“Everything.” I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Uttered exactly how I felt. When had I done that around Aiden?

The coiled tension eked out of him. His gaze brushed over my face. “I want to know everything.”

Did he though? “I grew up on bags of cheap cereal and mac and cheese. Off-brand toilet paper. The kind that left behind more than it took.” My cheeks burned, but Sophie’s pep talk rang in my brain. Aiden didn’t flinch from the bathroom talk. He hadn’t moved, and that hard length compressed between us branded itself into my belly, but he waited. “When Mom married Randall, it was the first time my brothers and I experienced brats and burgers on the grill.”

“While my family was cooking up prime cuts every weekend?” No sarcasm laced his words. He was stating a fact.

“Randall moved us from a single-wide with a leaky roof and a mouse infestation to a double-wide. A nice double-wide, in a trailer park that didn’t make the news because someone had been found shot or stabbed. But I still couldn’t walk to the bus stop by myself because the guy on the corner gave everyone under the age of eighteen the creeps.” That was a danger in many neighborhoods, but as a kid, it’d felt like a me problem because my family didn’t have as much money as others.

“The point being that we grew up differently.” Another plain statement.

“I woke up for school and Mom was plunging the clogged kitchen sink. She would be in her robe, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Or the car didn’t start when it was twenty below zero because we had no garage and the extension cord to plug in the engine heater kept getting stolen. And when Matt called to get bailed out, Mom brought me along. A little life lesson for both me and Mattie. I knew the police station’s front-desk folks on a first-name basis by the time I was thirteen.”

Jason hadn’t been better; he’d just never gotten caught.

His gaze roamed my face, leaving traces of heat that were all but tangible. “I bet you were a good girl because of that.”

“Mom had it hard enough. I didn’t hang out in a bad crowd, even if it meant I didn’t have many friends.” It was why I liked being involved in wrestling with Jason. I was part of a group, and while I wasn’t the life of the party, all of Jason’s teammates just kind of accepted my presence.

Maybe I hadn’t changed that much for Aiden. I had defaulted to my people-pleasing ways, molding myself into what the people in my life needed.