“You should know better than anyone that old shit is always going to come up,” he grumbled. “Do you think I don’t know that being your friend is going to bring up old stuff I thought I’d left behind? Well, guess what? It is, and now I’m stuck with it.”
“Stuck? You’re the one talking to me again like nothing ever happened.”
“No, Levi, not like nothing ever happened. I’m not so fucking stupid that I don’t realize what I’m doing, alright? I know that talking to you is dragging shit up for both of us. But I’m not going to pretend like I don’t still want to try, alright?”
“What is the point?” I asked tiredly. God, how was it that it had been years since I’d dealt with him, but he was still one of the few people who wore me down just by being themselves? “Nothing good could come of this, as I keep trying to tell you.”
“And like I’ve tried to tell you,” he began, his voice growing heated, “it’s not?—”
“Wait,” I said sharply, my head jerking up at an odd noise. “Be quiet.”
“Don’t—”
“Shut up.”
I didn’t know whether to be surprised or grateful that he did as I asked, but I didn’t have time to weigh the options and decide. Straining my ears, I frowned when I realized that what I was hearing was the sound of an engine roaring to life. Not far away, but certainly not that close.
“What the fuck?” I wondered aloud as I watched a car burning rubber shoot away from the opposite side of the warehouse. A couple of SUVs followed it, and I realized those were the vehicles Reg and Luis had arrived in, along with their retinue of guards. Alarm shot through me, and I turned toward my men at the door and Will. “Get away from there! Get away from the building, move, move, mo?—”
Light burst before my eyes, and I watched the few remaining intact windows shatter before I heard the sound of the explosion. Hot air washed over me, and my cry was drowned out as I was thrown backward and hit the ground, trying to cry out again but finding no air in my lungs as something hot and sharp ripped down my arm and shoulder. The world spun, and nothing made sense. Some distant part of my thoughts knew there had been an explosion, but I was left to choke on the acrid taste at the back of my throat and try to make sense of where I was, and where my body parts were.
Consciousness flickered, fluttered, weakened, and then faded as I swore I heard yelling in my ear.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Dom snarled at me, and I watched his hands ball into fists at his side as he took half a step toward me, seemed to think better of it, and then drew back.
“It means what I said,” I told him, my aching heart thundering in my chest, but I refused to listen to its cries. “I don’t need you following me around like a lost puppy, alright? So fuck off and leave me alone for once!”
“No, no, fuck you, you don’t get to say that shit to me, not you,” he said, and for a moment I thought he might beg.
God, don’t let him beg; don’t let me see the pain in his eyes without the anger and the almost-hate. I’m strong, I know I am, and I know I’m tough, but I’m not tough enough to stare him in the eye, where the hurt I put there is waiting for me, and expect to keep going. Please, Dom, for once in your life, do not relent, do not be soft with me, don’t make me the exception again. I need you to be hard and angry, just like you always are when someone upsets you. Please do this for me, for yourself, for both of us...please.
“You’ve got plenty of people to follow around,” I continued, shaking my head and backing up toward the door. “Go bother them. Go interfere in their lives, alright? Leave me the fuck alone, for once.”
“Or what?”
There it was, what was I willing to do to make sure he did leave me alone? What could I possibly summon that would allow me to drive him away completely?
I could lie.
“Or nothing, you’ll be following me around like you’ve done for fucking years, acting like you’re this big protector when in reality all you’ve wanted was someone who could take care of you,” I told him, watching a hurt I couldn’t stand flash over his face, and was relieved when fury took its place. “I’m not some little kid for you to play big brother with, alright? Go be like that with your actual family. Leave me the fuck alone.”
“You don’t want that,” he said, and I was glad he wasn’t a different person. Someone else might have said it with that softunderstanding that would have sent a crack right down the middle of my offense. Dom, though, was too wound up; he was too hurt, too willing to fight back right now, and it was exactly what I needed. “You don’t fucking want that. You were the one who said?—”
“I know what I said,” I told him coldly. “But you know what? I bet I’ll say shit like that to another guy when I’m well fucked and in their bed afterward, alright? I’m not going to let some stupid crush let me keep going like this. I should have realized a long time ago that I didn’t need you, and that, you know what? That having you around does nothing but cause me a shit ton of pain and BS that I don’t need anymore, you got it?”
His mouth screwed up into an ugly, thin shape. “What, and working for your daddy is going to be somehow better? Like they’re not a bunch of assholes and snakes?”
“Maybe some snakes will do me good,” I told him as I yanked open the door and stepped out. “Because I’m done trying to play sitter for someone else’s dog. Go look for a treat at someone else’s doorstep, Dom. Because I’m fucking finished.”
I walked through that door and into a darkness that swirled and writhed, almost like I had fallen into a pit full of snakes so deep it could cover a full-grown man. It was a place of misery and loneliness so pronounced and deep that I thought it was amazing I could even breathe. After all, physical pain could grow so strong that the heart just couldn’t take it and would just...stop. So why the hell couldn’t the same thing happen when you were suffering from emotional pain? What, the heart could only give up when you were physically hurting, but when its metaphorical half was stuck in the throes of agony, it just kept pumping?
How stupid, how ridiculous, and how very typical of what it was like to?—
LEVI
—live in this world. All I could do was listen to the sound of him calling for me over and over again, which was...weird, because I didn’t remember him doing much more than yelling my name.
Wait, but I was...I was there...no...I’m not there, I’m?—
