Page 20 of What You Own
“My parents, Ellie, my shrink.”
Adam blinked. “Shrink?”
Bleeding hell, why had I let that slip? “I take stuff for anxiety.”
“Because of the bashing?”
“No, because of my fear of triangles,” I snapped. Pull him close or get away. “Yes, the bashing, Adam, fuck.”
His cold blue eyes went all sad and liquid again, and I reached for him. I actually reached a hand out to touch him, before pulling back because you aren’t supposed to touch electric fences. He saw it, though, and he was braver than me, so Adam yanked me forward into a tight, full-body hug. He hugged like he wanted to pull me right inside himself, and I hugged him back. Felt every curve and hard plane, every muscle and shape, his heart hammering in his chest. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and melted into the embrace, breathed him in.
He didn’t say anything stupid like “I’m sorry.” He held me, and I held him, and some of that buzzing died down now that I had him in my arms. Right where he should have been all these years. We existed in another perfect moment.
And then a car roared past, bringing with it the phantom sound of Adam’s arm being snapped. Dark. Parking lot.
I ripped away from him. “No!”
Chapter 6
Adam
“NO!”
Ryan’s wrenched shout hit me in the gut like a sucker punch. He looked so lost, so breakable, that I wanted to hug him again. I desperately wanted to make that awful, wide-eyed fear go away. To get his eyes to stop looking so haunted by a night we’d shared but only he remembered. And he was fighting me on it every step of the way, the stubborn Texas mule.
He turned in a circle, taking in the entire parking lot, and I understood. “It’s okay, Rye, we’re alone,” I said. “It’s you and me.”
He sagged against his car door, breathing hard through his mouth, sickly pale like he’d been last night when he found out I didn’t remember the bashing. I hated that I’d done that to him again. I wanted this part over with. I wanted him to tell me what I’d forgotten so we could get past it and maybe, just maybe, move on with our lives—together.
You can’t be together. Your father will find a way to ruin this too. It’s why you had a plan, idiot.
I pushed away the voice of doubt, the voice that dogged me and goaded me and sometimes even guided me. But the voice wasn’t always right. Ryan wanted me back; I saw it in his eyes and in his actions. He wouldn’t pursue this without a commitment from me, and I wouldn’t commit until he told me the truth. The whole truth, no condensing of details or prettying the facts.
The truth was more important than the damned plan, even if the plan was what had kept me going all these years.
“Come on, get in the car,” I said.
I opened the passenger door, and he slid inside, melting into the seat. Letting the air out of his tire hadn’t been my finest moment, but I needed him in my car somehow. Once this was over—and if he hadn’t punched my lights out—we’d come back and use the electric air pump hidden under a blanket in my trunk.
He stared at his lap while I drove, occasionally flexing his right wrist. When I went back to school after two months out, a classmate told me she’d seen Ryan with a cast on it after the bashing. He knew everything that had happened to me, and I hadn’t asked about his own injuries. God, how selfish could I be?
Now wasn’t the right time, and I needed him to not pay attention to where we were going.
After a few miles of silent driving, I pulled in to an empty, weedy parking lot attached to a vacant building. Ryan glanced at the window and jerked upright when he realized we weren’t on the street in front of his building. He twisted in his seat, the force of his anger making me doubt the intelligence of this plan.
“What in the blue fuck are we doin’ here, Adam?”
“Talking,” I said.
“Take me home.”
“No.”
“Adam—”
“No, Ryan.” I’d purposely parked so the headlights illuminated the rear corner of the lot, thirty yards from the old Pizza City restaurant, where a partial wood fence was all that remained of a dumpster enclosure. Time and weather had washed away any evidence that we’d been there, or been beaten unconscious there, in a narrow space between the dumpster enclosure and the back wall of a brick building that had stood empty my entire life. Pizza City was yet another victim of an ever-changing economy and town, having gone out of business two years ago.
I didn’t miss it.
