This is no world for anyone close to me. Cortland is a hardass and he’s only afraid of losing Remi or Lyle, but I still can’t let him near any of this. I don’t know what to do. He won’t stay in WestVirginia forever. Not yet, anyway. Remi wants to graduate, and she deserves to.
How do I keep juggling all these strange parts of my life and where does Sloane fit?
At the ocean. Running a marketing company. Smiling at rich people and selling their products and attending balls or galas or whatever the hell people like that do in their free time.
Not my life.
Not the man slipping drugs under those same rich people’s doormats before their kids wake up. Not the man supplying them with an addiction that will ruin their family’s lives. Not the man with blood on his hands and too many sins in his system to count.
Sloane’s palm comes to my chest, right over my heart.
She doesn’t stop staring up at me.
My baby,she called me.
No one has called me that before.
“What happened to you tonight?” She sounds nervous.
She should be.
But not because of me.
I’d never hurt her.
Which is the problem, though, isn’t it? If that’s true, I’ll let this go. I won’t take her to this fucking nineties concert tomorrow in another part of the state and I won’t stay with her at the Ritz-Carlton I booked us a suite at and I won’t do this to her.
I sniff, a bitter taste down the back of my throat.
Her light brows pull together. They’re thin, and I like them like this. They fit her face so well. I’ve seen them thicker, and she’s always stunning, but this suits her.
“Did you…” She takes a breath, exhales, her shoulders dropping. “Do cocaine?” She asks it like she’s never asked anyone that before, like she’s never even said the word, and she probably hasn’t.
How does she even know? Who the fuck is doing blow around her? Has she ever?
“What do you know about coke, huh?” I’m ignoring her question and the way she narrows those turquoise-green eyes into slits, she knows it.
Lydia knows all of this life, doesn’t she?
Lydia saw a dropped body on the stairs.
It hurt her, somehow. Not the death itself, but the vision. There was a memory, wasn’t there?
We have that in common.
In my mind, there is a closet, and there’s blood, and there’s a girl.
I don’t know why I cling to it.
Sloane, by contrast, is out of reach. Outerspace. Too high to touch.
Lydia is in the gutter, and there are other women like her I could belong to.
Not this one.
Too precious.
Honey,I called her the last time I was in her house. I’ve never said that before in my life. But…it fits.
