Page 36 of No More Secrets

She visibly swallows. “I thought—”

“Keep it,” he interrupts. “Not keep it, keep it.” That blade holds too much meaning for him. “But keep it on you. If it makes you feel safer.”

Eyes locked on him, she slowly crouches and picks up the blade.

“Just don’t off yourself.”

“I’m not suicidal,” she scoffs at the same time her gaze zeroes in on his tattoo, the raised flesh underneath. Her cheeks darken. “Sorry,” she mumbles.

An awkward silence hangs between them. She’s the first who’s remarked on his scar, however indirectly, in years.

He clears his throat, uncomfortable with his own failings. Not from the time he attempted to take his life when he was sixteen. But because he hasn’t had the courage to follow through on it again, which was the whole reason he landed here in his own private purgatory. A way station between living and dying.

“I’ll wash them,” he offers, because he needs something to do.

“’Kay.” She drops the pile onto the counter, more interested in the blade. She flings it open and closed with the flick of her wrist.

“Where’d you learn to handle a knife?” Unsettled, he takes her laundry to the washer in the hallway closet. He starts a load.

“A friend. Same one who taught me to kick a guy in the balls,” she answers.

He likes that friend.

He returns to the kitchen, and she’s flipping through one of his sister’sTabby’s Squirrelbooks he’s left on the counter but has never read. Too afraid of his own reaction, he hasn’t even cracked them open.

“You have Jenna’s books.”

He goes utterly still. “You know her?”

She shakes her head. “Love her stuff. I want to meet her. Kind of weird you have kid books. You got a kid somewhere?”

“Nope.”

“Niece or nephew?”

He doesn’t answer. She takes that as a negative and makes a face.

“See? Weird.”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion.” He also doesn’t like her flipping through Lily’s book. She closes the cover, and he moves that book and the other aside, stacking them on his laptop.

Her gaze follows him, her fingernail picking at a piece of peeling laminate on the counter. “You know that friend who taught me about knives? His name’s Jace. He was my neighbor, and his mom was a mean old bitch. She knocked him around a lot. She told him he was dumb, but he’s the smartest guy I know. Anyway, when you hear enough times that you have shit for brains and won’t amount to anything, you start to believe it.”

A tingling swoops up the back of his neck. He knows that all too well.

“Jace and I meet at the park before school and walk together. This one time, though, a couple of years back, he didn’t show, and I got this weird feeling that something was wrong, so I went to his apartment. When he didn’t answer, I used the key his mom keeps in the crack in the doorframe. I found him in the... he was...” She fixates her gaze on the chipped counter. “He was in the bath.”

A chill spears his spine, dry-ice cold. He knows where this story is going. He was Jace once, alone in a warm bath with a blade.

“The water was overflowing, and he had a knife. He looked at me and said, ‘I can’t do it.’ He gave it to me. I don’t know if he wanted me to cut him, but no way, man. I couldn’t. I flung it out the door.” Tears well in her eyes, and it takes everything in Lucas not to pull thisstranger of a girl into his arms and comfort her. The urge to do so a stranger itself.

“He dried off and cleaned up, and I told him I was keeping the knife at my place. He could have it back after he taught me how to use it. I told Jace I wanted to learn how to protect myself in case, you know, Ellis tried anything. I told him he wasn’t allowed to die. He couldn’t leave me unprotected.”

“You gave him a purpose.” Lucas’s throat is tight.

She nods.

“How old were you?”

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