“I’ve told one other woman what I came from,” he carried on. “We’d grown tight. She meant something to me. But after I told her, she acted like I was some kind of creep. Like that was a latent gene that hadn’t woken up yet, but I was eventually going to turn into that and drag her down with me. She broke it off with me within forty-eight hours.”
I could not believe that some bitch was so stupendously dumb.
But I couldn’t get a handle on that thought because Knox wasn’t done.
“Growing up, I was the bad element, when I wasn’t. I was the freak, when I wasn’t. I was to be avoided, so the filth on me couldn’t get on them. I had my girlfriend, and one close bud, Matty. Everyone else treated me like a pariah. Like I was what Dad was, Crew was, Poe. Like I was trash.”
It was all making sense to me now.
All of it.
And the only worse pain I’d felt when it came to Knox was breaking up with him.
Even so, knowing this about him killed.
“I did everything to prove I wasn’t that. I was the quarterback of the football team that led them to a state championship. That didn’t matter. I had a summer job at Lowe’s, working full-time, and the only member of my family I was ever seen with was Gypsy. That didn’t matter. It did a number on my head,” he went on. “Mom leaving. No one inviting me to their sleepovers. Eventually having to walk to practices myself, until I could drive. Being voted most likely to get incarcerated my senior year, which was supposed to be a joke category, but those assholes believed it, even if I did not one thing for them to think that shit about me.”
Oh boy.
Now I was getting mad.
“And I end up close to home. My sister is up in my shit to return to the family fold. But I’d put that behind me. No one in the army knew what I came from. I had friends. I proved myself worthy. I proved I had loyalty. I get out, Cap tells me I’d be a good addition to the Nightingale team. He’d talked about those men a lot. I knew they were the kind of men I wanted to be. Cap thinking I could be one of them meant everything to me. Cap seeing that in me. Then Lee, Mace, Darius, Luke, all of them, all of these good, solid men seeing that in me. Taking me on board. Making me a part of something that felt right. Putting me where I always hoped I should be, but no one ever thought I should be there. Then I meet this hilarious, gorgeous, curly-haired girl?—”
Oh God.
“Honey—”
“And she’s got a loving family who throws a Thanksgiving dinner so big, they gotta borrow chairs?—”
“Knox—”
“And sure, her sister is a pill, but even through that, my girl looks out for her, so do her parents?—”
“Baby—”
“And I’m falling in love with her, and it seems like she’s falling in love with me.”
I got quiet, mostly because my chest caved in.
I’m falling in love with her…
“And I’m worthy of her too.”
Worthy.
I closed my eyes as the pain of it all washed through me.
I opened them when he continued.
“I tell her my garbage. It doesn’t faze her. I tell her I might have to put distance between me and my family, she says she’ll leave behind everything she knows, and she’ll come with me. Every fucking day for two fucking weeks, I live through the time I’m away from her feeling good and right and decent. And I feel this not because I’m with solid, respectable men, but because, eventually, I’ll be with her again. And because she wants to be with me.”
“Stop talking,” I croaked.
He didn’t stop talking.
“Then shit goes down…twice…with her and her girls wading into the underbelly I fucking escaped, and I’m down to play cleanup. What I’m not down with is her being immersed in that underbelly that should never, not ever, touch her. She’s too good. She’s too right. She’s too decent. She’s about love and loyalty and laughter. She is not that. She’s not fucking that.”
Okay.
