Page 56 of Waste of Worth

Karen just stared at him, sadness in her eyes and disbelief coloring her expression.

On this, he would never, ever budge.

Not with her.

“You don’t need to know,” Dino continued quieter, “because I don’t want you to.”

It was as simple as that.

She could take it or leave it.

“But are you in it?” she asked. “Is that why you disappear sometimes or you don’t call? Is that why I’ve never been to your place and you park three blocks away from my apartment?”

“Does it matter?”

“Is that why you were attacked last night?”

She was fucking relentless.

Dino gave her credit where it was due.

He still refused to budge.

Maybe someday, she would understand.

This was not a hell she needed to be introduced to.

His life, aside from her, was not normal.

She deserved normal, happy things.

The worst part?

Dino knew he couldn’t ever give Karen normal or happy.

Not entirely.

It was why he kept calling himself selfish where his involvement with her was concerned. It was yet another reminder that eventually, they were going to have to end whatever they were together because it would never go beyond the four walls of her apartment.

They couldn’t be something because he wouldn’t put her in a position to be somehow used against him, simply because he cared.

Simply because a part of him—the part that was hidden from everyone else—cared for her.

He didn’t know how that had happened.

That care thing.

It probably started that day he met her in the cemetery when she picked him out in her day simply to make him smile. Maybe it was when she admitted that even after he rejected her, and purposefully avoided seeing her, she had still gone to his mother’s grave to keep his private tradition. Or maybe it was when Karen just let him be close, or push her away, and she never really asked why.

She never told him not to come back.

She never hurt him.

She always smiled with him.

It was a great many little reasons that he could say he cared and know it was right.

That didn’t mean he was going to tell her.