Cowan only smiles ruefully. He slowly gets to his feet, tossing more bread on the ground further away. The pigeons follow, cooing, as Cowan looks down at me with contempt.
“You don’t even believe that anymore. Listen to yourself. You let your little girlfriend throw herself into danger again and again, all for what, your own ego? All to get a shot at making a movie with me. It’s pathetic. That’s who you are, Baptist. You’re a danger to everyone around you. Give up and walk away before someone else gets hurt. Leave that poor girl alone. At least suit has a spine, unlike you.”
I clench my hands into fists. He turns, showing me his back. I could throw him to the ground and stomp on his skull, cracking it in half—
But what would that accomplish? Prove I’m stronger than an old man?
Cowan walks away. I watch him go and don’t make a move to stop him as his words echo through my skull.
Walk away before someone else gets hurt.
Blair’s bruised and bloodied lip. The pain in her eyes.
If I stay with her, is that our future? More agony?
Just like my poor, wasted father, and my mourning ghost of a mother.
What’s left for me now?
I ruin everything I touch, and if I touch the one thing I really want in this world, I’ll destroy her, too.
Chapter23
Blair
It takes a few days, but I finally get a text from Zoe the barista.He’s sitting in the bar down the block if you want to talk to him. Just saw him through the window!!
I stare at that text and let it roll around my brain. I told her to message me if he ever came into the coffee shop, but I guess she spotted him somewhere else, and now I have a choice to make.
Confront him now or leave it alone and let him come back on his own time.
If he’s going to come back at all.
I can’t continue like this. Not with what Cowan said back in the hotel room. Baptist needs to know the truth about everything we went through—that it was some sick reality film orchestrated by an absolute monster—but more than that, so much more than that, he has to know about the baby.
Enough holding back. Enough being afraid.
I’m pregnant with Baptist’s child and I need him to know.
Before anything else, even if it ruins whatever small, precious thing we’ve been growing, like the beginnings of a house fire when it’s still only a spark, infinitely hot but infinitely tiny, compressed into nothing more than an inch of space and a lifetime of possibility, I’m willing to take that risk. I’m willing to let that spark fizzle and fade, if it means he knows the truth.
Or maybe it’ll burn so hot it consumes us both.
Isn’t that what I want?
I put on my big girl pants, pull my shit together, and make my way down to The Black Sheep.
It’s a bar set into the lower floors of a black building on the corner of Fairmount and Twenty-First. The place is mostly empty and music drifts from speakers in the ceiling. I spot him sitting alone at a bar in an empty front room, elbows flanking a large tumbler of whiskey, shoulders slumped and spine curved like a half-moon. It’s barely past one in the afternoon, and I hope Baptist isn’t too drunk, because I need him paying attention.
I need him to really understand.
He looks over as I approach. If I expected something from him, I don’t get it. There’s no smile, no frown, no excitement and no dread, only a passive tilt of his head and a stare like he barely knows who I am.
Like I’m some stranger.
That hurts more than anything else.
“Your eye looks terrible,” he says flatly.