  I pulled away. “Alex…”

  “Olivia,” he said with a slow and easy smile.

  “Thank you for the camera.”

  Kisses lingered and I had to lean back to catch my breath again. “It’s…amazing. It’s too much.”

  “It’s not too much.”

  “It’s very expensive,” I amended. “I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Duh,” Alex said, surfer-boy style. “That’s totally why I bought it for you.”

  I cupped his cheek. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Eager, like a kid, he bent over it to show me the other things in the box. A camera bag, neck strap. Cleaning cloth.

  “Alex,” I said quietly so he’d look at me. “I have some things to talk about.”

  Chapter

  13

  “I have to tell you something I never mentioned before.” I set the camera aside and took both his hands.

  His brow creased. “Okay.”

  I drew in a breath, thinking of the words and how to say them. Then I knew. I got up and went to the drawer in the cabinet along the wall. I pulled out a sheaf of photos and came back to the couch. I faced him, our knees touching. I gave him the pictures.

  They weren’t in order, but as he sifted through them Alex set the ones that were alike together. He looked at the ones of the infant on a blanket, then the shot I’d taken just a few weeks before. He glanced up at me.

  “She looks like you.”

  “Yeah. She does.”

  He blinked and gazed back at the photos. “You and Devon?”

  I shook my head. “No. I met Pippa’s dad in a bar after I broke up with Patrick. He claimed to be shipping out the next day, and even though I knew that was probably a crock of shit, I wanted to believe him for a few hours. It was…a bad time in my life. I found Devon and his partner through an adoption agency. They wanted a baby, and I wanted to help them.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” He put the pictures all together in a pile but didn’t hand them back to me.

  My stomach sank and twisted, dinner sitting in it like a stone. “I wanted you to know.”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  I turned my head to look at the picture on top of the pile, the one of her spinning with her dress out around her. “She is. But she’s not my daughter, Alex. I’m not her mother.”

  He shifted on the couch and I dared a look at him. “But you’ve got pictures of her.”

  “Devon and Steven wanted Pippa to know me. They want me to know her. But I’m not her parent.” I swallowed against dryness, waiting for judgment.

  He nodded. “That’s quite a gift you gave them. I only gave you a camera.”

  The laugh startled out of me. “Yeah, well, believe me, that was a better choice for me.”

  He smiled and kissed me. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “I had to. I didn’t want you to find out later, because you would. She’s not a secret in my life or anything. And if ever…well, I mean, it would come out, eventually. That she was my first.”

  Something softened in his gaze, and his mouth. His kiss this time was longer. Different. And when he pulled away, his expression was more open than I’d ever seen it.

  “I’m glad you told me.”

  I took another deep breath. “My family took it hard. My dad and his wife won’t talk about it. One of my brothers pretends he doesn’t know, but the other one had fertility problems with his wife, so they’re actually pretty cool with it. But my mother…”

  He waited for me without pushing.

  “She hates what I did. Hates.”

  “Because you gave the baby away?”

  “You’d think a woman who adopted a kid would be more understanding, huh?” I shook my head, bad memories still tasting bitter.

  “So what happened?”

  A lot had happened, but it would take longer than a few minutes to share the story, and I didn’t really want to get into all the details. “She disowned me for a while. Now she just refuses to talk about it. But we’re not close. We used to be.”

  “I’m sorry, Olivia.”

  “It’s not just that. It’s her whole Orthodox thing. Since she became observant, there’s not much room in her life for me.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “I’m glad you told me.” He paused. “Does it matter to you?”

  “What?”

  “That I’m not Jewish.”

  I laughed, hard and long. “God, no. Why would you think so?”

  He touched my necklace with a fingertip. “It suits you. And I thought the candles, the pepperoni…”

  “Those are my things.” I thought of my mom, hair covered, insisting I stand beside her to pray. Throwing away the plastic dish that had been mine since infancy because there was no way to make it kosher, and she had no room in her kitchen or her life for anything that couldn’t be made kosher. “I don’t expect you to go by what I believe. If I believe anything, which I’m not sure I do.”

  “I just wondered if it mattered if I was different, that’s all.”

  I took his hand, our fingers linked. I touched them, his, mine, his, mine. “We’ll always be different.”

  He kissed our fingers. “That doesn’t matter to me, either.”

  We kissed, not passionately, though of course it was all still so new that every time we kissed I thought about fucking him. I rested my head on his shoulder. “I wish…”

  “What?”

  “That I could be just one thing. One way or another.”

  His hand stroked over my hair, toying with the locks. “Nobody’s ever just one thing, Olivia.”

  I snorted softly. “Right.”

  “I mean it.”

  I toyed with the snaps on the front of his shirt. Cowboy chic had never impressed me, so why did Alex’s snap-front Western shirt so enamor me? I pictured him with a cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, a pair of boots, a swagger. I could picture him as a lot of things. That didn’t make them true any more than picturing myself as Catholic did, or Jewish, or white. Or black.

  Alex looked uncomfortable for a moment, took a breath, looked as if he meant to speak, and thought better of it. I gave him the time he’d given me. When he did speak, his voice was low and guarded, but he looked me in the eyes. “I have something to tell you, too.”

  I braced myself. I took his hand. Palm to palm, our fingers linked. “Okay.”

  “Is the reason Patrick’s so pissed off at you because of me?”

  “Part of it.” My thumb stroked the back of his hand.

  He let out the breath he must’ve been holding. “So…you know.”

  I nodded and went for broke. “I saw you the night of Patrick’s Chrismukkah party. With that guy Evan.”

  Alex groaned. His head dropped back against the couch. “Fuck.”

  It had been easier than I thought, but then so far, everything with him had been. “And Patrick told me about you.”

  Now he looked at me, a brow raised. “He did?”

  “He said you…were together,” I said delicately. “Just once. And that Teddy didn’t know.”

  Alex frowned. �