He sighed heavily and rolled off of me, settling on the bed beside me. I shifted to face him and waited for him to say something more. His fingers found mine, threading through them.
“Can I ask you about prison… what it was like for you?” Harley replied quietly. There was a tentativeness in his voice, which I understood. There were so many ways this conversation could go.
“It was uneventful for me,” I said.I wasn’t lying.Mrs. Lowell had kept her word, much to my surprise. Whatever she had on Robert Howard worked in my favor. I didn’t go through the same experiences as some of the other new guys. Instead, I just hung around Rob and waited my time out, because no one messed with Rob. Oddly enough, the guy wasn’t so bad. Sure, he’d done a lot of fucked up shit that I forced myself to never think about, but he was quiet and damn near philosophical.It was a weird thing to bond with a guy who had definitely murdered way more people than he was sentenced for.
“It was?”
“Yeah. I was in four and a half years, I got sober because I had to, and I got out early on good behavior because I’m a good fucking boy like that.” I chuckled at my own joke, mostly because I had to. “I was on parole for eighteen months, I go to A.A., and that’s… that.”
I didn’t know what else to say. There wasn’t anything else to add. Yeah, the experience sucked, but it could’ve been worse. Honestly, parole sucked more thanks to Levi’s intensity and drive to be all up in my business.
“How did you get your scar?” His fingers touched the scar cutting my brow.
“Oh,that.” I blew out a breath of air. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“It did happen in prison.”
“Okay…”
“I tripped on my first day there and hit my head on the metal bedframe,” I told him. His lips flattened into a line, and I watched the struggle on his face as he tried to maintain his expression. “You can laugh, Harley.”
“I’m not going to laugh,” he said, his voice a whole notch higher.
“Well, you should, because it’s funny,” I retorted. My permission shook a laugh free of him, and he covered his face. Just the sound of him letting go was more than enough to make me laugh, too.
“Only you.”
“Right!” I exclaimed. “If it helps, I tell people they should see the other guy.”
“Of course you do,” Harley murmured.
“What about you?” I asked, broaching the topic carefully. I knew the kind of mess he was from the little bit I’d pieced together. It felt a lot like opening a can of worms, and I wasn’t sure he could put them back in if I did. “You don’t have to talk about…”
Though I wanted him to.
“Uh…” His voice trailed off, and he rubbed a hand over his chest. Reaching out, I gently pushed his hand out of the way and did it for him, hoping some ounce of comfort would bleed from me to him. His heart raced frantically under my palm.Shit.
“Just breathe, princess,” I whispered. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“I took over my family’s business,” he said, his voice so quiet that I barely heard it in the silence of the room. “I hate it.”
I just waited, giving him the room to either continue or not talk at all. It was up to him. I wanted to know all the details of his life, but I also didn’t want to torture him just to know.
“I hate the people, and I hate what I have to be to be around them,” he continued softly. His chest rose and fell too quickly under my hand, tension radiating off of him. I didn’t pull away. I was determined to give him something to hold onto as I pressed my fingers a little firmer into his skin.
Harley stared at the ceiling, eyes unfocused and a million miles away in a place I couldn’t quite reach. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to bring him back. And so I stayed quiet because that’s what he needed from me. I let the silence exist between us, even though the list of questions I had about his life continued to grow longer.
He swallowed hard, and his breath hitched under my palm. He was barely holding it together, the weight of his thoughts crushing him. I inched closer and slipped my arm around his waist. I kissed his shoulder for comfort.
“It’s okay, Harley,” I assured him. It was the only thing I could do.
“It’s not,” he replied, his voice cracking. “It’s not…”
His jaw ticked, and his head turned away from me. He didn’t try to keep talking and didn’t push through it. The words simply stopped, sealed off by whatever walls he’d built up to survive the life he’d made for himself.
I didn’t push him. I just held him as the only reassurance I could give him that I wasn’t going anywhere.
