AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“For the tattoo?”
“Well, that, but shit. I can’t keep up with everyone else,” he admitted. “I feel like fucking crap. I want a relaxing day of seeing the town, eating food, finding something to do, and then go back and fucking my fiancé.”
“Too much information,” I cut in with a smile.
“Don’t even care. I’m still doing it.” He laughed. “My point is, I have no problem staying sober with you. And if it gets too much, please save me from these young assholes.”
“God, you’re fucking old,” I said. And the best big brother a fucking idiot like me could ask for. But I kept that part to myself.
“You have no fucking idea,” he agreed. “Want to talk about you and Ginny?”
“What part?” I asked tentatively. We’d kept a lot of fucking secrets from my brothers—a fact that fucking wrecked me. Maybe if they’d known, I could’ve handled the situation better. Or at least not completely lost my fucking shit and left. Who fucking knew what I would’ve done if everything hadn’t been a secret?
“Any of it? All of it? I don’t know. You tell me what you want me to know. That’s how this has always worked.”
“I had divorce papers drawn up,” I admitted. Fuck, I even hated saying the words out loud. I glanced at Raven just to double-check. If she heard a thing, she showed no sign of it. The woman was deeply immersed in tattooing his forearm with what looked like a bird. Probably a raven. “Oh, it’s a raven. That makes fucking sense.”
“The tattoo?” He followed my gaze. “Yeah, call me a sentimental asshole, but I don’t care. I don’t like the idea of tattooing her name on me, but I like this.”
“God, you’re in fucking deep.”
“Happily,” Declan agreed with a dumbass grin. Giving him shit or not, I was happy for him. “Back to divorce papers.”
I’d rather talk about him tattooing a bird in honor of his fiancé on his fucking forearm.
“Yeah, I just… don’t want to give them to her,” I said. “God, I’m fucking pathetic. Two days of seeing her and I’m ready to go back on years of figuring my shit out.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Define talked.”
“Did you try talking to her about the state of your marriage?” he elaborated. “Have you told her you’re not ready to be divorced?”
“That ship has fucking sailed. That ship is so far gone it’s not even on the fucking horizon. We crashed and burned so fucking hard. There’s nothing left to save,” I muttered. There wasn’t a damn thing left to save—except maybe sexual attraction. Fuck, I couldn’t get that goddamn kiss out of my head. We’d never kissed like that. Granted, we had three years’ worth of pent-up rage to back it up.
“Do you remember how you were when we were kids?”
“Devilishly handsome?” I flashed him a cocky grin. Nah, I was still that. “Brilliantly daring? The best of us?”
“A fucking moron,” he retorted. “No, you were a fucking bulldozer.”
“I’m not a fucking bulldozer!” I exclaimed. My gaze dropped to Raven. I wasn’t sure why I expected her to react. The woman was so lost in her creative world that I could probably walk past her naked and she wouldn’t bat an eye. Declan would fucking kill me and she still wouldn’t notice.
“You were,” Declan said. “You’ve always been a fighter. You’d argue with anyone over fucking everything, but you wouldn’t fucking listen. You’d end up stuck in your own anger and thoughts. Not a damn thing mattered otherwise. And if someone wouldn’t bend, instead of trying to talk it out, you’d run.”
“I didn’t fucking run!”
“You did. You were an unreasonable fucking bulldozer,” he repeated. Jesus fuck, he wasn’t holding his punches. “It’s the whole reason I never engaged you in those moods. It was like arguing with a brick wall if a brick wall was an angry asshole.”
“You could’ve just said angry asshole,” I grumbled. I wasn’t that way, was I? Fuck.
“You’ve mellowed out a bit, but that part of you will always be there,” he continued. “Hell, it’s probably why you got so into fight nights and shit. It’s easier to hit things than it is to argue your way out of shit.”
“You’re really not holding back, are you?” I snapped.
“My point is, Ginny is also an immovable force of nature,” Declan said over me. “The two of you have that same fight in you. Together, you could probably take over the world if you wanted. But fighting each other? You have a childhood full of memories as to why that doesn’t fucking work. So, did you talk to her, or did you fight with her? Because only one is going to get you anywhere, Killian.”
I hated it when he was right.
