Текст книги "When the Stars Align"

Автор книги: Jeanette Grey

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

For a moment that seemed to stretch on and on, everything else faded away. It was just her and him and the connection between their bodies. The fire of their initial confrontations, the heat of her spark, and how it had flowed into careful touches. Cracks in her exterior. And then this. Now.

In this room, on this island, with this girl.

He closed his eyes and held on.

Time sped up again a second later when she bit her way down the column of his throat. The sucking pressure of her mouth had a familiar warmth gathering in his gut. She was going to leave marks.

“Lower.” He threaded his fingers through her hair, and she made a sound of displeasure but allowed herself to be moved. The next bite was beneath his collarbone, and the next on his biceps, and he fucking loved it. Bending his knees, he got his feet on the mattress, finding some leverage to shift his hips into hers, and she groaned, low and throaty, just like she had before she’d fallen apart the first time.

He’d already been about to do it, but she grabbed his wrist and dragged his hand to the place where they were joined. It wasn’t easy with the way she was moving on him, but he curled his hand into the crease of her thigh, got his thumb up into all that softness. The edge of his thumb slid along the length of his own cock before he found her clit, and she made this beautiful sound.

“Can you come again?” he asked, because he didn’t have a whole lot left in him, not the way she was taking him apart, but he’d hold out if it meant he got to feel her.

“Guess we’re about to find out.” She dropped down onto her forearm as she rode him with prejudice, slipping one hand to tug at her own breast.

He joined her, twisting the barbell through her nipple at the same time he rubbed her harder with his thumb.

“Oh—” She clenched up around him, her mouth dropping open, and if she’d been gorgeous in orgasm before, it was nothing compared to this. Her skin was slick with sweat, a hot flush covering her chest, and she groaned like she was dying.

And he couldn’t take it anymore.

He left his one hand between her legs and slapped the other to her thigh, keeping her steady as he thrust up into her. Pounded into that tight, wet heat, let himself really feel it…

His eyes snapped shut and he threw his head back as the pleasure overtook him. He emptied himself into her in a rush, turning inside out with the sheer expansiveness of it, the connection.

The inevitability. For all that they’d spent so long working up to it.

It felt, somehow, that they’d always been meant to end up here.

Chapter Twelve

Jo’s whole body thrummed with satisfaction as she gave in to the shakiness in her arms and legs, letting herself collapse onto Adam’s bulk. They were sweaty and disgusting, but he smelled good and felt better, and when she clenched around him, wringing out the last licks of pleasure, he twitched inside her in the best way.

He let out a soft, embarrassed laugh and wrapped his arms around her, and that was… different. He didn’t slap her ass or thank her for the fuck and show her the door. Instead, he held her like she was precious, like he had no real intention of moving anytime soon. It made something uncomfortable and warm unfurl in her gut.

She refused to think too much about it, lying there on top of him, working to catch her breath. Finally, though, the swelter got to be too much. Fucking in the tropics was going to be such a pain in the ass. “God, you’re like a furnace,” she muttered as she peeled her chest from his.

He was a good, responsible sex partner, easing his hand between them to hold on to the condom as he slipped free. Collapsing to the side, she got out of his way as he rose to deal with the cleanup. She craned her neck to watch him stumble across the room.

Hot damn but the boy had a fantastic ass. He’d looked good from the front, but the bare expanse of flesh he showed her when he turned was another entire level of hotness.

“You don’t have any tattoos.” She said it without really thinking, letting her gaze sweep over miles of virgin skin.

“Nope.” He made a soft sound, then drew a couple of tissues from a box.

“You ever thought about it?”

“Not really.”

“You sure seem to like them, though.”

He dropped the trash into a wastebasket in the corner of the room before facing her again. And maybe she’d been wrong. The front of him looked damn good from this angle, too.

Grinning, he gave her a none-too-subtle once-over. “I like looking at them. Doesn’t mean I like needles.”

“Wimp.”

“Whatever.”

He stood there gazing at her for a moment too long. A flicker of self-consciousness broke through her haze as she remembered herself. Sure, he’d held her with an unusual amount of tenderness, but this was typically the part of the evening where she picked up her clothes and beat a dignified retreat.

