“It’s comfortable.” He wrapped his hand around my wrist, steadying me. “Mona does like her whiskey.”

Yeah, duh. Jax knew Mom. Our gazes collided, and I thought . . . I could tell him this. “I thought . . . I’d be like her if I drank, you know? Doing dumb stuff and . . . I saw things done to her when she was drinking.”

An alertness seemed to bleed into Jax, and maybe later, when there wasn’t so much tequila sloshing around inside me, I’d realize that he was nowhere in the near vicinity of being as trashed as I was. “What kind of things?”

Rocking back so my butt was pressed against my calves, I knew I shouldn’t tell him the things I’d seen. No one wanted to hear that. It was messy. It was ugly. Not ugly like the scars on my body, but deeper and nasty.

But I had tequila tongue. “The first time—and it was the first because it happened more than once—she was having a party. She was always having parties, but this night it was late and I was thirsty. I had a cold or the flu. Something. I needed to get something to drink. I had to come downstairs. Mom had told me before not to come downstairs when she was having parties, but I had to.”

“I get you,” he said quietly. “How old were you?”

Shrugging, I struggled to flip through my memories. “Twelve, I think? I don’t know. It wasn’t too long after . . . well, anyway, I came downstairs and there were people passed out on the floor, and I heard Mom. She was making these weird noises—not good noises and her bedroom door was open. I looked in, and she was on the floor. Some guy was with her. He was . . .” I shook my head slowly, seeing the fuzzy, cloudy images in my head. “Mom saw me. So did the guy. She freaked, and I ran upstairs. She’d been so drunk that night.”

His chest rose sharply. “Did any of those guys ever . . . mess with you?”

I stared at him a moment and then laughed. It wasn’t funny. It was far from being funny, but back then . . . I looked worse than I did now. “No.”

“That doesn’t make it any better.”

“No. I guess not.”

“I’ve seen people get themselves in stupid situations while drinking and I’ve seen some in really precarious ones,” he said, his brown eyes serious. “You don’t have to worry about any of that here. You’re safe to enjoy yourself.”

“Thank you,” I said, thinking that needed to be said.

“But God damn, Calla . . .” His fingers squeezed my wrist gently as a hard look entered his eyes. “You shouldn’t have seen shit like that.”

“I know, but I did and there aren’t any take-backs in life.” I trailed off as his gaze held mine. I wished he thought I was pretty and that his kiss had been real. “But it’s not like that. Tequila is better than whiskey.”