“I’ve told you time and time again what I want. For you to leave me be, but you can’t seem to understand I want nothing to do with you, Finn.”
A moment of silence passes between us, and when I look back over, I swear I catch the tail end of his face falling. “I washere the night of your accident, waiting just like your aunt and your friends were.”
He was? I had no idea. Not that it matters.
“What? You want a prize? You want a watermelon sucker to make you feel like a good boy for showing up?” I quip.
“I’ll take butterscotch if you got it.”
My eyes squint in irritation. “What?”
“Not a fan of watermelon, but I’ll take butterscotch.” He takes a step closer to the bed, his hands leaving his pockets for him to cross his arms over his chest. I don’t know what he’s doing, why he’s wasting time on a lost cause. “I know I’m not going to find forgiveness here, but…” He collects his hair in his hand and pulls at it. Pulls at the stainless-steel ring pierced into his lip, too.
“Just leave, Finn. We’ll both be better off if you actually start listening.”
“Thing is, I don’t want to fucking listen to that, Moore.”
A host of memories come when he refers to me by last name. So many times, that word has left his mouth only for me to have to endure his wrath over deals that had nothing to do with me.
“He didn’t tell me,” Finn says. “I had no idea who you were to me. And if I had known?—”
“If you had known, what? You stand there and act like it would’ve changed things, but it wouldn’t have. You run drugs, and who the fuck knows what else, with that piece of shit you call Dad. He would’ve forced your hand; we both know it. I can’t wrap my mind around you not realizing that on your own.”
“He’s your dad, too,” he interjects.
“No…he’s not. I’m nothing like that man, and I never will be but you…you’re a spitting image of him. You drain people of the little bit of life they have left in them. Then when you do, you toss their pruned bodies out like they never had a chance.” I lick my lips and continue. “I may have turned to shit I should’ve leftalone after my mom died, but that’s not who I am. Isn’t that why you showed up and brought Violet into it? To get me to snap out of it and stop throwing my life away? That’s the difference between you and me. There’s still hope where I’m concerned even if I have to work double time for it now but you? You ran out of potential a long fucking time ago, Finn.”
“Watch what you’re saying,” he warns, his eyes flared with heat.
I laugh, swallowing down the raspiness that comes when I say, “Or what? You going to do what you did to me back then? In case you can’t fucking see, Finn, I’m already laid up in a hospital bed. Not much more you can do to make me suffer. Unless you’re willing to end me, and if that’s the case,” I hold my one good arm out, “then have at it. Put me out of my goddamn misery.”
For what feels like the first time ever, he rolls his eyes. “Jesus, fuck. That’s not what I want. You don’t fucking get it. You willneverunderstand what it was like growing up in a house with a man like him and being forced to look up to him.”
My heart gallops in my chest. Fuck him for trying to make it sound like he suffered to the extent I did. At least he had two parents. Not only his father, even if he is a royal fucking prick, but a mother as well. No one fedherdrugs until she wound up in jail then proceeded to sneak them in for her. He doesn’t get to do this to me, goddamnit.
“I don’t care what it was like for you, Finn. My free passes shriveled up a long time ago.”
“A free pass isn’t what I’m looking for. All I’m saying is…”
“Is what?” I press, because I’m getting fed up. Since he came into the room, my pain number has gone up no less than three digits.
The words must be hard for him to get out, because he mulls them over for a solid minute. He ducks his chin, his voice a decibel I can hardly hear. “I’m fuckingsorry, okay?”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yeah, I am.” He raises his head, not backing down from the weight of the conversation. “We’re family, and we’re supposed to protect our own. I went against you every step of the way because Ihadto. I let him turn me into him, so he could get what he wanted. It was fucked up.”
“You’re just realizing this now?”
“Consider yourself the smarter one of the two of us,” he half-jokes but there’s not a smile in sight.
I look at him. Really look at him as he stands at the foot of my bed. For a fleeting moment, I see it. The scared little boy who would run around the playground during recess with a gigantic smile on his face until life caught up with him. The boy who went off on summer vacation and came back colder and meaner with two burly cousins who flanked his sides during our middle school years.
The playground games stopped, and the pocket picker and lunch money thief made his entrance. Back then, he thrived off the punishments and the cruelty he dished out. His older cousins would pat him on the back, and I’m sure that filled his eager little heart, knowing he’d get to go home to receive the affection he so desperately wanted from Clyde as well.
His expression flattens, the tiny smirk that was playing at his mouth vanishing. “I’m not him.”
“You’re a spitting image,” I remind him again.
