Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,61
and maybe it would be my brother who was dead. Or Pops. Or Annie. For sure you’d be dead. Blown up by your own damn bomb. So, I’m glad I came back. And now…” He stared up at the sky for a long time. So long, I didn’t think he was going to say anything. But finally he laughed. “Fuck. I’ve got four days in a condo by the beach with no brothers at my back. No Lagan. No drug deal. Nothing except a bunch of prospects who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
“You could just…walk away. You did it before. You could do it again.”
Max stretched his hands wide, looking at the muscles and the tattoos. Or maybe it was me looking at the muscles and the tattoos.
“Jesus, Max, don’t you see?” I said. “You’re getting a second chance. Like…a real one.”
He didn’t say anything and I understood that, too. Laying claim to something, owning up that you wanted more than you had was like asking for it to be taken away.
And second chances were a fucking miracle for people like us, because all our chances were used up before we were even born. For a second, I was so jealous I couldn’t breathe. My throat was clogged with envy.
He got the light of a new day and I was heading down so dark a road, I couldn’t even see the end of it.
It would be better when I got Jennifer back. It would be worth something once she was free. I would do anything for her shot at a second chance.
“I’m glad,” I said, the words squeezing through the tightness in my throat. “For you.”
“Joan—”
He reached for me and I shrugged away so fast I hit my shoulder on the lawn chair.
“Don’t…just don’t.”
It seemed proof of something, the way I turned away from comfort. The way he curled his outstretched fingers into a fist and then reached for his beer as if he’d never reached for me.
“You’ve got this bright, shiny new chance,” I said. “You don’t want to get involved with me. I get it. I’d only fuck it up.”
“No!” he said. “God, no, Joan. That’s not it.”
I laughed at him. Or at myself. I wasn’t sure. I was laughing at something and it wasn’t all that funny.
Laugh or cry, that’s where I was. That’s where I lived. Black and white. Survive or die.
“Listen to me.” His hand grabbed mine and I tried to wiggle it free, but he wasn’t letting go. “You want to fuck, let’s do it. Let’s burn down the fucking place. We got that in us…between us. But when it’s over…all I’ll leave you are bruises. Because that’s all I have to give you. And a few months ago, fuck…two days ago, that would have been fine.”
“Why not now?”
He didn’t answer the question. And I didn’t, either. Neither one of us wanted to talk about what had changed between us. The shit we’d shown each other—told each other…it made everything more dangerous. In ways I couldn’t even see in the shadows we lived in.
“You got enough bruises, Joan.”
Oh God, he wasn’t staying away from me to protect himself. He was doing it for me.
“So do you,” I said, and he nodded.
He was right. He was exactly right. There’d be no comfort between us. There would only be more pain.
So, I left him there. His bruises and his tattoos black in the light of the glowing blue pool.
Chapter 17
I went to sleep on the love seat, but I woke up alone in the bed. The sheets beside me were cold, but the pillow next to mine still carried the dent from his head.
He’d moved me in the night. Picked me up in his tattooed arms despite his hurt ribs and carried me into the bedroom. And then didn’t spoon me, or try to seduce me. He didn’t even cup my breast.
Bastard.
Screw him and his kindness and respect. He didn’t have to rub it in.
I crawled out of bed, feeling a little like I’d been hit by a car. I’d slept so hard, for perhaps the first time since we got down here. The clock on the microwave in the kitchen said 10:30.
Jesus. Almost twelve hours of sleep.
“Max?” I said. He wasn’t in the living room or the bathroom. There was no note from him.
Perfect.
I’d had this thought last night, before drifting off, that I would go back down to Eric and ask if he could put some kind of spyware on Max’s phone.