Page 19 of Talk Wicked to Me

He nodded. “I’m sorry you went through that.”

“Me too.” She blew out a breath, her eyes tearing up. She fanned her face. “Sorry. I’m not a crier. All these extra hormones are annoying.”

“Emerson, it’s okay to be emotional. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but if you ever do, I’m here, and I’m a good listener. You don’t have to shoulder those memories alone.”

God, why did that make her want to cry even more? She blinked several times, taking a moment to regain control, and huffed out a breath, trying to get the attention off herself. “Thank you. Do you have a picture of Ashley?”

“Yeah, but it’s not recent.” He pulled out his wallet and withdrew a picture, gazing longingly at it with a mix of pain and love. “She was five in this, and I was about ten.”

He handed her the picture, and she took in their innocent young faces. Baz’s hair was shorter and lighter, those deep dimples in full force. He was leaning back against a brick wall, and Ashley was clinging to him like a monkey to a tree, skinny arms wound tightly around his neck, legs around his body, and her cheek pressed to his. Her messy strawberry-blond hair hung nearly to her waist, and her electric-blue eyes beamed at the camera just as Baz’s deep blue eyes were.

“You’re both adorable.”

“She was way cuter than I ever was.”

“I don’t know about that. Why do you carry this picture instead of something more recent?”

“She’s happy in a lot of pictures, but I don’t think she’s as happy in any of them as she was in that one. That was the day I taught her to ride a bicycle. We were celebrating at the Salty Hog with our cousins.”

“Aw. I love that you taught her to ride. Isn’t the Salty Hog where you were supposed to meet Evie?”

“Yeah. My parents own it. We’ve always spent a lot of time there. We’d get together for dinner with our cousins and friends and other Dark Knights families. The adults would stay inside while we ran wild on the grounds. Tank and my cousin Blaine were the oldest, and they were forever trying to rein us in.” He laughed. “Ash and our cousin Madigan used to do all sorts of shit just to rile us up.”

“She looks mischievous and like she never wanted to let you go.”

“That’s because I was her secret keeper. From the time she was little, she’d make up secrets just to see if I’d keep them.”

“And did you?”

His expression turned serious. “Every single one. I’m as loyal as they come.”

“I bet she appreciated that.”

“I know she did, but it was just a game to her.” He worried with his hands. “I wish she’d trusted me enough to confide in me about what was going on in her life before taking those damn drugs.”

The anguish in his voice was palpable. “Nineteen can be a rough age for girls.” She remembered being that age and feeling so alone, despite being Gwen’s roommate in college. When other kids were going home for holidays or weekends, she was going to Gwen’s house, around the corner from her childhood home, to visit parents who were nothing like her own. It had taken her a long time, but with a lot of therapy, she’d dealt with those feelings. But that didn’t mean they didn’t resurface sometimes.

“Every age is rough, for girls and boys,” Baz said. “But I don’t think I realized how hard it was for girls to deal with relationships and social shit until we lost her.”

He sounded a little angry, and Emerson understood that, too. Anger and grief were often tangled together like prickly vines. “Is that what happened? A bad breakup that turned ugly?”

“NOT EXACTLY.” AS much as Baz didn’t like talking about Ashley’s death, he wanted to be honest with her. “After Ash was gone, her best friend, Bethany, told us she had hooked up with some prick at school who talked shit about her afterward, and she was embarrassed. She didn’t even want to go back to college. She’d never used drugs before, and she decided to try ecstasy to escape those feelings. Bethany talked her out of it. But later that night, after she’d gone home, Ashley changed her mind.”

He swallowed hard, dropping his gaze, channeling the residual pain of the loss away from the surface, rubbing one fist with his other hand. “Tank found her, and he tried to revive her, but he was too late. They found toxic levels of PMA in her system. The official records show her death as a suicide, but we’re pretty sure she was sold bad shit. It takes longer to feel the effects of PMA. We think that’s why she took so many pills. If that had been ecstasy, she probably would have lived.”

“That’s horrible. I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks. Bethany is Gunner’s close friend Steph’s sister. After Ashley died, Bethany was mired down with guilt. She ran away and lost herself to drugs for several years. Thankfully, she’s doing much better now.” He met her gaze. “The thing is, if Ashley had told any one of us, or our cousins or our parents, we’d have taken care of the prick and it would never have happened again. That’s what family is for, to protect each other, and she knew that. She lived it.”

“I didn’t have protective older brothers,” Emerson said softly, “but if I did and that had happened to me, I probably wouldn’t have told them, either. I wouldn’t want them to be disappointed in me for making a bad choice.”

“I get that, but everyone makes bad choices. We trust people we shouldn’t and say and do things that aren’t smart or nice sometimes. That’s how we learn to make better choices in the future. We wouldn’t have judged her for it. She was just doing what kids her age do. We would’ve put an end to it and done our best to make sure the asshole didn’t do it to anyone else, and more importantly, we would have been there for her.”

“Maybe she was judging herself or she was scared, or she thought if you took care of the guy, it would make things worse. I’m sorry she didn’t tell you, but she might have wanted to forget it and move on.”

He cleared his throat and sat up. “Yeah. I guess all of that makes sense. I’ll tell you this—losing Ash showed me the errors of my ways.”

“What do you mean?”