Cash shook his head, a gesture that somehow managed to be helpless and resolute at the same time. “I can’t change who I am, how I feel, and I don’t want to die trying. I’m a sab, Rae.”
I knew that, had always known it. In that, him and I were the same, but there was more to the torture in Cash’s eyes than I truly understood, even now. “What are you trying to say? That you want in on my crew? That you’re going to join us?”
Cash nodded. “Yes, but that’s all it can be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I meanus, Rae…this.” He gestured wildly…and vaguely between us. “I can’t do both. It’s not in me anymore.”
For a long, drawn-out moment, I had zero clue what he was talking about. Then it clicked, and my stomach dropped to my feet. I sat heavily on a nearby stool. “You don’t want to see me anymore?”
“I won’t have much choice if I join your gang, mate.”
“Don’t be obtuse.”
“Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about then.”
He spoke gently, nothing like the way we’d torn strips off each other in the past, but it hurt just as much…perhaps more so because I understood. Sabbing was an insane lifestyle, even for people who only did it on weekends. The emotional commitment was huge, and left little room for anything—oranyone—else.
Especially if you’d been burned before.
I sighed and stood, stepping briefly into Cash’s personal space to drag a final, sweet kiss along his jaw. “I get it. I’ll call Meg, tell her you’re in, then I’ll get out of your hair.”
Chapter Eighteen
Cash
In movies, action follows declarations. Violence, sex, whatever—shit happens. But real life wasn’t like that. Rae kissed me, and disappeared to make his phone call. Ten minutes later he came back, fully dressed, boots on. He knocked my shoulder like we were dude bros, and then slipped out, leaving me to make sense of something I’d been a fool to misunderstand in the first place.
The silence hit me as soon as the front door shut behind him, but I welcomed it, absorbed it, and used it to blanket my thoughts. Rae was an addiction, but that didn’t change who I was. Sab life wasmylife. No fucker got to take that away from me.
Didn’t make it hurt any less, though. The prospect of committing to Rae’s gang brought a sense of rightness, a strange peace I couldn’t describe, but it was marred by sadness. Rae made my blood sing, my heart race, and my head implode with a single dark glance. No one had ever made me feel so…consumed. Not even Zander. Giving it up felt so wrong I could hardly think straight.
Dom came downstairs as I was looking for answers in the kitchen sink.
“I thought you’d gone,” I said tiredly.
He reached around me for a bottle of the weird vitamin water he drank every morning. “Not yet. Just didn’t want to intrude.”
I was glad of that, but I didn’t want to be the kind of prick who held his housemates hostage because I had a fella in the house. “You wouldn’t have, but don’t worry about it in any case. It won’t happen again.”
“Why’s that?”
“Rae’s not coming over anymore.”
Impossibly, my cheek felt like it was still shaped like his lap. I turned the hot water tap on, treating myself to a cloud of steam I hoped would irritate Dom enough to get rid of him.
His hand on my shoulder surprised me, but he said nothing, and his silence got under my skin. I turned the tap off. “I want to talk to you about that land.”
“Okay.” Dom twisted the cap back on his bottle and set it on the side. “If you want to talk figures, you’ll have to speak to Fletch. It’s not my information to give out.”
“I don’t want specifics,” I said. “I just need to know what you’re offering is enough for them to start somewhere new. They won’t give up the life, and I can’t be the one who fucked them over.”
“Are you asking me if I’ve offered them a fair price?”
“Have you?”
For a brief moment, Dom seemed offended. Then his expression cleared. “Yes, I have. More than fair. I would never undervalue someone’s land, no matter who I was buying it from. And I’m aware that if this deal goes through, I’m the one with the power—the money to pay lawyers and brokers, etcetera, but I’m not a wanker, Cash. My business would mean nothing if I built it on the back of screwing people over.”
