I pulled the gauze loose and hissed when dried blood tugged against the split skin. “You’re relentless.”
“You respond poorly to gentle.”
Ryan tossed a towel at me. “And you go quiet when you’re spiraling. Gayle should hear from you before she has to hear through someone else that you got into it at The Sin Bin.”
That sobered the room slightly.
There had been a fight. A public one. Maddox had left bloody, and secrets had teeth in a town full of bored college students. My mother hearing a twisted version from someone else would gut her.
“I’ll call her,” I said.
Briggs leaned back against his stall. “Say it with less hostage energy.”
I shot him a look.
He smiled. “Beautiful. Healing already.”
Later that night, my apartment was too quiet. The kind of quiet that didn’t feel restful. The kind that moved in after a storm and started touching everything the storm had left behind.
The coffee table was still crooked.
I had tried to straighten it twice and stopped both times, standing over the cheap wood with my hand on the edge and my stomach twisting like touching it would replay Aura laid across it, crying afterward, asking me to forgive her with her Sin Bin uniform wrinkled in her hands and her mouth swollen from mine.
I left it crooked.
Maybe that made me a coward. Maybe it made me honest.
The rain had started again sometime after dinner, tapping against the window in soft, uneven patterns. My ribs ached every time I breathed too deeply. My knuckles were cleaned and rewrapped, thanks to Cade leaving supplies on my counter like a rich, emotionally repressed nurse. My mouth had stopped bleeding, but the split reopened if I moved it wrong.
I sat on the edge of the couch with my phone in my hand and stared at my mother’s contact until the screen dimmed.
Then I tapped it awake.
Mom.
The word alone made my chest hurt.
I hit call before I could talk myself out of it.
She answered on the second ring. “Easton?” Mom’s voice came through warm and instantly worried, because mothers had a tone for when they were pretending not to panic, and mine had never been good at hiding it from me. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
I closed my eyes. “Hey, Mom.”
“Don’t ‘hey, Mom’ me in that voice. What happened?”
A laugh almost came out, but it died before becoming sound. “You always know.”
“I made you. I know when the wiring sparks.” Something rustled on her end, probably her moving away from the living room so Skylar and Vivi couldn’t hear every word. “Tell me.”
I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees, the phone pressed tightly to my ear. “I got into a fight.”
The silence after that wasn’t empty. It was my mother collecting herself so she didn’t scare me by sounding scared.
“How bad?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