Except before she could act on the impulse, his smile deepened. He crossed back over to the bed and climbed onto it, lying on his side, curled around her. His fingertips grazed her neck where her tattoo spilled over. “I like looking at them a lot,” he said, intensity shading his tone.

Too much intensity. She glanced down, away from his eyes. “Yeah, I could kinda tell.” It was supposed to be a joke. He’d been so obviously turned on by all the things she’d done to her body. But it came out weak.

“Hey.”

She stilled, expecting him to say something else. A second passed and then another. But instead of speaking, he tucked two fingers under her chin and tipped her head up.

When his lips met hers, it was soft. Gentle. She let him deepen it, but the pace stayed slow. The warm brushes of his mouth were building toward something, though—something that wasn’t sex. Overwhelmed, she slumped against the pillow and closed her eyes.

He gave her a second to get herself together. The bed jostled as he half sat up, grabbing the thin cover of the sheet and dragging it over their lower halves. She accepted it, tucking the fabric under her arms so her tits weren’t hanging out before opening her eyes.

Even partially covered, he was gorgeous, his warm skin a contrast to the white of the sheet. He lay on his side, propped up on his elbow, his other hand resting in the scant inches of space between them. Expression soft, he gazed at her, not seeming to expect anything. But something about him said he’d accept whatever she decided to volunteer.

“Hi,” she said. She wasn’t embarrassed, not exactly, but this wasn’t usually a part of sex for her. She didn’t know how it was supposed to go.

Reaching across her body, he swept her hair from her eyes. His fingertips lingered on the edge of her face for a moment. Just when it threatened to become uncomfortable, he dropped his hand, moving it to rest on her stomach instead.

He nudged her ankle with his. “So how was your week?”

“Really?” The word was out of her mouth before she could stop it, a barked-out half-laugh of a question. All that intimacy and kissing and orgasming, and now he wanted to have a normal conversation? Like this?

Forget that they’d scarcely had a normal conversation in all the time they’d known each other, not without other people pushing them along. They’d had weird, brief moments of oversharing, and arguments, but not small talk.

His eyebrows rose to match hers. “Why not?”

“It’s just…” After a moment, she settled on, “Weird.”

“Not really. We haven’t seen each other in a few days. It’s pretty typical for people to want to catch up after that.”

“Is it pretty typical for them to tear each other’s clothes off first?”

“Typical is a strong word.” Consciously or not, he stroked his thumb just under the curve of her breast through the sheet. “In my limited experience, though, people are usually even more interested in how each other are doing if clothes-ripping-off is also a thing they like to do.”

She shook her head. “Your limited experience is really different from mine.”

Sadness darkened his eyes, but in the end all he said was, “Humor me.”

“Okay.” She drew out the end of the word. “Um, my week was pretty boring. I worked a lot.”

“Shocking.”

“No, like, a lot a lot.” She twisted a few strands of her hair between her forefinger and her thumb. “Unhealthy a lot.”

She really didn’t want to have to fill in the blanks. The work had been work, because that was what she did. But the unhealthy part of it had all been his fault.

He seemed to hear enough of what she didn’t say, because his expression softened, a soft smile curling his lips. “Okay. More work than normal, even for you. Check. Get anything cool done?”

“Yeah, actually.” And she was preparing to self-censor, except she didn’t have to with him, did she? Letting herself relax, she recapped some of the progress she’d made with her project, told him about her observing run. As she did, she shifted to rest her hand atop his on her belly. “It wasn’t as much fun, though. Babysitting the telescope alone.”

And hadn’t that been a surprise? After all those team projects where she’d fought for the right to work by herself. Now, all of a sudden, she was eager for a partner?

Adam nodded, tapping a finger against her abdomen. “I’ve got another session scheduled with it this week. You wanna come and keep me company?”

“I guess. If I’ve got time.” Inside, her heart leapt at the chance.

“Cool.”

She hesitated before she spoke again. She didn’t have a whole lot else to say about herself, and all week long she’d been wanting to know… had been dying to hear about…

In the end, she decided to ease into it. “How about you? How was your week?”

He gave her a laugh that was almost too easy, too casual. “Not that different from yours, actually. You know how conferences are.”

Oh. So he was going to dance around the subject, too.

She let him, for a little bit. His descriptions of the lectures he’d attended were interesting enough, and there were a couple of papers she’d have to look up when she got into the office tomorrow to learn more. But that wasn’t what she’d been asking.

