a girl. She was in college. I was in Phoenix for about a month when it happened. I’d found a job and was living in this crappy motel while I saved up to fix my car.”
“You wrote that check to fix your car?” According to the reports she’d read, he’d cashed a check for two thousand dollars written to himself.
“I didn’t write the check at all,” he said with a sigh. “The girl I was seeing, she wrote it and convinced me to cash it. She said she couldn’t cash it herself because she was in trouble with the bank, so she had her mom write it out to me. I know. I was stupid.”
“You didn’t get the money?” It was worse than she’d imagined. Not on the guilt side. On the naïve idiot side. He could have done serious time for forgery and he hadn’t even gotten the money? He’d been trying to help someone, and he’d been burned hard.
He shook his head. “Nope. I did what she asked and turned the money over to her. When the police showed up, I was arrested and my girlfriend’s mom bought her story that I’d stolen the check and she had no idea I was doing it. I got a public defender, and lucky for me, he was actually pretty decent both at his job and as a human being. He made a deal with the DA. If I pled out, they reduced the charges. I would get six months and likely would do about half if I behaved. My brother actually came and picked me up when I got out. He’s the only one who knows what really happened. I don’t know if he believes me or not. Probably not, but at least he trusts me now.”
She believed him. He’d been barely eighteen. “They didn’t want to bring in a handwriting expert?”
“I couldn’t make bail, Roxie. If I’d fought it, I would have sat there for maybe longer than the actual sentence,” he explained. “I know I could have called my mother, but that seemed worse than jail. As soon as I got out, I went home and I actually got my priorities in line. That was when I went to community college and I met the vet who runs the shelter in Houma.”
That was when he’d started to dream. Then he’d sacrificed to help his family, the same one he wanted so desperately to hide his mistakes from. He should be hard with a hundred walls up. That time in jail should have taught him to protect himself, yet here he was every day giving to the people around him. Why hadn’t she seen past his gorgeous looks and bad reputation to the real man inside? “You don’t owe your brother your entire future.”
She had the most insane urge to sit on his lap and wrap her arms around him. Seeing him like this was softening her up in ways she hadn’t imagined. Or perhaps she had, and it was exactly why she’d stayed away from him.
“It’s not like I’m doing anything with it.”
But he was. He was helping a lot of people. He was kind. Wasn’t that something? He was right. Not everyone got their dream job. Not everyone’s dream was a job. It was hard to imagine because she’d always wrapped up her own self-worth in her job. She followed her instinct now and got up, moving toward him. He looked a bit surprised as she eased onto his lap, but his arm went around her waist.
“I was fooling myself about you.” She put her hands on his cheeks and looked him right in the eyes, willing him to believe her. “I felt something when I met you, and it wasn’t lust. It was more. I told myself I could have one night and then walk away. The same way I’m telling myself I can have a week with you and walk away.”
“I don’t want you to walk away.”
“But, Zep, you have to understand that I never meant to stay here. I always meant for this place to be temporary for me.”
He hugged her tight and let his forehead rest against hers. “I understand. Whatever we have is not going to last.”
Hearing him say the words hurt her heart. “Can we not make a decision right this second? The truth is, I don’t have any interviews coming up. Who knows? I might be here for another year or two. We don’t know what could happen. I’ve tried