“Come sit with me?”
My eyebrows pinch a little that she’d want me to. However, I understand most people want comfort from someone else.
And that someone else is apparently me right now.
Wrong choice.
Nonetheless, I take the opposite side of the couch and keep myself closest to the front door, in case I’m needed for something.
“Are you upset with me?”
I don’t understand her question, so I shake my head again, even though she hasn’t looked at me or opened her eyes.
“I have too much on my plate, and I can barely do that right. I put a hit out on myex.Myself.”
“Good,” I reply, the answer blurting from my mouth before I have a mind to stop it.
Bay’s blue eyes come up to me with a flat stare. “It was a stupid thing to do.”
“Why?”
“You know why. You know everything.”
I wouldn’t say that.
I don’t know the first thing about how to make her feel better. I sure as hell don’t comprehend fully why she even wants me around half the time.
I’m not the person to be asking for life advice or anything to do with a child. This is anyone’s territory but mine.
I’m not built for this shit.
However, on the same note, Torin and Reeve are out of the question and I told Cairo to heal his damn eye first before coming to see her.
“I’m…scared,” she admits, slightly tucking her chin into her chest. “I don’t know if I have it in me to do this.”
She does.
Bay can do anything she puts her mind to.
Matteo De Leon is a poser with many men who blindly follow him. He isn’t and wouldn’t make a good leader and do worse than Emilio did with The Landings and South Shore.
Bay is empathy, kindness, and loyalty. We’d follow her anywhere.
“I think I should go?—”
Panic immediately fills my veins at the beginning of her comment, and I can’t stop it on a dime.
My heart slams into my chest with fervor. The thought of her leaving South Shore or any surrounding city gives me a wave of anxiety that makes my breathing slightly hitch.
Bay notices, and I hate that she does because she scoots her ass closer. “Ozzy, no, I didn’t mean it like that.”
She reaches for me, but I flinch out of her grasp, jumping to my feet to gain some well-needed space.
Words of Torin come fluttering in my brain that she’d hurt me one day. That if I got too attached, I was going to pay heavily.
That it’d be like Vivian.
“I’d neverleaveyou,” she tells me, her sole focus on me, and I feel uncomfortable and ashamed under it.
