I didn’t know.
I damn sure wasn’t going to ask.
So what was I supposed to do then? Try to guess what was going on inside his head?
Pretend to be normal?
No doubt he noticed I was dragging my feet, so I quickly bent down to hug him while he sat on the bench. Mistake of mistakes. I’m talkingfarmore awkward than I could have imagined.
Eddie wrapped me up like he used to, long arms all the way around me. He hugged me so hard, I nearly lost my balance and fell over into him.
“It’s nice of you to be here,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound like him. “You smell really good.”
Oh no. Not good whatsoever.Make this stop.
I gently shrugged out of his embrace and tried to think of something to say—to cover up the awkwardness of it all. “How, uh, are you holding up? This must be overwhelming.”
He blew out a hard breath and shrugged. “I don’t even know.There’s a little boy inside my head walking around in a dark forest. That’s how I feel right now. Lost and alone.”
“That sounds…” Terrible. Awful. My heart hurt for him because I believed that he was being absolutely honest with me. Maybe for the first time since we’d known each other. “I’m really sorry, Eddie.”
He leaned back on the bench. “Why are you sorry? You didn’t do anything wrong. Oh, wait.…” His gaze locked on mine. “You mean about you andFen.”
Shit. He knew!
My legs felt a little wobbly all the sudden.
I wasn’t prepared to talk about this with him. But here we were.
“Eddie—”
“It’s fine,” he said, dark circles rimming bloodshot eyes. “I saw your text messages. They let me have my phone in jail. They were actually really cool about things and nice to me over there. I love the Philippines. Weird, huh?”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, but emotion caught me by surprise. I blinked back welling tears. “Eddie, please believe me. I didn’t plan for Fen. For any of this. When you left for the Philippines, if I had an inkling that we’d end up here—”
“I told you to stay away from him!”
“You didn’t tell mewhy,” I argued. Upset. A little indignant, too. “You didn’t tell me what happened to your family. Why Fen was kicked out of the house. Your role in that. The drug problems—”
“I’m not some kind of junkie, okay? Jesus. A couple of Americans I knew from online met up with me in Manila. We were just going to party on the island, that’s all. I just got caught.”
“I know about Christmas, too.”
He looked genuinely surprised and mumbled, “That was just a bad night.”
“You didn’t pull me out of the dam,” I said, shaking a little. “Youlied. Why, Eddie? Why would you lie about that?”
Eddie said nothing for several moments. A plane streaked across the dark sky, and in the distance, an ambulance siren heralded an incoming patient. When the sound faded, Eddie scrubbed his face with his hand.
“It was fine when no one knew what happened that night but me and Fen. But someone else saw Fen pull you out, and you know how gossip spreads. Next thing you know, my father is up my ass.”
“Why would he care?”
“Papa told me that if Mad Dog found out you fell in the dam because you were upset about… if you fell in because of me, that it would ruin the relationship between Sarafian Events and Mad Dog. Papa said I had to clean up my own mess. So if you thought I’d rescued you and that ever got back to Mad Dog, then it would soften the blow.”
I blinked at him. “You started seeing me because your father was worried about collateral damage with Mad Dog?”
Because he believed I was Mad Dog’s daughter.
