“I don’t like it when people go after larger people.”
Heath practically gives himself whiplash looking at me. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”
I look down again at my hands, unable to maintain direct eye contact with him. “I don’t like it when people go after larger people.” I stop at repeating myself, just to make sure that I don’t say too much.
He opens his mouth to say something, but then his mouth snaps shut as he looks into the rearview mirror. After a few more seconds of silence he asks, “Why don’t you like it when they go after larger people?”
“Nobody should really go after anybody, actually. But, let’s just say that my experience in Iraq taught me how much damage I could do with my mouth, and when I see people making the same mistakes I did, it sets me off pretty badly.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asks, his face sincere.
I shiver and nod. “Yeah, I might need to.” I look back at Lily, who is paying rapt attention. “But maybe later.”
“Nuh-unhhhh! No fair! Why can’t you talk about that stuff around me?”
I angle myself so that I can look at her in the eyes. “Lily-belle, I had a lot of bad things happen to me when I was in the Navy, and I’m not a dad. I don’t know what’s appropriate and what’s not. If I talk to your dad and he thinks you can hear my story, I’ll share it. Promise.”
Heath looks at her in his rearview mirror. “Lily, sweetie, I think Roly’s right on this one.”
“But I want to know what happened to Roly!”
“I know, baby. And I do, too. But we’ve got to let him tell his story in his way. That’s not up to you.”
She deflates like a sad balloon animal in the back seat, perfectly working the guilt trip. I look at Heath, and we share an eye roll.Teenagers.
Ashley’d made it home and wanted to spend time with the girls, so we grab the other two and drop off all of them before heading back to his house.
As we step into his living room, Heath lays his hand on my arm, stopping me. “We don’t have to talk about this tonight, or ever, if you’re not ready, okay?”
I smile, even as the anxiety of being seen licks through me. “Actually,” I say, looking at his hand on my arm. “In a weird sort of way, this all leads back to you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Roly
“How so?” he asks. “How does it lead back to me?”
His large hand is gently stroking my arm, almost undoing my will to be truthful, but… I can’t hide anymore. It hurts too much, even if the truth means that he’ll never want me like that.
“The day before everything went to hell, my team and the Peshmerga team we were training went to a party being hosted by some important diplomat. We were there to, I don’t know, show our solidarity.”
“Okay…”
“And that’s where I saw him for the first time, this big bear of a guy named Asadi. There was something really familiar about him, and without thinking, I made a flippant remark about his weight, and everyone around us laughed.”
Heath stiffens a little but keeps his hand on my arm. “Was he familiar because of me?”
“Yes,” I admit. Heath absorbs that information quietly, then gestures for me to move on.
“He’d obviously heard me make fun of him, and he became the butt of the joke for the rest of the party. I didn’t realize that he was the son of the diplomat, because his father was laughing with everyone else, and I didn’t realize that…”
“He was stuck there.”
I nod, wondering how many times Heath’d been trapped, listening to his stepfather’s shitty words only to turn around and deal with it again at school. With me. Stuck.
“When I saw him the next day in that horrible room, I knew I’d done that to him.”
“What do you mean?” Heath isn’t buying it. But he will.
