“Boy-o, you haven’t been trying,” West said. “You’ve been plowing, sowing the proverbial wild oats.”
If people were clay, then the past was the pair of hands on the spinning wheel, shaping...shaping...misshaping. They’d each been dried and hardened damaged. The only way to change them now was to break them. But Jase had been broken before and had tried to glue the pieces of himself back together. Had suffered in ways he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. He was different now—worse.
He would not break again.
“Forget about me. You’re avoiding the heart of the issue, Jase,” Beck said softly, leaning back in his chair. “We all are, and it’s not doing us any good. So I’m just going to say it. Because despite the fact that we all did what we did together, we’ve never spoken the words aloud.”
A stilted pause as Jase shook his head. They hadn’t spoken the words aloud because he couldn’t bear to hear them.
“Nine years ago,” Beck continued, “we committed a terrible crime. The three of us. Together.”
Not ready to do this. Jase drained his beer then drained Beck’s. “Enough.”
The color faded from West’s face, but still he said, “We killed someone.”
Jase went still. Why were they doing this to him? As if he would ever forget.
West, looking haunted, said, “They deemed it voluntary manslaughter.”
“You refused to name names and testify against us to reduce your sentence,” Beck added, “so you were given the maximum penalty.”
“I know. I know all of this,” Jase snarled, his rough voice echoing off the walls. “Enough!”
Damn it, the girls.
He twisted in his chair to watch the door in the hallway. A minute passed...two...three... To his immense relief, it never opened.
He released a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. He never wanted Brook Lynn to discover he was an ex-con. A murderer. That he’d committed the crime not in self-defense but in white-hot rage.
“I expected the purging of the poison to make me feel better,” Beck said, slumping in his chair. “Instead I only feel worse.”
“Yeah,” West said, just as despondent. “That kind of sucked.”
Jase’s mind drifted to the hours before his entire world had come tumbling down...when he and the boys had been so hungover they’d slept the day away. Tessa had come barreling into the apartment, tears streaming down her cheeks, waking them. It had taken a while, but West had finally gotten the story out of her. She’d gone to a party with her girlfriends and one of the guys there—Pax Gillis—had followed her when she left and raped her in her car.
Even now, bile burned his stomach at the thought.
They’d gone after the guy and beaten him bloody, and it should have stopped there. But even after Pax passed out, their rage hadn’t cooled. They’d continued to whale...and whale...until finally stopping no longer mattered. The damage was done.
Even though Jase had paid for the crime—again and again—guilt had plagued him ever since, almost as bad as prison. Almost. Books and movies often tried to depict the horrors of life behind bars, but they weren’t even close to the reality. There was no privacy. Few privileges. Food he wouldn’t serve to dogs. Hour after hour spent with nothing but memories—and other inmates. Constant threats of violence...rape. Carving weapons in secret simply in an effort to protect yourself, all while living with the knowledge that years would be added to your sentence if you were ever caught. But what else could you do? Let someone shank you?
Been there, done that. And he had the scars to prove it.
Jase would rather die than go back.
“I know you.” Beck returned to subject one. “You prefer commitment. Need it. But ever since your release—”