“Fucking forget it,” Brock said.
He didn’t speak with the evident, expressive anger Steele frequently did. He didn’t speak with hatred for me. He just spoke with resigned coldness.
“I knew this, us, was a bad idea. I just didn’t know it would be that way because you couldn’t stay out of my damn business.”
That stung. This was a guy I’d chosen to talk to instead of having sex with Steele. This was a guy that knew me better than anyone in his group of friends—including my ex. Better, in fact, than my parents or my friends. Elizabeth was probably the only one who knew me better.
And I couldn’t stay out of his damn business?
“Fucking stupid,” he said, grabbing his keys from his pocket. “If you need security next week, do me a favor. Don’t contact me until Sunday. Because there’s no way I can look at you, right here, right now, and not think about how you can’t let things be.”
“Brock, come on—”
But he was already turning around and walking back to his bike. I said his name one more time, but he never even looked over his shoulder. It was only seconds later than he had turned on his bike and peeled out, heading to a home much closer than mine was.
What the fuck?
Maybe I’d had the wrong idea about Brock. Perhaps he was just a more attractive, more empathetic, less volatile version of Steele.
Or, something horrible really had happened, something so horrible that even he didn’t want to face it.
But what?
Brock
What the hell was she thinking?
Fucking hell, Tara.
She’d pressed before but had been wise enough to back the fuck off. I never would have expected, though, on a night when it seemed like we were moving past our dancing around each other and getting to the point that she’d throw a fucking monkey wrench in there and ruin everything.
Did she not know her fucking place? Or that she didn’t need to know about my past to appreciate me? Did she not…
Did she really want to fucking know what had happened with Rachel?
Did she really want to fucking know how much of a coward I had been, why I tried so hard to defend and protect this town—my terrible, incomplete way of atoning for what had happened?
I pulled over to the side of the road about a block down, feeling sick to my stomach. I got off my bike, sat on the concrete sidewalk, and took a couple of deep breaths. I listened to the quiet night of Santa Maria.
Quiet only because my boys and some Bandits were in jail in Albuquerque.
Quiet only because Sheriff Davis presumably would not be patrolling until midnight so he could catch us and the other drunkies.
But it was a quiet that buried what had happened eight years ago, an incident that had turned Santa Maria from a chic hotspot into a feared spot, as ugly a place as Compton or South-Side Chicago as far as reputations went.
The gang rape of Rachel Reid.
And how I’d fucking failed…
My stomach flipped on itself. I stood up, hurried to the nearest patch of dirt, and hurled my guts out. There wasn’t much in there, but it didn’t matter. No matter how much I tried to throw up, no matter how much penance I did, no matter how much I tried to believe I could purge myself of this monumental failure, it would haunt me from now until kingdom come. Really, the only thing that I saw as bringing peace to the town was the complete and total annihilation of the Bandits.
And even then, I somehow feared that it wouldn’t be enough.
Because how the fuck could you ever look someone in the eye like Rachel and tell her you had made up for what she’d gone through, so now all was well?
The only thing I could muster in my defense was that I had to dosomething, and when it had happened, I didn’t have the emotional maturity—probably still didn’t—to comfort her and to help her through it. I just reacted with anger, swearing to burn the Bandits down forever. I still did, but it wasn’t what Rachel wanted. I wasn’t sure, even now, that she wanted anything. It was why we ended a few weeks later.
Still…I had to dosomething.And since I couldn’t do anything for Rachel—I’d never blamed her for leaving me—I could do something for Santa Maria.
