“It started at about thirty-five thousand, and I think with a year of payments, it’s at a solid thirty-four thousand.” I laugh but it’s definitely not funny.
Reid blinks. “I’ll pay it for you.”
He says it so casually. So easily. Like that amount of money is nothing.
To him, it probably isn’t. But still.
I baulk at the offer. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
My mouth opens and closes like a fish on a line, nothing coming out. “You just—you can’t. I couldn’t accept that.”
He frowns deeply and squares his shoulders toward me. “I wanted to do it for you in the first place. Just accept it?—”
“I don’t want to owe anybody anything!”
“You wouldn’t owe me,” he rears back. “I’m not giving you a loan. I don’t want, or expect, you to pay me back.”
“No.” Even though part of me is dying to say yes, to be free of the weight on my shoulders that the debt brings to my life, but I can’t do it. It was a hard lesson to learn as a kid when I was bounced from one person to another who wanted nothing to do with me, that I never wanted to rely on someone else.
And whether or not Reid would want to be paid back, I’d always feel like I owed him something. That he held something over my head, even if he didn’t use it against me.
“Penny, don’t be stubborn just?—”
I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “My answer is no, so you’re wasting your breath.”
He looks like he still wants to argue, his shoulders tight with the desire for a fight, but he must see the stone resolve on my face and drops it. He sighs heavily and looks back out toward the water.
Only the sound of the waves fills the air for a while, before I ask the burning question that’s been on my mind since I first found out about the money. “Did you think I was just ungrateful? That I never tried to get in touch with you and thank you for it?”
A muscle in his jaw clicks as he stares out toward the water. The salt in the air brings out the slight curl in his dark hair. “I didn’t care, honestly. And I sort of forgot about it.”
My stomach drops at that and I turn away from him slightly. Well, that fucking hurt.
Noticing my reaction, he straightens up and holds out a hand. “I didn’t mean it to be a dick.”
That’d be a first.
“I didn’t send you that money expecting you to send me fucking flowers or something in thanks. I didn’t expect anything from it, or you. Hell, I didn’t care if you even used it for school. I just wanted you to have a shot when I knew no one was going to be looking out for you except you. And if I could make it a little easier for you to get out of there”—he runs a frustrated hand through his hair—“then I wanted you to have that chance.”
When no one was worried about my future, he was still thinking ahead, planning, trying to do what the adults in my life should’ve been doing. My heart thunders in my chest so hard I wonder if he can see it in the moonlight.
“Once I started getting more steady income and had hired an accountant to my team, I had her send through payments each month automatically,” he explains. “So I never had to think about it after the first couple of times. That’s what I meant when I said I forgot about it. And yeah, over the years I blocked all of it out.”
“Including me,” I say.
He nods gravely. “Including you.”
He doesn’t try to apologize for it, and I don’t expect him to. Not after getting to know him more the last few weeks. If there’s one thing I’ve picked up from him, besides the fact that he loves to pick a fight, it’s that he’s completely unapologetic.
I was too young for him to ever tell me much about how he ended up in Gina and Patrick’s house, but I can’t imagine it’s good. If he wanted to block everything out from his past,including me, I can understand it. I try to do it myself, although he seems better at it than me.
And I need to stop holding that against him, or try to.
“Do you still want to forget about me?” I ask so quietly, the sound of the water almost drowns out my question.
A beat, a wave crashing, a blink of the stars in the moonlit sky, the air in my lungs locked up tight while I wait.
