24
Icheck on Birdie again, making sure she’s comfortable before I wander back down the hall to the stairs in search of water, but as I pass through the living room my fingers catch on the doorframe of Riggs’s bedroom and I stop just to see if he’s inside.
The bed is unmade and there are still clothes on the floor but otherwise it’s empty.
It smells like him: oil and spice. It drags me in like a rope around my waist, and suddenly I’m exploring all the little pieces of Riggs that he leaves behind every day: his bowl of rings, his messy drawers and unorganized closet.
I stand inside and press one of his sweaters to my face.
He hasn’t changed at all. There’s boots on the floor in piles, old and new.
Pairs I haven’t seen him wear in years, and others that probably don’t even fit him anymore—but he keeps them all.
An old sweater catches my eye, a black one that he used to wear all the time with the Monroe logo over the back shoulders.
It’s the one he was wearing that night and tears well in my eyes.
The right shoulder is ripped open and there’s proof of the fire that had started along the hood, collar and down the left side.
I pull it from the hanger and stare at it for a long time, trying to imagine how horrible it all was—angry that he’s still lying to this day, even more so that he kept a memento. Then I realize something.
“You weren’t driving…” I whisper, touching the charred collar. The fire started under the driver's-side wheel well. That’s what the cops told us. If Riggs was driving, this sweater would have been nothing but ash.
“I should have thrown that out.” His voice startles me and I use the collar of my shirt to wipe away my tears.
“You don’t throw anything out.” I give a hollow laugh. I move around him, never looking at him as he makes his way into the room. He sets something down on the dresser as I close the door behind us.
His hair is messy and his hands hover at his sides. He’d been racing.
“Where did you go tonight?” I ask carefully.
I can see him thinking about it. His eyes stay planted on mine but he swallows down whatever excuse he’s formulating. “Racing.”
“Alone?” I ask and he nods. “Did you win?”
“No.” It’s honest—he’d never admit otherwise—and it sounds painful as it leaves his lips.
“What happened?” I ask, begging him to keep being honest with me.
“They were better,” he admits roughly.
You aren’t telling me something. No one is better than Riggs. I’ve watched him drive cars my entire life, not even Koa could beat him, not fairly at least. He’s unbalanced, exhausted and overwhelmed. He’s not himself. Neither am I. The sweater. He’d have scars. I need to know.
“Take off your shirt.”
“What?” he chokes out.
“Not—” I sigh. “...like that. I need to see something.” When I finally look up at him he’s staring at me like I have a gun to his head. “Please?”
Why did you lie?
I watch as he strips slowly from the leather jacket, tossing it on the bed he never takes his eyes off me.
The next to go is the shirt. He rolls it up from the bottom and pulls it over his shoulders awkwardly.
The ink across his chest and shoulders is new, darker and heavier than I remember.
I step forward and I understand why. It’s scar tissue.
I lift my fingers to touch his shoulder and he inhales so deeply I can feel it in my own lungs. I trace the lines of scarring across his collar bone, matching it to the damage on the hoodie as I go.
“Did it hurt?” I dare to ask, looking up to meet his eyes. He grinds out a rough breath as my fingertips brush across the large mangled patch on his hip.
“I can’t forget how excruciating it was,” he answers honestly, and I can see the agony there, behind the ice in his gaze.
“You weren’t driving.” I whisper, noticing the burn scars around his ribcage.
His jaw clenches tightly. “I was.”
“You’re lying,” I push, confused as to why.
“I never lied to you,” he corrects me. “Not once.”
“You never told me what was going on. Withholding is the same as lying. Secrets hurt just as much as lies, Riggs.” I watch him nod, the shirt tangling in his fist at his side, but he doesn’t make a play to put it back on.
“You think I don’t know that?” he says, finally exhaling. His tongue runs over his bottom lip and he looks down at the ground. “I’ve kept thousands my entire life, Cress—to protect you.”
“That’s an excuse,” I whisper.
“Only you would think that,” he chuckles, shaking his head at me. “I’m not going to start speaking ill of him just because you want the truth. I won’t ruin how they remember him for shit that’s in the past. Things I can’t change.”
“Is it really all bad?” I ask him, scared of his answer.
When he doesn’t say anything I take his silence as one, I just wish I knew the Koa they all did. “I killed him, Cress. It was me that night.” Riggs breathes out.
“No.” I shake my head.
“Why are you picking so hard at this?” he barks, louder than I’ve ever heard him.
“Because you’re still protecting him! Even now! And I don’t understand why…” I step forward again. “This is undeniable proof. You can lie to me all you want. These scars tell the truth.”
Riggs stares at me and I can feel the weight of the world on my shoulders through his gaze. It burns across the bridge of my nose and ripples down into the pit of my stomach.
“I feel stupid,” I confess.
“No.” He’s quick to move, his finger beneath my chin as he pulls my face up to meet his intense gaze. It’s not an omission, it’s more deflection. “He manipulated everything we knew for his benefit. Including us.”
“What does that mean?” I ask, staring at him, trying to control all the other thoughts stirring below the surface. All the unanswered questions I have that threaten to explode from me at any given second. But I have him here, now, talking and I can’t risk forcing him away again.
“I only ever wanted you to be safe and he used that against me. Every single time,” Riggs confesses.
“Why didn’t you ever just…”
“It’s not that simple..” He clears his throat. “He made me believe that he loved you the best, that he knew what you wanted and needed before you ever did, and I just got overwhelmed with the idea that I could never be that.”
“That’s stupid,” I argue.
“We were kids, Cress.” He drops the shirt and cups my face in his calloused hands, the cool metal of his rings biting into my skin. “Koa was always one step ahead, he took on the world like he was immortal. He was a god. So I did what I was told.”
“Like getting in the car that day?”
“Yeah,” he admits softly, and my heart starts to race.
I chew my bottom lip, tasting the copper that pools there as the skin splits from my frustration. His eyes well and I can feel his lack of control in the way his hands tremble around my face.
“The best I could do was make sure he never let you down, so I did what I was told, I helped him and without question until the day he tried—” Riggs cuts himself off. “Until the day he died.”
“And now?” I ask. He didn’t kill Koa. It wasn’t him.
“Now I can’t stop thinking about how you taste,” he says without hesitation. “The way you feel, the curve of your smile against my lips…” Riggs stops, his jaw ticking uncomfortably as he holds back. “No more secrets.”
“Do you promise?” The hope is violent. It courses around under my skin and I can feel myself leaning into his grasp, needing all the same things he does. It’s been less than twenty-four hours, and yet all I want is the reminder of how he feels when he’s completely lost in me.
“With my life.” He presses his forehead to mine and my hands find his chest, raking up and over just to feel the way he breathes shallowly, his heart racing beneath all that ink. I swallow. This is the edge. The place where truth either saves us or ruins what’s left.
“Then tell me,” I whisper, holding his gaze. “Tell me what happened that night?”