Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,87

Not ever. And maybe I never would again.

And the grief of that would put me on my knees if I said the words.

And how would I get up from that? How would I save my sister from my knees? With a hole in my heart?

It served no purpose.

“You were Plan B for getting my sister back,” I said, looking right into his eyes, sending a terrible ripple all across his calm. “And now you’re in the way. Take the car. Take what’s yours. And go.”

Max

I listened to her leave, expecting slamming doors but getting only silence.

Yes, Joan knew how to leave. It was surgical, her leaving. Clean cuts. Nothing that lingered. I wasn’t even bleeding.

Fuck, she was good. Cold as ice except when we’d been kissing.

I’d been the one wanting something more. Some bone tossed my way.

I fell back on the bed feeling like I’d been turned inside out.

Beneath me, my phone, forgotten in the sheets, rang, and I lifted my right shoulder and found it.

Dylan.

Dylan was calling me back.

Now.

I shouldn’t answer it, I knew that. I was restless and pissed and hurt and looking for a fight. Despite that—or maybe because of it—I answered the phone.

“Hey.”

“Hey!” The happiness in his voice made me close my eyes. “I got your message. How are you doing?”

Weeks ago, Dylan had come to me at the club when he’d been a mess about Annie. About the life he was living and how hard it could be to break out of the shit box he’d built himself. And I’d sat beside him on the roof of a car drinking warm beer and felt like I’d been knit back together for a few minutes. Like all the things I’d been living without had revisited me for an hour.

And then he’d left me, taken that stuff with him again—packing up my heart and my soul and all my good memories with him like clothes in a suitcase. But he’d gone on to make a better life with Annie. He’d gone on to be brave and bold. And in my meager life, I was proud to have been a part of that. In whatever way. Even if it was to show him what he didn’t want. What a mistake looked like.

Oh fuck.

I put my arm over my eyes.

“Max? You all right?”

No.

“Do you…do you ever wish I’d never made you move in with Miguel and his family when you got out of jail?”

That was what I asked, but the real question I was asking was: do you ever wish we could have been a family like we used to be? You and me against the world? Did you miss me like I missed you?

I heard Dylan’s long, slow exhale. Like, in a way, he’d been waiting for this question.

“No,” he said.

It was the right answer. Just like Joan telling me to leave was the right answer.

But it still hurt.

“What I wish though,” Dylan said, twisting the knife. “Was that you’d come with me. I wish…I wish you would have seen that you deserved that shot, too. That you didn’t have to ruin your life to save mine.”

“There’s a cost to everything, Dylan,” I said. “And the fact that you don’t know that just means I did the right thing.”

“Fuck you, you don’t think I know that? Look at me, asshole.” Dylan said with an angry laugh. I could see those scars on his face from the fire. I saw them on the backs of my eyelids every night before I went to bed. “What I’m saying is the cost didn’t have to be you.”

“I didn’t have anything else to give up,” I sighed. I still didn’t. Except this second chance of mine. I could give that up. And would in a heartbeat, if I could only figure out how.

“You know what I told myself when I was living with Miguel and I was so pissed at you? That you didn’t care about what happened to me.”

“You know I cared.”

“Now I do. Then I didn’t. How could I? You vanished, man. You chose the club over me.”

“The club was what I had instead of you. It was all I had.”

“Then you give up the fucking club, Max.”

It was like having the back of my head blown off. It was like having my whole world rearranged.

“You don’t push everyone you love away for a group of men who are going to shoot you in the dirt.”

Give up the club. For Joan. For a few extra days. For a shot at