When he started to wind down, she walked her fingertips up his wrist, watching her own movements instead of his eyes. “And after the conference?”

“Oh. Right.” The motion of his throat, bobbing as he swallowed, drew her gaze. “Shannon came.”

Jo had kind of figured as much, and really, it wasn’t as if she didn’t already know at least part of the outcome. Adam was here with her, after all, naked and postcoital. But uneasiness still plagued her, making her ribs tight. “How did that go?”

“Really well, actually.” His voice went fond and just a little bit wry, and it made her chest squeeze harder. “We had a good time. Went out to dinner, had ice cream, walked around the city.”

The affection in his tone was what did it. Jo wasn’t going to overreact, wasn’t going to screw this whole thing up. But this was important. “Did you fuck her?”

His gaze snapped to hers, creases forming between his eyes, and it was like he hadn’t even considered the question, much less that she would actually want to know the answer. “What? No.”

“It’s a valid question.”

“Of course it is. But… but how could you…” He visibly took measures to calm himself, breathing out through his nose and closing his eyes for a second before sitting up and turning so he faced her. “Believe me,” he said, looking down at her with fire in his gaze, “we would not be lying here like this if I had.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know that?” For all she knew, they could have decided to break it off after getting it on, or figured they’d have one more go at each other before they parted ways.

Or their breakup could have been a whole lot less final than he’d implied.

She squirmed. She didn’t like him having the vantage point over her that he did. Keeping the sheet wrapped around herself, she scooted up the bed, coming to sit with her shoulders braced against the headboard. She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at her feet.

“Jo.” He paused for a beat, waiting before repeating her name. “Jo.”

Ugh, he was doing that thing again where he wanted her to look at him before he told her something. Begrudgingly, she lifted her gaze.

It was such a subtle change. Talking about Shannon, he’d had this warmth to him, this soft affection, but it had been directed at nothing. He’d been looking off into some middle distance. Now all of that was trained on her, layered with that same intensity from before that had made her want to pull away.

She wasn’t sure if it was really all that different at all.

“Look,” he said. “You know me and Shannon were together for a really long time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know how important she was to me. Is. She’ll always be someone I care about.” He put his hand on her leg, pulling her focus and keeping it on him when she wanted to look past him. “But we’re friends. Just friends now. I think we have been for a while.”

He hadn’t acted like it, those first few weeks they’d been here.

“What changed?”

“I don’t know. Me. Her. Everything. We had a good long talk about it, while she was there. About how people can come into each other’s lives at these points when they’re exactly what you need. But then as you grow, maybe things don’t fit so well anymore.” He shrugged. “Sometimes you hang on too long.”

It struck Jo all at once. When Kim had been talking to her about making the most of a summer fling, Jo had doubted her. Nothing about Adam had said short-term. He’d basically already told her that he would throw himself into it and give her everything. And when it was over, when it came time to part ways…

He’d hold on too long.

It was what he did. He loved with the safety off, while Jo scarcely knew how to love at all. Yet she was going to have to be the one to keep whatever this thing between them turned out to be in check. Really, if she wanted to save them both a lot of heartache, if she wanted to keep him from wasting months trying to make this work, she should cut it off now.

But she looked at him, gazing back at her with those guileless eyes. She took in the dirty blond of his hair and the warmth of his cheeks, the cut of his jaw and his shoulders. His chest. There were still so many things she wanted to do with him.

“Yeah,” she said, vaguely helpless to it. “I see how that could happen.”

She did see it, and she knew the smart course of action. But the smart course sucked. There wasn’t any point giving it any real consideration. And anyway, she was smart enough that maybe she could walk the stupid path and not get burned.

Resolve and hope lit in her chest. She could keep both eyes open. She could curb his expectations. When their time was up, she’d let him down gently. And in the meantime, for just a little while, she could have this.

Smiling, oblivious to her decision, he leaned in closer. He took her hand in his. “Long story short, we talked things out. We decided we were better off as friends. And as soon as I could, I caught a flight back here, so I could see you.” With that, he squeezed her palm. He nudged her nose with his own in a gesture that was far too sweet, then caught her lips in a kiss.

