Shredded - Wolff Tracy. Страница 60

“Why should I?”

Excuse me? “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means you don’t come to me when you’re messed up. You don’t talk to me. You let me find out about the past that is still haunting you from old newspaper articles.” She’s right in my face now, her sweetness gone as quickly as it came. “Why the hell should I trust you with my mindfucks if you don’t trust me with yours?”

I flop back against the bed, then regret it when my currently numb shoulder starts to throb. Damn it. I walked right into that one. “It’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same and you know it, or you wouldn’t be lying there pouting right now.”

“I don’t pout.”

“Sorry. It’s just that that brooding expression looks an awful lot like pouting from here.”

I glare at her, and she glares back like the total badass she is. God, it’s sexy. And God, do I love her.

It’s that thought more than any other that gets me talking. Because I do love her and I don’t want to lose her like I’ve lost almost everything else in my life. I didn’t think she’d stick if she knew, but here she is. She knows everything and she’s sitting right here across from me, all but daring me to try to cut her out of my life again.

I wouldn’t even know how to try. Still, it’s not nearly as easy to talk to her as I wish it was. I’ve locked this shit down deep for eleven years. Spewing it back out now feels about like I imagine swallowing razor blades would.

“Her name was April.” I finally manage to get the first sentence out, then I close my eyes, rest my head back against the bed. “My sister. She was seven years old when she was—” My voice breaks when I try to say it, so I clear my throat. Try to start again.

“When she was kidnapped and murdered.” Ophelia says it for me, her voice strong and steady as she gives voice to the words I’ve never been able to say.

“Yes.” I clutch her hand in mine. “My dad had a business call, and he thought we were making too much noise—thought I was making too much noise—so he sent us to the park down the street for an hour. Told me I was in charge, which I totally rubbed her nose in like the obnoxious older brother I was.

“For a long time it was fine. We played on the jungle gym, ran around, all that stuff. But then I had to pee, so I told her to wait by the water fountains next to the bathroom and I would be right back. I made her promise not to go anywhere, but she was only seven, and …

“I was only in there a couple of minutes. Two. Maybe three. But when I got back, she was gone. At first I thought she was hiding from me, so I looked for her. And I got madder and madder the longer I looked. I told her—I called to her that I gave up a bunch of times, but she never came out.

“Finally my dad came looking for us, and when he realized she wasn’t there, he flipped out. Screamed at me for being stupid. For not understanding. And then he called the police and they came and they talked to me. For a long time I was the number one suspect. They thought I’d hurt April and then hidden her body somewhere. My parents never said it, but I think they thought so, too.”

Hot tears leak from the corner of my eyes at that admission, and I turn my face away, not wanting Ophelia to see what a pussy I really am. That’s why I never talk about this, never even think about this. Because I’m too fucking weak to handle it.

Ophelia leans over, brushes kisses over the tear tracks on my face. “It’s okay, baby,” she tells me. “You don’t ever have to be embarrassed in front of me. Ever. For any reason.”

“I would never hurt—”

“I know. I know.” She squeezes my hand.

I nod, then continue, because if I don’t say it now, I know I never will. “They found her six weeks later, about a hundred miles away. She’d been—He raped her. That bastard raped and murdered a seven-year-old little girl and then threw her away like she was garbage. Like she was nothing.

“And she wasn’t. She was everything. She was smart and silly and she told the most awful knock-knock jokes in the whole world. It used to drive me crazy having to listen to those ridiculous punch lines all the time.” My voice breaks again. “She wore ribbons in her shoes instead of shoelaces, and always matched them to the bows in her hair. She—” My voice fails altogether, and this time Ophelia doesn’t just rub me comfortingly. She actually climbs into the bed with me, snuggles in against my uninjured side.

“I think I would have liked her.”

I run my fingers through her hair, loving the sweet peach scent of her. “You would have loved her. She was sassy, just like you.”

“You think I’m sassy?”

“Baby, I was trying to be polite. I think you’re a lot more than sassy.”

She laughs. “I don’t know if I should be insulted or not.”

“Never.” I want to kiss her, but my shoulder makes it difficult to move around, so I settle for squeezing her more tightly against me. “I think you’re amazing.”

She squeezes back. “I think you’re pretty amazing, too.” She waits for a minute or two, just lying there against me, before she asks, “What about your mom?”

“Fuck. You really are ripping open every fucking wound I’ve got.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t find anything on her in the paper, so—”

“My mom killed herself exactly one year after my sister disappeared. She climbed into the bathtub and slit her wrists while my dad was on a business trip. I found her when I got home from school.”

“Jesus Christ, Z.”

I don’t say anything else. Neither does she. At least not for a while. There doesn’t seem to be anything to say.

Finally, when I can’t take the silence any longer, I tell her, “I’m sorry about the competition. It was a stupid thing to do.”

She nods, doesn’t even pretend to disagree. In fact, she doesn’t say anything else for a long time, so long that I think she might have fallen asleep. I’m starting to drift myself, high on painkillers, when she whispers, “It wasn’t your fault.”

Suddenly I’m wide awake again. “Don’t,” I tell her.

“Why not? Somebody has to. What happened to April wasn’t your fault. It just happened, Z. The way terrible shit sometimes happens. There are all kinds of psychos in the world. You aren’t responsible for what they do.”

“My mother—”

“Your mother was lost. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine how devastating April’s death was to her. She was lost and sad and miserable after April and she made a selfish, selfish decision. She let herself drown in the pain. That’s all. Still not your fault.”

“If I hadn’t gone to the bathroom—”

“If you hadn’t gone to the bathroom, that bastard might have gotten you, too. Then you’d be dead right along with April. Is that what you really want?”

“I wish it had been me,” I whisper, voicing the words I’ve never dared to say out loud before. The words that have been my mantra, the words that for so long have been my reason for being. I wish with everything inside me that it had been me that day in November and not April.

“I know. But it wasn’t.” She burrows into me, kisses my neck. “It wasn’t, and I will thank God every day that it wasn’t. I love you, Z. I love everything about you, and the idea that you might have died, that you might not exist in this world—I can’t even imagine it.”

It’s her turn to cry, my turn to comfort. Except it turns out I’m still crying a little, too. Eleven years I didn’t cry, and now that I have this beautiful, beautiful girl in my arms, I can’t seem to stop.

She doesn’t seem to care, though, as she runs her lips over my cheeks and jaw and nose and forehead. “Promise me,” she tells me in between kisses.

“Anything.”

She stops, looks me in the eye. “You don’t even know what I’m going to ask yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t you know I’d do anything for you?”

“Promise me that when you start to feel like this again, you’ll talk to me. That you’ll tell me what you’re feeling so we can work through it together.”