“My uncle Carl.” That’s how I begin. That’s how a lot of the stories in my life have begun. With him. “When my parents died, my uncle Carl took me on. He was a piece of shit, and he used to beat me. He wasn’t all that bad, though. He’d wait long enough for me to heal from the last one before laying into me again. And he hardly ever broke bones. That was a small mercy, I guess. Things got real bad when I was about eight. He started drinking more. Whatever. So I learned how to distance myself from it all. For me, Carl was like a festering wound that refused to fucking heal, and yet I somehow managed to turn off the nerve endings. I managed to not feel any of it anymore. I shut myself down and suddenly I could handle everything that was happening to me.
“Anyway. The fucker died three years ago. Someone killed him, cut him up real fucking good. I had to come to the hospital to ID him, and that’s when I saw you. You were waiting for an elevator, and I was just sitting there, trying to take it all in. That he was dead and he was obsolete and I didn’t even have to think about him anymore. And you…I took one look at you and I saw that you were just like me. Something had happened to you to make you turn off everything around you. You were walking through life looking and acting and sounding just like everyone else, but you weren’t. You had directed every last part of you inward. And I…” I need to hit something. I need to lay my fists into something solid and heavy. Fuck this. I shouldn’t be doing this. What the hell am I thinking? My hands are just itching to burn with some sort of pain, but instead I feel something warm and soft against the bare skin of my back. It’s not her hand this time. I exhale, looking up at the ceiling—why I’m sabotaging myself like this? It’s her lips. She’s kissing me. And it feels so fucking good. She stays still, as though she’s waiting for me to walk away. When I don’t, she presses her body flush with mine and slides her arms around my waist, linking small hands together over my stomach.
Fuck.
Shit, fuck, motherfucking bastard.
I might as well finish now. This massive cluster fuck of a situation can hardly get any worse. “And…I wanted to know what had hurt you so badly, Sloane. So I made up my mind to do that. And I did. I found out about your sister. And Michael followed you when you went to see Eli that first time. And now here we are.”
I’m waiting for her to react, but all she does is stand there with her arms around me and her forehead pressed against my back, breathing in small, shallow breaths of air that she blows out across my skin. This is a first for me. I have no idea how to react to any of it. The only person I’ve ever told any of this is Michael, and that was only the raw instructions of it. Follow the girl, find out what she’s doing, don’t let her see you. That kind of thing. I never told him why, and he never asked.
Eventually I can sense she’s going to speak because her breathing cuts off for a moment, like she’s concentrating very hard on something. And then…
“How? How can you be so good and so dangerous at the same time, Zeth? You’re a contradiction.”
The scathing laughter erupts from me before I can rein it in. “There’s nothing good about me. I watched you. I followed you. I worked out what made you tick. I made plans to break into your life and manipulate you just like Eli did. I’m no better than he was.”
I can feel her forehead rolling against me as she shakes her head. “You’re not. You’re better than you think. Why don’t you want to admit it? You can’t, can you? Not even to yourself.”
There are a lot of things I can’t admit to myself. A lot. But being good isn’t one of them. I’m not blind—I know the kind of man I’m looking at when I find myself standing in front of a mirror. “Don’t get your hopes up, Sloane. There’s nothing here to be redeemed. Nothing here that you can try to fix.”
She’s quiet for a while. She probably didn’t wanna hear that. Most girls don’t. They all think they can change you. Iron out the creases in your screwed up life. But then she whispers, “I’m not gonna try and fix you. But…I would like to try and understand you.”
I feel like telling her the truth. That I don’t even understand me. I doubt that’ll do me any good, though. So I just stand there like an awkward motherfucker, trying not to enjoy the feel of her slim frame shifting against mine. This is fucked up five different ways from Sunday.
“Zeth?”
I grunt out a response. “Mmm?”
“I need you to do something for me.”
Oh, here we go. The needing part. I need a stiff drink. “What?”
“I need you to turn around and put your arms around me. Can you do that?”
The thing about Sloane is that she never says what I think she’s going to say. I’m definitely not expecting her to say that. She wants me to hold her. Holding someone like that, the way she’s actually holding me right now, isn’t about sex. It’s about something else. Something I’m not sure I have to give, and yet this morning I practically told her the exact opposite, knowing how it sounded. You’re the girl who’s too blind to see what’s standing right in front of her. Well, she’s throwing it right back at me now. She’s telling me she sees. And she wants it. Fuck. How did this end up happening? I should have just said I had the clap and gone and slept on the couch. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
She’s been tensed against me while I’ve been running through every curse word I can think of in my head, and yet she hasn’t let go. She hasn’t panicked and run. She’s far more fucking brave than I am. So I turn, and I put my arms around her, and I hold her.