Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,81
I needed to beg for it from people who could give him what he deserved. What he needed. Otherwise it didn’t mean anything. You understand that?”
Down to my bones and in my blood. It was in every single beat of my heart.
The waitress wearing a pink Spotted Pig T-shirt came by with a pot of coffee. She filled our cups and apologized for making us wait so long.
“Do you know what you want?” she asked.
I caught Max’s eye. Do you know what you want? What a question. Yeah. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to get Jennifer free. And I couldn’t do it myself.
Trust. I had to trust someone. And I needed to ask for help.
“I’m sorry, do you need a few more minutes?” she asked.
No. I didn’t need any more time. I’d wasted too much time already.
I was going to have to trust Fern. And then Eric.
Who do you trust? I thought watching Max. Wishing for a just a quick second that it could be me. That would be nice. To not be alone because someone needed me instead of the other way around.
“Hello?” the waitress said, because Max and I had been caught in a stare, eye-fucking each other.
“I’ll have the pulled pork eggs Benedict,” I said.
“I’ll have the peach pancakes.”
Hard to say, looking back, but maybe that’s when I fell in love with him.
Chapter 21
Max
She was going to do it. I could tell. She was silent all the way back to the condo, staring out the window with her thumbnail in her mouth.
She was going to go to Eric and get the help she needed. Which was good for her.
Incredibly, impossibly bad for me.
There were about twenty things the feds could charge me with regarding that drug deal. And my being in her life in any way might make the help she got from the feds more complicated.
I have to go.
The wind blew her hair across her neck and I curled my fingers around the steering wheel so I wouldn’t touch her. Wouldn’t stroke those hairs back from her neck, cup her shoulder in my hand. Slide my fingers under that ridiculous unicorn T-shirt.
We pulled into the parking garage and stepped out into the muggy heat of midday Florida.
I felt very keenly the gaze of Eric’s cameras on my neck as we walked into the building. In the main lobby there were a number of people moving furniture and setting things up, I assumed for the cocktail party.
The women all recognized us and shouted hellos. Joan and I lifted our hands in awkward greetings. We weren’t used to all this unwarranted enthusiasm. I couldn’t speak for Joan, but I didn’t particularly trust it. Or want it.
“I’m so glad you’re here!” Nancy came across the sunny room to us.
Joan and I both took infinitesimal steps back. “Fern has all the highball glasses in her condo. Would you mind going to get them?” she asked.
“Um…sure,” Joan said and we headed toward the wing with our condo unit and Fern’s on the floor beneath ours in it. We got to the end of the hallway and the stairs and I pushed open the door.
“You don’t have to come with me,” she said.
“It’s no big deal—”
“Max. I don’t want you to come with me.”
Her green eyes met mine, and I realized she didn’t want me there when she went to talk to Fern.
I got it. Begging was private work.
“Yeah. Sure. My leg’s hurting like a bitch anyway.”
She fished the keys to the condo out of her pocket and handed them over to me. I had the foreign instinct to lean in and kiss her forehead. The kind of thing I saw my dad do to my mom about seven hundred times a day when the times were good.
And I realized Pops probably didn’t even realize when he’d done it for the last time. Maybe he didn’t even remember it.
Sometimes goodbye looked nothing like goodbye.
Joan
I knocked on Fern’s door and then, like the teenager I hadn’t been in forever, I wiped my sweating palms on my shorts.
“Nancy!” Her voice called from inside. “Come on in.”
I pushed open the door and stuck my head inside. “Hey, Fern. It’s not Nancy, it’s Joan.”
There was the brush of feet over carpet and then Fern stood in the hallway wearing a robe and towel drying her hair. “Is Max all right?” she asked.
“Fine. I mean, his leg is sore but he’s…he’s fine.”