Forgetting You (Damaged Goods Duet #2)

Chapter 1

Zane

The prison gates open as if the bastards have changed their minds about letting me go.

They groan first.

Metal dragging against metal, teeth grinding through rust, the whole thing shuddering in protest, as if it resents this as much as I do. As if it already knows something I don’t. The hinges scream, and the sound crawls up my spine and buries itself there, familiar in the worst fucking way.

Seven years of that sound.

Locks, latches and heavy doors swinging shut behind me. My body still braces for it. Still waits for the clang that means you’re not going anywhere.

For seven years, freedom was something other people had. Something I remembered in fragments.

Wind on my face. Grease under my nails from a car engine I was working on at eighteen, thinking I was building something toward a life.

The smell of rain on hot concrete. A rooftop at dusk, rusted tin burning through my jeans.

A girl with fire in her eyes and a mouth sharp enough to make me bleed, who laughed once and cracked something open in my chest that I spent seven years trying to seal shut.

Now the gate is open, but I don’t move.

My boots remain planted on the cracked concrete.

The air is different out here.

It comes at me from all sides, with no walls to break it, and my lungs don’t know what to do with that much of it. I breathe in slowly. Chest tight.

The officer beside me clears his throat. He’s impatient, ready to tick me off his list and move on to the next poor bastard.

“You’re free to go, Rivera.”

Free.

The word feels off.

I roll it around in my mouth and let it sit on my tongue.

That word should crack something open inside me. It should mean air. Space. A world big enough to breathe in without measuring the distance between your bunk and the door out of habit, out of instinct, out of the particular brand of paranoia you develop when you’ve been caged long enough.

It should feel like relief, but instead it sounds like a trap. A trick dressed up as mercy that watches you walk out just to clock how long it takes before you crawl back.

I glance at the officer. There isn’t much left of me that knows how to smile politely. Prison carved that shit out early, stripped me down to bone and bad temper, then handed me back the kind of silence people mistake for control.

I step forward, the sun hitting me full in the face.

Fuck. It’s too sharp.

My eyes burn, and for half a second I almost laugh, because that would be the fucking joke, wouldn’t it? To survive seven years inside only to be taken out by sunlight.

My skin feels too tight over my bones. My shoulders are broader than they used to be, my arms harder, my chest thickened from years of pushing iron because the alternative was letting my thoughts eat me alive.

I used to fight because rage needed somewhere to go. In prison, rage became routine. Push-ups until my muscles shook. Pull-ups until my palms split. Sit-ups on cold concrete while the night pressed its ugly mouth to my ear and whispered her name.

Skylar.

No.

Not here.

You will not fall apart at this fucking gate. Not with the officer standing two feet away, pretending he isn’t watching. I didn’t survive seven years with her ghost lodged beneath my ribs just to fall apart before I even make it to the fucking parking lot.

I make myself move. One foot in front of the other.

The parking lot stretches ahead, heat already shimmering off the asphalt even this early in the day. A handful of cars sit scattered across it. A woman cries into someone’s chest, her shoulders shaking. A kid sits on a curb, staring at his shoes.

I keep walking until I see it.

Rainer’s truck. Parked near the edge of the lot, like it’s been sitting there for seven years, just waiting for this day.

My chest does something I’m unprepared for.

The driver’s door swings open.

Rainer climbs out more slowly than he used to, but he still carries himself the same way. Back straight. Shoulders square. His hair has more gray now, threading through the dark in streaks that weren’t there before. His face has deeper lines, carved around his mouth and eyes.

He shouldn’t be here.

That’s the first thought that comes to me. I told him that every day he showed up in that visitation room. That I wasn’t his responsibility and that he had his own life to live somewhere else, not in a plastic chair behind reinforced glass.

For the first two years, he kept coming anyway.

And then I said things meant to wound, because I have always been good at that.

I find the exact place a person is soft and press hard until they pull back.

It’s a horrible skill I learnt over the years, sharpening it in every foster home that taught me people leave, so you may as well be the one to push them out the door first.

It worked. He stopped coming.

