Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,57

classic movie spit-take. I swallowed down my own laugh with a sip from my bottle.

“No,” he said definitively. “It doesn’t count.”

“What about you?”

“Hell no.”

“Were you ever close?”

He blinked like the question was a weird one and then he shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe. High school girlfriend. She was…real good to me. Good to my brother. I would have married her for sure.”

“What happened?”

“She was a good girl. Smart enough to dump my ass once I got heavy into the club.”

“You’re breaking my heart. I was close once, too. I mean to marriage. A real one.”

“The bad boyfriend with the fake badges.”

“No, Bad Boyfriend #2 came after Hector. I was with Hector for two years. Two really good years.”

“What happened?”

“What always happens. I got scared. Fucked it up.”

“Here’s to fucking it up,” he said and held out his bottle. I laughed and tapped mine to his.

He took a sip of beer and watched me over the bottle. The bruises on his face and his ribs were black in the shadows. The combination of the tattoos, the very real whiff of danger that rolled off him, and the weird smiling condition he was currently suffering from made him look like a recently released inmate.

Possibly of a mental ward.

“You don’t look like a man on a honeymoon,” I said.

“What?” He pretended to be offended.

I pointed to my own eye.

“Right. Maybe my bachelor party got out of control.”

“Maybe you like me to beat the shit out of you?”

He chuckled. “Not likely, honey.”

He cut through more of his steak, demolishing the thing in record time. I drank more beer, trying to squelch this strange fire in my belly.

“So, tell me about your aunt.”

I scowled at him. “I thought we were on vacation.”

“We are. I am making vacation conversation.”

I laughed, without much humor. “I may be new at this, but Aunt Fern is not vacation conversation.”

“I should know something, right, since we’re family now.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You guys close?”

Not at all. I didn’t have to say it.

“What happened?”

“She’s was woman who didn’t understand kids. I was a teenager bent on destruction. The usual.”

“Nothing—absolutely nothing about you is usual.”

Was that respect? I didn’t look over to make sure.

“She took me and my sister in when my dad died. I was sixteen. I was angry. She didn’t know what to do with us. We…we didn’t stand a chance.”

“Where was your mom?”

“She died when Jennifer was a baby. Heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Why don’t you tell Fern about your sister and Lagan? Maybe she could help.”

“Help? No. She won’t help.”

“She’ll blame you?” His words were a sharp jab so I said nothing. I sucked in my breath.

“I deserve to be blamed,” I said. “It’s my fault. What happened to Jennifer, it’s all my fault.”

“Somehow I doubt it.”

The underwater lights made the pool glow blue at the bottom but black at the top. Like it was covered in a thin layer of solid dark Wisconsin lake ice.

I turned away fast so I couldn’t see the pool, not even from the corner of my eye and somehow with the movement, I just started talking. It was like the words I had denied and held back and swallowed over and over again, had been waiting, for just such a shift, so they could make their escape.

“Bad Boyfriend #2, with the badges, he took all my money. I had to drop out of nursing school and Jennifer and I had to work a bunch of crappy jobs just to get back on our feet. It was…it was a really awful time. And then I lost my job at this shithole restaurant along the highway outside of Raleigh,” I said, not looking at him. Not looking at anything, really. Certainly not that pool.

“And I wanted…God, I wanted to just give up. Just crawl into a hole and sleep. But there was this woman that came into the truck stop all the time. Nice lady. Older than me. She found out I got fired and she offered to let Jen and me come stay with her out at her farm. Jen didn’t want to go. She had a job at a mall, piercing little kids’ ears. She loved it. And I was sort of pissed at her because she was like genius smart and she’d dropped out of college and all she wanted to do was work in this stupid mall with these stupid kids. We couldn’t live off what she made and we didn’t have money for rent. So there wasn’t any choice. Again. Having

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