It was almost as good as their first kiss—maybe better because she had some clue about what was going on between them now. She parted her mouth and let his tongue inside. Idle sparks of arousal darted from her breasts to between her legs, and if the drape of the sheet was anything to go by, she wasn’t the only one who was ready for another go.

It would be so easy, too. If she just put her hand on his chest, or hell, right on his cock. Kissed him a little deeper or climbed up on his lap, they could be off and running for a second round in no time. After, they could end up the same way they had at the end of their first, holding each other through the afterglow.

She could fall asleep, right here in his bed.

Temptation clawed at her. She’d never really done that before, not on purpose, and he was so warm and held her so nicely.

But they had to pace themselves. It was her job to keep this thing in check.

Groaning out her reluctance, she tore herself away from him. “I should go.”

“You should stay.” He pursued her as she tried to retreat, kissing her and pressing her into the headboard.

“I should go,” she repeated. She shoved at his chest.

He heard her this time. The disappointment on his face killed her, but as he retreated, giving her room to breathe, she took it.

And then fucked everything up, leaning back in to kiss him.

No. No, no, no, no, no. Releasing another noise of frustration, she put a finger over his lips and pushed him away with it. “Okay. Just so we’re clear, I want nothing more than to have you fuck me into this mattress right now.”

She preferred being on top, having control. But seriously, at some point, that was happening.

He visibly twitched beneath the cover of the sheet. Against her finger he got out, “Then why—”

“But it’s getting late. And I really shouldn’t stay here.”

His forehead crinkled. “Why not?”

She scrambled, trying to think of something. Sadly, all she was left with was the truth. Well, a version of it. She dropped her hand from his mouth and slipped past him to start gathering her clothes. “Listen, I know we jumped into bed together pretty fast.” She stopped him before he could question that. “And it was awesome. No regrets. But”—she drew in a deep breath—“I don’t want to rush things.”

I don’t want you to do anything you might regret.

And besides… “I know we’re not going to keep this a secret or anything.” Apparently, everyone knew, just from their flirting. “But Carol will know if I stay out all night, and I don’t want to deal with Jared making comments in the morning. I don’t want to be…” It was part of why she’d always selected her conquests from anonymous clubs. “I don’t want to be the girl who sleeps with the guy.” She wasn’t saying this right. “I need people to respect me.”

His eyes were sad, but he didn’t put up any further protest. Except… “Are you saying you’ll never want to sleep over here?”

Shit. That sounded terrible.

But when he brought up the other aspect of staying the night—the part about how she would be sleeping with him, it made a vulnerable little piece inside of her tremor. It made another piece of her glow.

Fighting both reactions, she took a deep breath. She found her underwear and shorts and drew them on before climbing onto the bed to press an insistent kiss against his lips. “Not never. Just not all the time. And not tonight.”

“Okay.” He didn’t sound entirely happy about it, but he didn’t sound like he wanted to argue anymore, either. He let her go, and she slipped away to claim her bra from the floor.

She was pulling her shirt over her head when he piped up. “I never did get a chance to really look at your tattoo.”

He hadn’t been lying about really, really liking her piercings and ink, huh? “Maybe next time.”

Then he was rising off the bed in all his naked glory, stalking over to her.

“What—” she started.

“Definitely next time.” With that, he grasped her face between his hands and hauled her into a kiss so deep and dirty it stole her breath.

When he let her go, she felt a little dazed. But he didn’t press. He went to his dresser and pulled a fresh pair of underwear from a drawer and stepped into them. For a second, all she could do was stare.

“Next time,” she agreed faintly.

“Okay, then.” When she stood there, staring at him dumbly, he rolled his eyes. “I’m using willpower here to not act like a caveman and drag you back to bed. But if you’re going to go, you should probably do it now.”

Right. She got her socks and boots on and found her binder under his shirt. More or less put together again, she straightened up and cast one last glance at him. Gorgeous, barefoot, shirtless him.

He wasn’t the only one using a hell of a lot of willpower now.

Without another word, she turned to the door. In a few quick strides, she was through it and down the hall and spilling out into the warm night air. She pressed her spine to the door as she pulled it closed behind her.

This was the right decision. No matter how much it felt wrong.

Chapter Thirteen

“You kids got everything you need?” Lisa stretched her arms up overhead, pushing back from the bank of monitors.

