Jamie came home with me that night. I cooked dinner for him, and even had Julia stay over at Nate's house. I sat him down once I had finished cooking. "There are a few things I need to tell you." He nodded for me to continue, "The biggest thing is that I'm a recovering alcoholic."

He nodded, "I kind of figured. You have no alcohol in the apartment, not even mouth wash. You also don't smoke, and the only reason you take pain medication is when people force you to." He noticed that I tried to stay away from all addictive substances.

I rubbed the back of my neck, "It's that obvious huh?" He nodded, "Are you mad I didn't tell you?"

He laughed, "If there's one thing I've learned about you, you don't tell people things about yourself in the order they happened. You tell them in the order you think is important and don't care what other people think is important. That's fine with me, but Nate cornered me last week and finally told me. He said you were being too chicken about it and I deserved to know."

What? Nate had never done this with any of the guys I dated in my twenties. But then again, a lot of the guys I dated in my twenties were not fit to bring home to show off. Quite frankly I was lucky I didn't get and STD from a few of them.

"He did?" Jamie nodded, "Oh. What else did he tell you?"

"That was it. He said you had to grow some balls and tell me everything else." Well now I had two people giving me deadlines on when to tell Jamie things. It was a good thing I had planned on doing so tonight.

"That sounds like Nate. But just because I'm an alcoholic doesn't mean you're not allowed to drink around me. I usually have enough self control not to want to steal someone's drink." I just went after the bottle they had open.

"But you'll go after the bottle, right?"

I laughed, "Yeah. When we go out to eat, or if we ever go to your place, you can drink. I just ask that you don't drink here."

"I can do that. Besides, this may be healthy for me, not being able to drink all that often."

I shook my head, "That's not my intention. It's your decision on when and where you drink, if you do at all. When the whole crew has barbecues, we have alcohol there, but there is also a separate bowl for the few of us who are alcoholics. And we are watched like hawks the entire time to make sure we don't drink."

"I'm sure people don't do that. They're probably considerate enough to let you have some dignity."

I smirked and shook my head, "I'm one of the people who watch the other alcoholics every time they take a sip, so I would know." He was kind enough not to ask their names.

"Ok, anything else I should know?"

I sighed, "About this? No." He waited for me to continue, "But I should tell you about my last foster home." I took a deep breath and told him the whole story. "How in depth do you want me to go on this?"

He looked me in the eye, "I want to know everything." I thought he would.

"Ok." I made sure to look him in the eye the entire time, and slowed when I could tell he needed to process what I just told him. "This wasn't the first foster home I was abused at. Do you remember me telling you that?" He nodded, "The only one I wasn't abused at was when I lived on the streets, and then at Jared's house."

He interrupted me, "And Jared is Julia's biological father."

"Yes. Basically we dating before I had to leave his house. He was my first kiss. But after a month or so, his mom couldn't afford to keep me in her house, so she had to put me back in foster care. I was placed in a home near the border. It turned out that that home was an underground human trafficking ring; specifically teenage girls." I let him process that. "Because the family wanted to get into the foster care system to harness the girls there, they kept me. The first week they started torturing me. My foster father was a sadist." I had to stop to take a deep breath. I continued to tell him everything I had told Nate those first few months in the hospital. When I told him what my foster father had done with the tazer he just gasped. I told him how I was so malnourished that Frank didn't even recognize me when he found me. I told him how I didn't speak for months, and how even now if my vocal cords are strained, my throat closes up and I can't talk. Then I told him how I was tortured again in the army. "My shoulder blade was cracked. Even today I still have trouble with it sometimes. It's been broken two more times since then." I asked if he wanted to see all the scars and he nodded. I took off everything except my bra and underwear and moved out from behind the counter. He saw the cuts to my ankles, the permanent scar from the shackle on my wrist, the faint scar going down the middle of my stomach, and little knife marks on my thighs. I lifted my head up and pointed at the scar that ran along my jawbone. "This was from my father. He nearly broke my jaw with that one and this was from corrective surgery years later."

I showed him the burn from a fire I got caught in before 9/11. "I had been in the department for three years when 9/11 happened. I'm almost 33 Jamie." He smiled a little bit at that. "I've been in the department for 13 years."

I could see the shock on his face, "I was there on 9/11." It seemed I was telling him this secret too. "I was hung over that day. My captain told me to stay by the truck and help people coming out while the rest of the team went up." I wiped a few tears from my eyes while Jamie handed me my shirt and led me to the couch, "None of them came down alive." He just pulled me to him and let me lean against him, "We never found some of their bodies. They were just incinerated." After a few seconds I continued, "There was one of our army buddies who was in the hospital the same time Nate and I were. He joked that if I wasn't married by the time I was 35, that he'd marry me." I didn't mean to scare Jamie with that, but it just slipped out. "We had been dating on and off since then. He would only stay with me when I was sober, which wasn't often."

"There's more, isn't there?" He said after a few minutes.

I nodded, "Yeah. That's one of the reasons I haven't dated in years. I tried a few times when Julia was little, but it never worked out. They were scared off by my past." I dried my eyes, "I can't have kids because of all the harm done to my body over the years. I have just enough eggs to keep my hormones in balance most of the time, but the doctors said that the egg will never be able to attach to my uterine wall. About half of the time I have to take additional hormone supplements to account for it." I sat up and pulled away from him.

He just gulped. "Ok. But there are other options too."

I shook my head, "I'm too screwed up to ever be aloud to adopt, and my eggs are damaged so they could never hold in another person's body. I don't want kids Jamie. Julia is enough for me." I wiped my eyes some more. "I've known about this since I was seventeen Jamie, and I never wanted kids before that. I won't change my mind." I took another breath, "If this is a deal breaker for you, I understand. But you need to be gone when morning comes if that's so."

I walked away from him into my bedroom. Jamie and I hadn't had sex yet, and I needed him to know this before we did. I sat on my bed, curled my legs into my chest and let the tears fall; afraid of what would come in the morning.