She glared at me and crossed her arms, her eyes narrowed in a challenge.
I hated playing the tough guy with Tana when all I wanted to do was hold her in my arms, but I knew she needed to fight back, especially once I wasn’t around. I picked her up and tossed her across my shoulder. She beat the hell out of my back with her fists and called me more names. Holding my hand around her legs, I shoved aside the shower curtain and put her in the tub. I blocked the way when she tried to get out. “No, Tana.”
Turning from me, she beat her fist against the tile. “I’ve always fixed things for my family, Ryan, and I can’t fix this! Everything is all messed up. Including us.” She glared at me. “I could hate you. For how you treated me after we had sex.” Her face scrunched with remembered hurt. “Do you remember what you said to me? ‘Thanks for the fuck’ that’s what you said.”
The expression of loss on her face tied my gut up in knots. “I remember, but as long as you feel something, I don’t care if you hate me.” I pointed to the soap. “Take off your clothes and shower or I swear I’ll do it myself.”
“Go away,” she moaned. “I just want the night to come so I can go back to sleep. When I sleep, I don’t think and I don’t remember all the blood. I don’t worry. I don’t have to feel anything.”
I’d been there, too. “Get undressed. You have five seconds.”
She huffed at me, then pulled off her wet shirt and flung it onto the floor. Water seeped around the edges. Wrapping her arms around herself, she put her forehead against the tile. “It’s not fair. Mom’s a good person.” Anguish mixed with tears leaked from her eyes to track down her face.
I unfastened her bra, slid the straps down her arms and tossed it onto the floor.
Smacking her chest with her fist, she said, “I’m being ripped apart every time I see her lying so still in the hospital bed. She won’t wake up. She has to wake up.”
“I understand.”
Her eyes blazed. “You understand? How can you understand my pain? Nothing gets to you, Ryan.”
I didn’t really want to take a trip back to my screwed up childhood, but if it would help Tana, I’d give her all I had. Even the stuff no one else knew. “I know what it’s like to be ripped apart. My father killed my mother.” I swallowed at the image of all the blood and of the little boy I’d been who’d sat holding his mother’s hand pleading for help. My throat worked but I forced the words out past the lump. “I was a little kid and when I tried to stop him, he beat the shit out of me, and I nearly died. I was in the hospital almost a month. Seeing someone you love get hurt and not being able to help is the most fucked up thing in the world.”
Tana looked horrified. “You never told me that,” she whispered.
“It’s not my favorite bedtime story.” Patting her leg, I said, “Lift.” When she did, I took off one side of her pants, then the other. Her underwear followed. I hated being tough on Tana but if I pissed her off, she’d come up fighting and she needed to fight. I knew she’d need that fire again and again. “You don’t have a choice about going on. Life’s a bitch, but you have to get your shit together for Mark’s sake.”
“You should put that on a greeting card. You know? Life’s a bitch, get your shit together.”
I grinned. “Romantic, isn’t it?”
She wiped at her eyes. “We made a mistake sleeping together, didn’t we?”
No. It was the best night of my life. Holding you was like holding the sun and for the first time since I was a kid, I was warm.Being with you was feeling safe, finding a place to belong, and I wish I didn’t have to give that up. I said none of what I was thinking. Instead, I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Do you regret it?”
“I do,” I lied without blinking. The last thing I wanted was to hurt her more, but if I didn’t push her away from me, Chanos would figure out what she meant to me and he’d use her as leverage to get me to do whatever the hell he wanted. And I would do it. I’d do anything for Tana. Things that were twisted and dark, things that no guy should ever have to do. I would auction off my soul for her. Before I rejoined Chanos, I would make Tana see me as the worst asshole in the world. I would lie and convince her to believe that she was just a fuck and nothing more. She would grieve the loss of our friendship probably as deeply as I would, but by pushing her away, I would push her away from Chanos.
Tana turned her face under the spray of water, then smoothed her hair out of her eyes. “It was really stupid of me to ask you to sleep with me. If Mom gets better and I am able to leave for college as planned, I guess we’ll lose touch and what happened between us won’t matter anyway.”
The need for reassurance was there in her voice but I couldn’t give it to her. Let her think I was self-centered. Let her cringe when she looked back on her time with me. Let her get angry, let her dislike, and then hate me. Let her move on with her life, but let her be safe. I could live with the pain of losing her as long as I knew she was happy and moving on. “Yeah, it won’t matter,” I finally said.
Her lip trembled but she firmed it and said, “I can’t understand why someone would want to shoot my mom.”
My chance to tell her to the truth. To point the finger at myself and see the disgust in her eyes. “I can’t understand, either.”
“I’m going to find out who did it.”
Chapter Fourteen
TANA
As soon as I said the words out loud, I knew that’s exactly what I needed to do. I’d figure out who did it and then maybe, I could stop feeling so helpless if I could make sure that whoever did it was caught. Ryan didn’t like what I’d said but I didn’t care. Someone had grabbed a thread from the tapestry of my life and unwound it. I needed to know who and why.
He crossed his arms. “What are you going to do if you find the person?”
“I don’t know. Maybe figure out a way to make that person pay for what happened.”
Ryan swore. “You want revenge? Want to shoot someone?” His eyebrows rose and the expression on his handsome face turned intense as his eyes blazed into me. “Have you ever held a gun before? Fired one?”
“No.” I held my head under the water spray again and let it flow over me¸ wishing I could wash away the pain rat chewing on my heart. Gripping the shampoo bottle, I looked at Ryan as the thought dawned on me. “Have you?”
He didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, and his voice was perfectly flat. “Yes.”
Apparently there was a lot about my best friend that I didn’t know. “Yes to both questions?”
He didn’t answer.
“You must have been just a kid.” I lathered the shampoo in, not caring I was naked in front of him. Not like he hadn’t seen all of me before anyway. After I rinsed out the shampoo, I wiped my eyes on the towel he held up. “What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about me.”
“I’ve noticed that you don’t talk a lot about yourself, especially your past.”
“Leave it alone.”
His sharp answer only made me more curious, but I rinsed out the shampoo and began to soap my limbs while I changed the subject. “I called my so-called father yesterday. I wanted to talk to him about Mom.”
“He ran right over with emotional support.”
“Right,” I scoffed. “He said he couldn’t talk right then because he and the new wife were leaving for a cruise and he didn’t want to be late.” Remembering his self-centeredness pissed me off all over again. “I asked if he was going to pick up Mark and he said there was no reason to change Mark’s living situation because his new wife didn’t really like kids.”
“Knocking a girl up doesn’t automatically make a guy a father. You’re better off without him in your life.”