Then he was gone.
Reno had yanked him back and had taken his place. His hands cupped my cheeks and he examined my eyes. Then he felt my pulse. Reno held up a few pills and studied them. “Did you swallow any of these, April? Answer my question or I’m going to force you to throw up and take you to the ER where they’re going to pump some vile shit into your stomach.”
“I’m…”
He glanced in the toilet and then looked at Trevor over his shoulder. “Leave us alone and shut the door.”
“Are you crazy? Call an ambulance!”
“She didn’t take these,” Reno said decidedly, brown eyes still on mine. “Did you?”
I shook my head. He knew me too well. As drunk as I was, I didn’t have it in me to cross that line.
“Two minutes,” Trevor growled.
The door closed and Reno took a seat in front of me, moving the bottle aside and taking handfuls of the pills and tossing them in the toilet, which was already full of them.
“My mother’s dead,” I said in a broken voice. No more tears were left to spill, but my heart burned with raw anguish. I’d never felt so gutted—so lost.
Reno leaned in and kissed me softly on the cheek. God, I’d missed him more than I thought. He smelled so good—like pine trees—and I wanted to rewind and do it all over. I’d ruined what we had and there was no erasing my past. I hated hindsight—I wished I could back a truck over it.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed against my skin. “But what is this about? Where’s the girl who has it all together? Where did she go?”
My head rolled to the side and I looked away. “I turned my mother into an addict because I was a stupid kid. I should have been a better daughter.”
He brushed my hair away from my face and leaned in so close that my leg had somehow wrapped around his waist.
“You told me when your mother started doing heavy drugs. Juvie. But did she drink before then?”
I didn’t answer and he gripped my shoulders.
“Dammit, April. Let me in.”
“Yes. She’d hit the bottle now and again but was never a user. Maybe some weed—I don’t remember.”
“You don’t get it. She was already an addict. She just traded out the booze for something stronger. It wasn’t you that drove her to fuck up her life the way she did. She couldn’t cope with her problems and tried to dull them away. Maybe she had a messed-up childhood or something dark you never knew about her. Don’t blame yourself for what that woman did to you. You’re entitled to a night of hitting the bottle after all that you’ve been through, and I’m cool with that. I’ll sit here and have a drink with you. I’ve been through some rough shit in my life and hit some pretty low points; those who have been there know what it’s about. Those who haven’t, judge. I’m not here to judge you, April. You’ve got some personal demons you need to battle and I want you to win. Do what you need to do in order to deal with this and get past it. But don’t shut me out.”
“I wish I hadn’t screwed things up with us.”
“Yeah, well. People fuck up. Doesn’t mean you go through life punishing yourself for it,” he said in bristly words, brushing the last few pills away from me. “I’m not perfect by a mile. I got a toolbox full of issues and I’m not a big talker, so that shit mostly stays locked up.”
I lifted my eyes. “You’re not a big talker? Everything you say to me changes my life in ways that you don’t even realize. You fix me with your kindness.”
His eyes melted and he held my left hand, brushing his thumb over the top knuckles. I studied his features and admired the man before me. His eyes were coffee brown and not wide, but narrow and kind. And his masculine nose and jaw didn’t seem to stand out as much as those carved lines in his cheeks or the tiny scar on his lip that used to be mine. He had recently shaved and I touched his smooth chin, pinching the tip and feeling a pang of guilt that made me let go.
“Don’t,” he said, capturing my wrist and bringing it back up to his face. “Keep doing that.”
I outlined his thin mouth and scratched my fingers along his short sideburns, noticing how attractive his widow’s peak looked on him. When I pinched his earlobe, he smiled, deepening those lines in his face. What a handsome man Reno was when he smiled.
“I have a confession,” he said, and I got the feeling by the way he was averting his eyes that it wasn’t something he wanted to admit.
“You regret having slept with a human?”
Reno reluctantly reached in his pocket and opened his fingers. I glanced down at his hand and saw a familiar red item settling in the crease of his palm.