“Thanks, Dr. Lloyd,” he said bitterly, moving away from me. “You want me to pay you fifty bucks for that insight, or can I go now?”
He stood without waiting for my response.
I jumped off the sofa and ran in front of him. He towered over me, our normally fair height difference drastically changed by the fact I was barefoot.
He stepped to the side, and I did, too.
“No.” I shook my head and pointed to the sofa. “Sit down.”
His jaw clenched. “I’m done.”
“Well, I’m not.” I stepped closer to him.
He dipped his head so his face was inches from mine. Until I could read the anger on the lines on his forehead and in the depths of his eyes.
Until I didn’t give a crap any longer.
Annoyance boiled, catching and flaring like a flame on a gas station floor. It burned red-hot inside me, tickling my skin and filling me with adrenaline.
It pumped through my heart. Wildly and harshly.
“I don’t care if you think you’re done just because you don’t like the truth. Ever since I met you, you never have liked the truth. It doesn’t play in your little world.” The words burst out of me like poison.
If it stung him, he didn’t show it.
“You’d rather live in a web of lies and sit on a throne of bullshit if it means you can do it easily and without that pesky thing called emotion. But I’m not that person. If you had any idea just how many things I’m terrified of right now, you’d shut your mouth and listen.” I jabbed him in the chest. “I’m not done talking to—”
He grabbed my wrist, peeling my finger away from his chest. “I am.”
Yanking my wrist from his grip, I stared at him, and in a deathly quiet voice, I said, “Damien Fox, you sit your ass back on that sofa right the fuck now.”
He didn’t move.
“I don’t know why I care, but I do, and that’s one of the things I’m scared about right now. So help me, you will sit back down and listen to me until I say I’m done talking.”
My stomach clenched.
His throat bobbed as he swallowed.
Then, he moved.
Back.
To the sofa.
And he sat down.
I bit the inside of my cheek and joined him back on the sofa. He rubbed his hand down his face, pinching his nose. The end credits of the movie filled the tense silence that hung in the air between us.
There were many things I wanted to say, I just didn’t know how. All the words seemed to disappear from my mind, but the silence was welcoming at the same time. It added a lull to the flash of high emotion we’d just shared. It brought it from boiling to a soft simmer.
“I know that you’re doing it to hide some kind of pain because I did it, too.” The first admission was said softly. “When I was ten.”
He drew in a quiet breath. “When your mom…”
“Disappeared from the pictures in the hallway?” I finished for him, meeting those devastating, dark eyes of his. “When she died, yeah. I remember everything. I was in school, my dad was at work, and my mom was running errands. Getting things ready for my grandfather’s birthday a few days later, stuff like that.”
I picked at a loose thread on the bottom of my old, NKOTB concert tee.
Had I ever told the story in its entirety?
No. Not once.
So why am I now?
“She was driving when someone shot at her in her car. It was a drive-by. Two bullets went straight through her window and into her. Nobody else was shot, and the car disappeared, so the police said it was an arranged hit. We found out after it had all been a mistake. It was a planned hit, but not for her. The gunman had fucked up and shot her instead of the person he was supposed to shoot.”
The lump in my throat. God, it hurt. I couldn’t breathe through it and I couldn’t swallow it. Nothing worked. It was lodged there, absorbing my pain, swelling with every word I spoke.
“They rushed her to the hospital and into surgery. I remember coming out of school to my mom’s best friend who took me to the hospital to tell me. I thought it was my grandfather who was sick. Then my dad told me. Someone had deliberately shot my mom, and the surgeons didn’t know if she would survive it.”
Eyes.
My eyes stung, and it took everything I had to blink it back. It all flashed through my head on an endless loop leaving me to pick and change the scenes as I relived them, over and over and over again.
“The details are where I’m fuzzy. I was too young to understand, but her lungs had blood in them where one bullet had hit her and there was swelling and water in her brain or something. I can’t really remember, but they told us that we needed to be prepared for the worst. That she probably wasn’t going to last the night.”