“Are you done?” Maryann smiled gently. “It’s okay. I get it. I’m something of an expert at being let down, myself. You get to the point where you’ve been alone for so long, you don’t trust anyone. Not even yourself. It gets so bad that it’s almost scary when someone offers to help. Right?”
The fight drained out of me. I nodded.
“I can take being let down,” she continued. “But my girls…” She slid her thumbnail along the card table, her eyes shining. “My ex, their dad…he left us in the middle of the night. Never said goodbye. So I promised the girls they will never not have me. Because that’s what they needed to hear. To know that someone would always be on their side.”
“I get that.”
“I know you do. You’re on everyone’s side but your own.” She cocked her head. “Did something happen today?”
I kissed Shiloh. And it was the best and worst fucking thing I could’ve done.
But I was done talking. “No.”
“Hmm. I don’t believe you, but I’ve meddled enough for one day.” She got up and went to the door, shooting me a final stern look with a smile behind it. “Don’t go up on that roof again in the middle of a storm. Not ever again. Promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Ronan?”
“I promise.”
“Not sure I believe that either, but…” She sighed. “Get some sleep.”
If only.
When she was gone, the only sound was the rain smattering against the windows and the water dripping off my clothes onto the kitchen floor. The cocoa was cold. The past faded away and there was only now, bleak and empty.
I took a hot shower to burn the cold out…and to wash the scent and feel of Shiloh off of me. But going up on the roof hadn’t done it; don’t know why I thought the shower would be any different. She had seeped into my skin, my bones, and wouldn’t leave. I didn’t want her to.
But she has to.
I remembered Frankie and Mikey’s knowing sneers. The malicious fucking glee in their eyes at seeing us together, like eager dogs who’d found a new toy. I had nothing to offer a girl like Shiloh. I’d already given her everything she needed, building her that shed. Kissing her was a stolen minute—something good and fucking perfect but not mine to keep.
At school the next day, I crossed the quad, heading toward the long, low wall that separated the upper and lower sections of the campus and where Holden, Miller, and I hung out between classes. Shiloh was coming from the opposite direction, wearing a long skirt that brushed the ground, a tight-fitting top, and earbuds in her ears. The sun after yesterday’s rain made everything seem brighter, including the glint of copper, silver, and gold on her arms, her neck—her skin where I’d touched her. She looked sexy as fuck—even more because I’d touched her.
Her head came up and our eyes met. For a split second, her expression softened, then turned passive. Not pissed off but worse. As if I were inconsequential.
I deserve that. And it’s better this way.
As if to punctuate the fucked-up futility of it all, Frankie Dowd and Mikey Grimaldi called out to me and approached. Frankie was scrawny next to the bigger football player. Grimaldi usually hung out with his friends on the team but slummed it with Frankie now and then. Holden said it was their mutual lack of brain cells that brought them together.
“Trouble in paradise, Wentz?” Mikey pretended to check his watch. “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours and you fucked it up with Barrera already?”
“Yeah, Wentz.” Frankie cackled. He looked like an underfed hyena. “What did you do to piss her off?”
I stopped, leveled both of them with my flattest stare as they approached, while inside my blood was rushing, muscles coiling.
“It’s probably for the best,” Mikey said casually. “She’s a little out of your league, don’t you think?”
“A lot out of his league,” Frankie said. “But I hope you got some of that sweet ass before she came to her senses—”
His words choked off as my hand shot out and gripped him by the collar of his shirt. I hauled him to me until we were nose to nose. Frankie’s pale blue eyes lit up with fear but were manic with a wild energy too.
“Don’t fucking talk about her like that,” I seethed. “Don’t talk about her, ever.”
“Or what?” Frankie managed. His grin was full of yellowed teeth.
My fist twisted and tightened in his T-shirt, and we stared, locked in the moment where I battled with the urge to punch the smug smile off his face, to beat any thought of Shiloh out of his head…