Adam cast a quick glance at Jo for confirmation, then smiled and nodded at Lisa as she stood. “Pretty sure we’re good.”

More than good. Great. Once his advisor headed home, it’d be just him and Jo here, manning a bazillion-dollar telescope until three in the morning. Sure, there’d be a tech in the other room, but they’d be more or less alone.

A night with nothing to occupy him except science and a beautiful girl. His girl. He wasn’t sure he could ask for anything more.

Gathering her papers, Lisa ran through his plan for the rest of the night’s data gathering with him, and Adam gave her as much of his attention as he could. Finally, she slung her bag over her shoulder, said her goodbyes, and headed for the exit. Adam watched her as she went, until finally she turned the corner and he heaved a sigh of relief.

“I thought she’d never leave,” he groaned.

Closing the gap he’d been so careful to maintain these past few hours—these past few days, except in the privacy of his room—he hooked an ankle under one of the legs of Jo’s chair and yanked her toward him.

“What the—” she started, but then she was right there, warm and tucked up against him, the seats of their chairs jammed together.

God, he’d been waiting so long to touch.

In the weeks before they’d gotten together, he’d built up the idea of being with her so much; deep down, he’d half worried that finally sleeping with her would take the sheen off, but it had done precisely the opposite. They’d met up twice more in the handful of days since he’d returned from his conference, and each time only made him hungrier. Right now, he was starving.

He leaned in to nose behind her ear, and she gave a little shiver, tipping her neck to the side to give him access, even as she pushed him away.

“Not here,” she insisted.

“But we’re all alone.”

“Miguel’s up in the booth.”

“Half asleep and watching telenovelas on the TV in there. You know he never bothers us after midnight.”

“B-but—” she stuttered as he brushed his lips over her pulse. “Your experiment.” She reached past him toward the data scrolling in.

“The cluster we’re looking at doesn’t set for an hour.”

“But don’t you want to see what you’re collecting?”

“I’d rather see you.” Naked. Three times now they’d taken some or all of their clothes off, and he still hadn’t managed to get a really good look at her back. The tattoo was of an animal, he was pretty sure, and it spanned the length of her spine, rippling waves of black ink curling out across her ribs. A tail or a tip of a wing climbing up onto her neck.

He wanted to lick it.

“You can see me anytime,” she argued.

He wished that were true.

He wanted to press, wanted to talk her into going out on the deck with him, or off to one of the restroom stalls. But she was squirming for real now, the playfulness giving way to actual annoyance.

He sighed. “Fine, if you really insist on me doing my job—”

“I do.”

“Instead of taking you apart with my tongue.” He drew back and raised his brow. It was another thing he hadn’t gotten a chance to do that he was dying to.

For a second her resolve faltered, her gaze flickering to his mouth. But then she took a deep breath and gave him a look that could peel paint off a wall. “Adam.”

The curl of disappointment was only a little one. He’d known who he was getting into bed with when they’d started this.

“Fine, fine.” He could admit when he was beaten. Mostly. He dropped his hand from her waist, but when she made to roll to her side of the desk, he locked his ankle behind the wheel of her chair, holding her there.

“What—”

“One kiss.” He held up his hands and showed her his cheek.

“You have got to be kidding me.” But she didn’t grumble too much before leaning in.

At the last second, he turned his head, darting in to cup her jaw and hold her there as he pressed his lips to hers. He swept his tongue over the loop of metal and then past it and into her mouth.

And it was the last thing he’d been expecting, but she opened to his kiss. Let him deepen it and keep her close. Her fingers dug into his arm, her teeth scraping just right against his tongue, and for a minute, he could honestly believe she wanted this as much as he did.

But he wasn’t going to push.

With more than a little reluctance, he pulled away, pressing one last kiss to her lips before releasing his foot. She stayed there, gazing at him with bitten lips and dark eyes for the span of a breath. Then she seemed to remember herself. Easing off slowly, she steered her chair to where it belonged. She picked up her pencil and turned the page of her notebook, and just like that, she was back to work.

Which was probably what he should be doing, too.

Returning to the monitor in front of him, he clicked over to the graph the computer was building from the readings streaming in. He bounced his knee up and down, fighting to stay focused as he reviewed the numbers. But it was a losing battle.

