Chapter Forty-Five
BARRETT
It was a character flaw, I knew, to always say the wrong thing at the wrong time.
I'd been guilty of it as long as I could remember, finding it often got me into trouble when I truly didn't mean anything by it.
My mouth was the sole cause of many an ass-kicking when I was younger, for many tears in my office while I was on a case and didn't remember to be careful of what I said, remembering that some people didn't think the way I did—unemotionally.
I often faced uncomfortable or unpleasant consequences for it.
But there was none that I regretted like this.
I knew the second the words were out of my mouth that I had fucked up entirely.
Her entire body froze up. Her eyes went huge. Her lips parted.
All the soft, sweet, writhing openness that had been there just a moment before suddenly disappeared.
"What?" her voice hissed, something barely audible.
Fuck.
Fuckfuckfuck.
It wasn't often I knew exactly what I said wrong or did exactly when I said or did it, and the impacts it had.
Right then, somehow, I knew.
I knew I had just jabbed a careless thumb into a gaping wound of some sort.
I had both shocked and somehow hurt her.
While I understood that much of it, I had no damn clue exactly why that was her reaction to what seemed to be an innocent enough question.
"Never mind," I told her, shaking my head. It wasn't like me to give up on something once I got it in my head, but I wanted that look off her face. I wanted things to go back when she was soft and sweet underneath me.
Anything, anything but that look on her face that seemed to scream pain to me.
"No, not never mind," she snapped, planting her hands, giving her enough leverage to slide up in bed, making me press up then back on my heels, looking down at her as she reached up to get her hair back in order.
"How do you know that?" she demanded, arms folding across her chest. I might not have been great with body language, but even someone like me knew that was a defensive move.
She was putting up guards. Against the conversation, but also—I feared— against me too.
For bringing it up. For, I don't know, knowing that about her maybe?
"I, ah, was trying to figure out if you were alright. I went through your social media."
"You hacked my social media," she clarified, voice cutting.
"I hacked your social media," I confirmed, seeing no point in lying.
The truth would have to come out eventually.
"You have a private picture folder," I went on as if she didn't already know it, as if she hadn't created it herself.
I hadn't been able to figure out why it had been set to private, though.
Usually, people liked to brag about doing something, wanting the external validation their friends and old acquaintances would give them for doing something new.
But the folder had been private since it was first created, back when she showed pictures of the building, of her in black pants and a bright yellow top in a training class, her beaming in her blue Police State NJ sweatshirt.
No likes, no comments, no descriptions under the pictures. Just keepsakes for some secret life she had been living.
"You know how beyond fucked up that is, right?" she demanded, her voice rough, thick.
"I was concerned," I countered.
"Concerned people call. Concerned people ask. They don't hack into someone's private accounts and go snooping. That's not what they do."
"It's what I do."
"It's wrong," she shot back, all her usual lightness, ease gone entirely.
She never took offense to who I was, how I was. Until now.
Since I figured she was less likely to be bothered by things than normal people, this meant that if I upset her, I had royally, epically fucked things up.
Suddenly, I wished I was better at this. I wished I knew how to act, what to say, how I could de-escalate a bad situation instead of making it worse.
But I didn't know.
I had nothing but wrong words in me.
They couldn't seem but to spill out, keep overflowing.
"Why would you keep the police academy a secret?"
"It's none of your fucking business, Barrett," she snapped, sliding her legs out from under me, throwing them off the side of the bed, getting up, pacing on agitated legs over to the window, ripping the curtains open.
"Wasn't it an accomplishment to get in? People usually share accomplishments with friends."
"Oh, my God. What part of it's not your fucking business do you not under..." she started, then trailed off as she looked over her shoulder at me sitting on the side of the bed, watching her, my brows knitted, my hand scratching.
Noticing that myself, I put my hands on my knees, grabbing those instead.
Then something changed. I didn't know why or what caused it, but her chest expanded to the point of near bursting before she let it all out with a sigh, her shoulders relaxing.
I didn't know what brought about the change, but I felt my own body relaxing as she turned, as her arms fell back down at her sides, as she rolled a crick out of her neck before reaching for a bottle of XXX before sitting down, but as far to the other edge of the bed as possible.
"Okay, let's try this again," she said, voice calmer.
"How?"
"Just start over."
"Ah, okay... why did you keep the police academy a secret?"
"Because my dad would have killed me if he knew."
"But... he was a cop."
"Yeah, and that is why he told me he never wanted to see me go down that path.
He said he lost most of his life and his marriage and a lot of my childhood to his job.
He didn't want that for me. I didn't even tell him that I took criminal justice courses in college.
That alone would have made him lose his ever-loving mind. "
"Did you think you could keep it from him forever?" I asked, wondering if she thought she could live a double life without him somehow knowing.
"I thought I could keep it from him until I was hired somewhere. I figured that would be easier for him to swallow. I could segue into a call or something I had been on. He liked that. Talking about cases and such. I guess because it was so much a part of his life."
"Why didn't you tell anyone else, though?"
"Because a secret gets harder to keep when other people are privy to it.
I didn't want my father to run into one of my friends, ask if they had seen me recently, and have one of them slip up and say that I had been too busy with the academy.
Or for my mother to get angry at him at some point and throw it in his face during a phone call.
It's always easier to keep a secret when you are the only one who knows it. "
"I guess that makes sense," I allowed even if I couldn't quite wrap my head around the idea that someone else's opinion should make you alter how you want to live your life.
I got never-ending shit from Sawyer and, to a lesser extent, the rest of that crew since going off on my own.
Especially if or when I needed their help.
But that didn't mean I ever thought twice about it.
My life was mine to live on my own terms, not theirs.
I couldn't imagine keeping a huge secret from them just to make things easier on, essentially, them while simultaneously making it much harder on myself.
That said, I did understand that the way I often conducted myself was not the way many—or most—people did.
Other people seemed to obsess over every possible outcome, the damage it might cause to everyone around.
I simply didn't do that. I wasn't even sure I would know how to.
And, quite frankly, seeing the way it impacted people made me suddenly glad I operated a little differently.
"You don't believe that," she said, pulling me out of my thoughts.
"What?"
"You don't believe that. That what I did made sense."
"Well... not really, I guess. It's your life to live however you want to, Clarke."
"My relationship with my father has been.
.. tense. At best. For a really long time.
I just started to sort of heal from all the feelings of abandonment and inferiority and just pain and anger and disappointment in my early twenties.
And my father, well, he's... sorry. You don't want to hear me dump all this. "
"Tell me," I demanded, finding that I actually did want to know.
I didn't particularly care what made most people tick.
It rarely made sense to me anyway, the tangled mess that was someone's emotions and motivations.
Somehow, though, I wanted to know. Like a complicated video game or a computer that refused to cooperate.
I wanted to figure her out. I wanted to take apart the insides and see how they worked.
I wanted to know why she did what she did.
I wanted to understand what she was motivated by.
"Well, I think spending so much of his life at work where things are hard and rough instead of at home where the soft and happy was, where he could have decompressed a little, he became hard and rough.
And, I think, it was hard for him to look at life—even when he was with us—without seeing all the ugly.
Or obsessing over some unsolved case. As an adult, I can maybe understand how a kidnapper or rapist on the loose trumps a children's new belt ceremony.
But as a kid, yeah, it hurt. It changed me in a lot of ways from who I might have been had he been around. "
"How so?"
"Well, with the divorce, my mom kind of got a little bitter. She raised me never to depend on a man, to never expect one to fill me up. That that was my job."
"That doesn't sound like a bad thing, though." Relying on people, it seemed, almost always led to disappointment.