Page 55 of Wayward

“No, I still am.”

“How? Where?”

“No, you’re not getting it. Just because I haven’t done anything here doesn’t make me suddenly the good guy.”

“Except that here, all you’ve done is good.”

I was going to argue, but…he was right. So far all I’d shown anyone was my white hat.

“Is that not right?” Gale asked. “Did I miss some sin you’ve committed since rolling into town?”

Lust was a sin and I’d been doing that since I met him. “No, but really, if you knew who I was, what I’d done…you wouldn’t like me.”

“I dunno,” he said with a slow grin that made the laugh lines in the corner of his eyes crinkle. “I have a soft spot for bad boys.”

I shook my head. “You’re thinking of some kind of romance-novel-bullshit guy with a heart of gold. That’s not me.”

He made a noise like maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about. “I dunno about that, because all I’ve seen is a man who saves damsels and dogs in distress.”

It was hard to breathe suddenly. “Listen, I was all mobbed up and everything. Lots of blood on my hands.”

He nodded. “And yet, you took a right when you could have just kept going.”

It was infuriating to be defended. There I was trying to come clean, to tell him something important about me. How unworthy of his time, or anything more, I was. “No. They tried to kill me, so my choices were taken from me.”

“But you could have probably run for your life, yes?”

Which had been the first plan. “Yeah, but—”

“Instead, you decided to stay and put worse people than you away.”

“It was a friend’s idea to fight,” I blurted out, an image of Sava in one of his wretched tracksuits popping into my mind.

“Even better. You took advice from a trusted source and listened. I don’t think I know anyone who actually heeds good counsel.”

I ignored him. I was trying to make a point and wanted to make it, not be diverted by allowing him to make me sound like a saint. “You don’t know that they were worse.”

“Sorry?”

“The—you said that I decided to put worse people away, but you don’t know that they were worse.”

“But I do,” he countered. “Because if you were the worst, they would have indicted you instead of whoever it was they used your testimony against. That’s just logical.”

“But—”

“So I can only conclude that you used to be a bad man, are not one anymore as evidenced by the very cute dog and how you’re getting ready to take on the daunting task of renovating—no, let’s call it what it is: gutting and piecing back together Ada Farley’s haunted house.”

It was suddenly all too much. “All day long today!” I yelled. “Everyone is thinking I’m the Second Coming or some shit! I’m not a good man!”

He crossed his arms and laughed at me. “Says you.”

“Yes! Says me!”

“And yet everything I’ve seen so far today speaks to the contrary.”

I had to lean over so I didn’t hyperventilate. “I’m terrified that you’re gonna hate me.”

“What?”