The thing was, the actual work of an astronomer wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was waiting for objects in the sky to rise and set, and analyzing data, and sitting around for hours on end. More often than not, it was about plodding and patience. Nights like this, it was just plain boring. While the woman beside him was anything but.

She was a puzzle and a mystery and just about the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. Already, just looking at her or thinking about her had his chest pounding too hard. He wanted to figure her out, to literally and figuratively strip her bare.

He wanted to know her. And if she wasn’t going to sleep with him during his shift, the least she could do was talk to him.

Giving up, he let his gaze drift to the side. Jo was bent to her notes, the metallic glint of her lip ring sharp against her teeth, the long, pale column of her neck exposed. The skin looked beautiful and naked where it disappeared beneath her shirt, the side she’d turned to him devoid of ink or ornamentation.

He paused. That first time she’d tried to kiss him, the night before he’d left to finish things with Shannon, Jo had been wearing a necklace. Before she’d made her move, he’d fixated on that bit of delicateness draped across her collarbone. He’d lifted his hand to touch it, had traced the silver chain to just beneath the hollow of her throat, and she’d told him…

“What?”

Adam blinked, and he was back in the present, in the observatory in the middle of the night, miles of inches between his body and hers. She was looking at him, one eyebrow cocked, a half-grin stealing across her face like she’d caught him doing something particularly lecherous, and like she didn’t mind.

His gaze dropped instinctively to her breasts, but only for a moment. Because he’d said these words before. “You don’t usually wear jewelry.”

“Excuse you?” She touched the studs in her ear and the hoop through her lip. “These aren’t enough for you?” She glanced around before lowering her hand to graze her nipple. “This isn’t enough?”

Heat flooded him. “Believe me. They’re more than enough. It’s just…” Rolling his chair closer, he circled her wrist and moved her arm to the side. He settled his fingertips at the dip where her shoulder met her neck, trailing them down to where the pendant would have hung. “The other night. You wore a necklace. I haven’t seen you wear it since.”

Her smile bled from her lips, and shutters seemed to fall, one by one, across her eyes. She pushed his hand away. “No. I haven’t.” She said it like a challenge, only he didn’t know to what.

“Why? It was…” He trailed off before settling on, “Pretty.”

She flinched. “Guess I just don’t feel like looking pretty very often.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you?”

And that was the question, wasn’t it? He tried to put it into words, licking his lips and closing his hand around nothing. The little bit of decoration had been striking, for sure, a contrast to the utility of how she usually dressed. It had drawn his attention to the fragile parts of herself she rarely showed.

The ones she never spoke about. Except that once.

Swallowing, he lifted his gaze to meet hers. “You told me it was your mom’s.”

And he watched all the color drain from her face.

Shit. Jo really had said that, hadn’t she? Adam had looked at her that way he tended to, with that weird mix of reverence and lust, and he’d asked her about the necklace, and she’d just given it up.

Inside her chest, her heart started racing, adrenaline flooding her veins. And she knew that fight or flight was a reflex, was a choice people made based on instinct, but it had never struck her as much of a choice at all.

She fought. And if you fought hard enough, if you fought people before they even imagined they should make the first strike, they tended to run. It saved you the effort of having to fly yourself. It saved you ever having to fight or fly from them again, because they knew. They understood what they were dealing with.

But Adam was sitting there, his knees almost touching hers, his gaze expectant. The skin of her throat burned from his touch, and her lips were kiss-bitten and damp.

The very first thing she’d ever done was attack him. And yet here he still was, pushing her. He hadn’t run.

And for the first time in her life, she didn’t want to fight him off.

She closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. Setting her pencil down, she braced her elbows on the desk and dropped her head into her hands. “Yeah. It was.”

A tentative hand settled on her shoulder. She stiffened beneath the weight but didn’t shake him off. “Are you okay?”

Was she ever okay? “I’m fine.”

“You don’t seem fine.”

He was the one who’d had to go and ask her revealing questions. Then he wanted to give her a hard time when she reacted badly? Bullshit. “What do you want to know?”

“You don’t have to tell me anything.”

She lifted her head to glance at him through narrowed eyes. “You asked me about my mother for a reason.”

“I asked you about your necklace.”

Right. “As a way of asking me about my mom.”