Page 339 of Off Limits: The Firsts

“Because it’s a case?”

Without answering, Grant opens the door and gets out of the truck. I watch him pace back and forth, the moonlight above accentuating the tension seizing his posture. I slip out of the cab and find a flat slope of rock near the front of his truck and take a seat, cross my legs, and focus on the twinkling lights of the city. They almost look like embers burning in the bottom of a fire pit, and I wonder what each of those lights represent.

Is one of them Keely’s?

How many of them hide the horror happening beneath their cover?

I shake the thought away. Too much thinking for tonight. Too much delving into a past I don’t want to delve into.

“Remember the side of your house?” Everything inside me freezes. The minute I’m determined to get out of my own past, he brings me right back into it. “Remember how we used to go and sit there and play whatever the hell we used to play back then because you wanted to get outside? Sometimes, you’d paint those rocks of yours with silly pictures, other times I’d play Barbies with you. I hated it, but I played because you were always playing cops and robbers with me?”

“No.” I whisper the word, not sure if it’s because I don’t want to remember or because I don’t want to talk about it.

Either he doesn’t hear me or he doesn’t care, because he keeps talking. “After you left, I used to go there. I’d just sit there by myself because I missed you so much. I’d pretend that you were inside and you were going to come out to play any minute.”

Every part of me wants to reject what he’s saying. I want to cover my ears like the little girl he remembers would have done and shut him out. I don’t want to know that he was hurt, too. It’s so much easier to think I was the only one who hurt. It’s so much easier to remember how much I hated him for pulling my world apart instead of looking at it like an adult and realizing he did the right thing.

But I don’t lift my hands. I don’t turn to face him. I need to hear this. I need to listen to him. I need to face what I don’t want to know and am scared to death to remember.

“I missed you, Em. You were my best friend. You were the one I told all my silly secrets to. You were part of my every day, and then you were gone . . .”

I told him my secrets, too. But mine were far from any secret an eight-year-old should have.

I push up from where I’m seated and walk a few feet away from him, hating the hurt in his voice that somehow I had a part in putting there. But at the same time, I’m angry at him for driving me up here where I can’t exactly escape the conversation.

Was this his plan? Trap me here and force me to talk?

“Do you remem—”

“What are getting at, Grant? What’s the point to this conversation?”

“I just—” He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair. “There are so many things I want to ask you, so many things that I want to know—”

“They’re none of your goddamn business!” I shout in an explosion of temper I’m not sure he was expecting.

“No?” he shouts back, crossing the distance and getting in my face just as unexpectedly.

“No.” I stand my ground.

“Oh, so, what? You’ll open your legs for me but not yourself?” His eyes burn with anger as we wage a visual war of contempt.

“Fuck. You.”

“That’s the point,” he sneers. “That’s all you want to do.”

“And?”

“And what?

“That was the deal, Malone. You agreed to the rules.”

“The deal’s changed.”

“Then the deal’s over.”

“No. I call bullshit on you. Why can’t you let me in? Why can’t you just talk to me? I know you went through a shit ton of horror, but I was the one who was there. I was the one who cared about you. Who still cares. And maybe I need to talk about it to wrap my head around how you dealt with all of that and turned out so goddamn normal when it still fucks my head up some days . . . did you think of that?”

I fist my hands and grit my teeth as I try to calm the riot of confusion laced anger swirling around inside me. “So you’d rather I be messed up too just so you can feel better? Well, I am,” I scream at him, hating to admit it but needing the catharsis of saying it. “Did that work? Do you feel better?” I sneer as every part of me vibrates with fury and shame.