Ronan’s glance flicked to me and back. “Is it true you lived in a car?”
My skin burned, and I looked away. “You’ve been on campus for all of ten minutes, and you heard that already? A new record. Yes. A long time ago. No one seems to be able to forget it.”
“Then make them forget.”
“How?”
He shrugged again.
“The guy you punched? His dad’s a cop.”
Ronan’s lips curled in a smile that was mostly a snarl. “Fuck them both.”
“What do you have against cops?”
He said nothing, and we kept walking.
We arrived in my neighborhood of rundown cement boxes with rusted wrought iron over every window. Ronan stopped and stared at one corner apartment on the second floor. A TV could be heard blaring through the torn screen.
“That you?”
He nodded.
“I’m a block down.”
He didn’t move, and I had a feeling come over me. A strange, out-of-body kind of reaction, one usually reserved for when a song lyric falls into place so fucking perfectly it was as if it didn’t come from me but from somewhere else.
Show him the shack.
“You need to get home?” I asked him.
“Home.” He snorted the word. “No.”
I nodded. Understanding passed between us like telepathy.
“Follow me.”
“Found it four days ago,” I said. “Been coming here every night, since. After work.”
“Yeah?” Ronan turned in a circle. His bulk practically filled the entire fisherman’s shack. “Where’s work?”
“The arcade, down at the Boardwalk.”
Ronan nodded and sat on the bench. “You can see the ocean,” he said, his words almost soft, coming out on a gruff voice.
“Yeah, it’s nice. A good place to just…”
“Get the fuck away from everyone?”
“Precisely.”
“You looked sick earlier.” He jerked his head at my wrist. “What’s with the watch? That part of it?”
“It’s an alarm. My blood sugars were low.” I lifted my shirt to show him the CGM. “I have diabetes.”
Ronan nodded, and then a sudden smile spread over his lips that he covered with his hand.
“Something funny?” I asked, ignoring the pang in my heart that maybe I had Ronan judged all wrong. Just another asshole…