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After standing side-by-side against the rail of the porch for what feels like hours, I let out a sigh. “What do you want Maddox?” I ask with as much venom as I can muster.
He lets out a long, sad sigh of his own. “How have you been, Zo?”
My jaw drops. “Are you serious?” I ask because how can he think he even has the right to ask me that. But he only nods. I think about what I want to say to him but come up short. “Well, I graduated today. You know what a huge milestone that is. One that I nearly didn’t have thanks to you.”
That causes him to flinch. “You looked good up there on the stage. Valedictorian. Just like you planned.”
I don’t understand what’s going on. We haven’t seen each other in nearly two years. I haven’t tried to contact him in any way. He tried for a while until he didn’t. “Why are you here, Maddox?” I yell. “Why after all this time? What do you want?”
“I wanted to apologize,” he says softly.
“Too little, too late,” I hiss.
“You’re still here. Your standing right here in front of me. Alive. So, it’s not too damn late, Zoey.”
“You’re joking right?” I seethe because I have every right to be angry. “You take me to some party where I won’t do drugs with you, so you slip them in my drink and when I start seizing you freak out and leave. But I guess it’s okay because you called Zane first. Right?”
He hangs his head. His light brown hair falls onto his forehead and he squeezes his eyes shut. “I was a stupid kid, Zoey. I fucked up, and then I bailed. I’m so sorry. If I could change it, I would.”
“Why now?” I demand. “Why now nearly two years later do you come to apologize?”
He looks at me as if I said something funny or stupid. Like I should know something, but I clearly don’t. “Zoey, I was essentially run out of town.”
I look at him confused. I don’t understand how he was run out of town or even by who. No one even knew what happen except Jax, Zane and Rory. They, somehow, managed to keep my parents from finding out. Not that it would have mattered because I didn’t do anything wrong. I suppose, though, my parents would’ve become far stricter with my comings and goings had they known.
“You really don’t know. Do you?”
“Know what, Maddox? What don’t I know?”
He shakes his head. “It won’t do any good to tell you because you’ll never believe me.”
“How about you just tell me anyway? I can’t possibly hate you more than I do, so what harm will it do?”
He narrows his eyes at me, his face unreadable. “You really hate me, Zo?”
I nod.
“But you don’t hate your precious brother or your precious Jax do you? Don’t answer that. I already know the answer. But before you place all the blame on me, know that I wanted to come see you after it all happened. To apologize for freaking out and leaving you there. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was, and that I made a fucking mistake. If you’d answered my calls or text, you would’ve known but that damn mafioso brother of Jax’s made sure I couldn’t come around to tell you. He went to my parents and threatened them with I don’t even know what if they didn’t make sure I was on the next bus out of town. Your brother and Jax made sure I was on that bus.”
I feel as if all the air has been sucked out of my lungs. Mafioso? Rory? And Jax and Zane knew about all of this. A part of me doesn’t want to believe they’d do something like this much less keep it a secret, but I can tell Maddox is telling the truth.
“Where did you go?” I ask softly.
“My parents sent me to Arizona to stay with my grandparents, but not until they had me in a substance abuse program for three months.”
“Did it help? The program?”
He nods and smiles a little. “It did. I didn’t even think I had a problem. I was fucking seventeen. Who the hell has a drug problem at seventeen?” he laughs nervously dragging his hand through his hair. “Apparently I did. And a drinking problem. Detox sucks ass by the way. Twenty months sober.”
I give him a small smile. I’m still angry with him. I don’t want to be. He was a kid after all. He’s still a kid, but a kid with a lot of hard lessons learned. “So, if you were run out of town, how did you manage to get here?”
He gives me a little smirk. “I’ve got my ways, but I won’t be staying. I just needed to see you. To explain.”
“Maddox, I -,”
The front door slams shut.
“Stay away from my sister, motherfucker,” Zane yells grabbing my arm.