I told myself that was what I wanted, but in reality, I wanted to see him.

He looks at me across the parking lot, and for one brutal second, I’m eighteen again.

Standing in his workshop, blood on my hands, sirens screaming closer, louder, tearing through the night air from somewhere down the road.

I blink.

The sirens fade, and the parking lot comes back.

Rainer just stands there beside that rusted old beast of a truck and looks at me the same way he always did, like I was more than the life I have been handed, and he has never once questioned it.

I swallow hard and step forward.

He watches me as I approach. His eyes sweep across my face the way you look at something you’ve worried about for a long time, checking for damage, cataloging what seven years does to a person.

I let him look. I’ve got nothing left to hide.

“Zane,” he says.

That’s it. One word. My name on his lips, then he turns and climbs back in.

I move to the passenger door and stare at the handle, because getting in means it’s real. That dream I always envisioned, the gates are actually behind me. It means the next chapter has started. The part I have no fucking map for.

“You getting in?” Rainer asks from the other side.

I pull the door open and climb in.

Rainer’s hand pauses on the gearshift. He clears his throat and looks through the windshield. He pulls out of the parking lot.

I stare ahead, watching the road unroll through the glass, and the world rushes past in colors that are almost too much.

The world doesn’t pause because yours ended.

It doesn’t hold still while you’re in there counting days until you get out.

It keeps moving. Seasons turn, girls grow into women, and people rearrange their lives around the space you left because that’s what people do when they aren’t locked in a cage with time sitting on their chest.

The question is already forming before I can shut it down. It’s clawing its way up the inside of my chest, dragging itself through the rot and regret, clinging to every rib on the way. It sits at the base of my throat, raw, desperate, and pathetic in the way only the truest things ever are.

How is she?

Three words.

That’s all.

But those three words sit on my tongue like broken glass—small enough to say and big enough to destroy whatever’s left of me the second they hit the air.

Every mile of road we put between me and those gates makes them heavier. All I want is to turn to Rainer and ask him. Rip the wound open because not knowing has been eating me alive all this time, gnawing through me slowly and quietly, the way only unanswered questions can.

I clench my jaw until the ache spreads down into my neck. My fingers flex against my thigh once, then twice.

Is she happy?

That one lands in a different place entirely. In places you can’t reach into to pull things back out of.

Here’s the fucked-up part: I wanted her to be happy.

That was the whole point of pushing her away the way I did, making sure she had every reason to walk and keep walking and never look back.

I did that for her. I told myself that in every sleepless hour, in every gray morning, in every moment when the guilt grew heavy enough to stop my lungs from working properly.

I gave her up so she could have something better than a boy the world had already decided was a lost cause.

And now the thought of her actually being happy—her life full, warm, and untouched by the wreckage of mine—splits me straight down the middle. It’s the cruelest irony.

I stare out the window and still I say nothing.

We roll through town, and I recognize pieces of it.

The bones are the same. Everything else has shifted. The corner store is gone, replaced by a clean little café with plants in the window and people sitting outside with their coffee and their ordinary Tuesday-morning lives.

The old bottle shop is still there. Of course it is. Places like that never close.

We pass the bus stop where I spent my first night after leaving Dolores’, with nowhere to go.

Lying there with my bags wound tight around my boots so nobody could take them without taking me too.

Staring up at the gray morning while the traffic groaned past and none of it slowed down, none of it cared.

We continue moving and I keep my eyes on the glass as the library comes into view.

My jaw goes tight before I even fully register it.

The steps out front. The iron railing along the left side, still bent at the top.

Cassie’s voice on the phone telling me Skylar had nowhere to go.

Skylar, folded in on herself at the bottom of those steps.

Bag by her feet. Head down, forehead pressed to her knees, making herself as small as possible, which was never small enough to hide her from me.

From a distance she’d looked breakable that day.

The quietest I’d ever seen her, and Skylar was never quiet.

It had hurt to see her like that, and seeing that place now still does.

I shift in my seat causing Rainer to notice. His grip on the wheel tightens, barely, the smallest tell. He says nothing.