Chapter 21 #3
I sit beside Skylar, watching the last of the light fall across her face, and everything in me goes completely still.
I have seen her furious, broken, soft, smiling against my mouth, and crying without wanting me to notice.
I have also seen her at seventeen, with her whole life still undecided, and at twenty-six, with something magnificent built from the wreckage of it.
Every version of her has found a way under my skin and stayed there without asking permission.
But this… Her face in the sunset on this damaged roof. This is where I first lost the fight.
I fell in love with her because she sat beside me in a place that should have been ugly and made it feel as if surviving the night were not only possible but worth doing. That has always been the whole of it.
She turns her head. “What?”
I swallow. “I fell in love with you here.”
Her lips part. “Here?”
“Yeah.” I glance out at the town because looking at her right now makes this considerably harder and I need to get through it.
“I didn’t know what to call it then. I was eighteen, angry, horny, and stupid enough to think every feeling could be sorted into two categories.
Things I wanted to hit and things I wanted to fuck. ”
Her mouth quirks. “I remember.”
“But you sat right there.” I point to the tin beside us. “The sunset hit your face and you stopped talking for once.”
“That doesn’t sound believable.”
“It was rare, I know.”
Her smile softens.
“I looked at you,” I say, my voice roughening at the edges in a way I can’t control, “and the whole town became quiet. Dolores’ house. The foster system. Every dirty room I had ever slept in. Every person who told me I was nothing and every person who proved it by leaving.”
I pause. “It all went quiet because you were there and for one second I thought maybe the world had made one good thing by accident.”
Her eyes shine. “Zane.”
“I loved you then,” I continue. “I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to hold it without breaking it. And I sure as fuck didn’t know how not to fuck it up.”
I gaze at her. “But I loved you.”
The wind moves her hair across her cheek. She doesn’t attempt to brush it away.
So I do. My fingers touch her face and she closes her eyes for half a second. I experience it the way I always feel everything with her, too much and not enough at the same time.
I need to tell her now before the softness makes a coward out of me and I convince myself to keep the ugly parts away from her. Which is what I promised I would stop doing and what I will spend the rest of my life fighting the instinct to do.
“My past came back,” I say. “That is why I went quiet on you and why I couldn’t pick up the phone.”
Her eyes open.
There it is. The flinch I earned.
“What do you mean?”
“Griff has been hanging around the workshop.”
She shifts. Just slightly. But I see it. That small, involuntary movement of someone who knows exactly which world that name belongs to and what it means when it shows up.
“Griff said I owed Ricky money,” I say. “Ricky came to collect it.”
She looks at me and I hold her gaze, swallowing the shame. She deserves the truth. All of it. Even if the truth is what makes her walk away.
“Rainer paid him.”
Her face drains. “How much?”
The number sits in my throat for a moment before I let it out. “One hundred and three thousand.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” I observe her. “I know.”
She looks out across the roof, blinking fast. “And the debt. Is it completely finished now?”
“Yeah, it’s clear. I never have to go back into that world again.”
She nods once, processing it, and I give her the space to do so because she has earned the right to take whatever time she needs with information I should have given her two days ago.
“I hated every second of it,” I say. “Watching Rainer put that cash on the bench. Watching Ricky’s guy count it. Watching Griff stand there with that asshole smile of his, knowing exactly where to aim.” My jaw tightens. “I wanted to break his stupid face.”
“Zane.”
“I thought about running,” I say. “Out of town. Out of your life. Out of Rainer’s before my shit cost him more than money.”
Her face twists and I hate that I put it there. I keep going anyway.
“I told myself it would protect you. Same old lie in a new fucking jacket. I thought I could leave before the damage spread. Leave before you looked at me and realized that loving me comes with men at the door, debts I can’t pay, and my old life that keeps dragging it to my door no matter how much I try to bury it. ”
I see tears forming in her eyes.
Mine burn too. Still, my gaze does not shift. I owe her every uncomfortable, honest second of this.
“I thought that if I left, maybe Rainer would stop having to clean up after the broken kid he found in a skip. Maybe that you could love the memory of me instead of waking up every day next to the mess.” I stop.
“I was alone in that workshop and I thought that I had caused you both enough pain. That you would both be better off without me.”
Her mouth trembles.
“But I did not run,” I say. “I wanted to. Fuck, Sky, I wanted to so badly, because leaving is the only thing I ever learnt to make appear noble. But I worked on that Chevy all night because if my hands were on the engine, they were not on a bag packing to leave, or around someone’s throat.
Instead, I finished the car. I watched Rainer pay the debt.
I let Ricky walk out with the money, which almost killed me. ”
“Why do you think leaving would solve everything, Zane?”
I stare at her for a moment. “Because I could not hurt you again.”
I stop because the next part sits heavier.
“And because of Rainer.” I drag a hand over my jaw.
“That man paid a hundred and three thousand dollars for my mess without blinking, without making me feel like shit for it, or asking for a single thing back. And for the fucking life of me, I still don’t understand why he does what he has always done for me. I never have.”
Skylar looks at me for a long moment.
“You don’t see what we do,” she says quietly. “Do you?”
I stare at her. “What I see is a man who keeps costing everyone around him and running out of ways to justify himself.”
“That’s not what I see,” she says. “And it is not what Rainer sees either.”
“Then what do you see, Sky? From where I’m sitting, the view is pretty fucking clear.”
“I see a man who keeps showing up, even when it costs him something.”
I turn my gaze away because her face is doing something I cannot bear to watch right now.
“You know what I see every day in my job,” she says. “Kids who run the second something good gets close, because nothing good has ever stayed long enough for them to trust it.”
She leans in closer, forcing me to look at her.
“That is us, Zane. That has always been us. We were never loved the way we needed to be, so we do it to protect ourselves.”
My jaw is so tight that it fucking aches.
“Rainer didn’t pay that debt because you’re a burden,” she says. “He paid it because of what you mean to him.”
She places her hand flat on my chest, right over the place that has been locked up and defended since I was old enough to know nobody was coming. “And I’m sitting on this half-collapsed roof, telling you that I love you. I love you because of who you are beneath it all.”
I peer down at her hand resting on my chest before glancing up at her face.
“We’ve always been the kids who never believed we deserved anything good,” she says softly. “But you have to stop letting that kid make every decision for the man you’ve become.”
Something in me that has been braced for impact since I was old enough to know what impact felt like finally sets down what it has been carrying.
“You thought I wouldn’t want you after you told me that?”