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“I want to know.”
He looked at me. “I got it when I first came to New York...”
With clear reluctance he said, “You’re not the only one who had a slightly misspent youth. My folks died in a car crash when I was seventeen, leaving Mary, our older sister, acting as both parents. She’s only a year older than me. Caitie was just thirteen.”
“Wow, Johnny, I’m sorry...” I said softly, feeling completely ineffectual.
He made a kind of small, dismissive gesture and then continued. “The thing of it was, I was in the car, too, yet I walked away without a scratch.”
I went still against Johnny. He wasn’t looking at me and obviously wasn’t expecting me to say anything so I stayed silent.
“For a long time I felt like it was my fault...I’d been arguing with my dad and he’d turned around for a second to clip my ear and then...everything exploded. We found out much later after a report that the other driver was drunk and on the wrong side of the road. But it was all a bit much. I couldn’t let go of the irrational guilt with typical teenage self-absorption and I went a little crazy, too. Acting out, missing school. Drinking, smoking.”
He grimaced. “I gave Mary an awful hard time, and she was only trying to keep us all together.”
“You were seventeen,” I pointed out, trying to imagine how traumatic that must have been. I remembered how volatile that age was for me. How precarious the world had seemed and how I’d wanted to control it whatever way I could. I’d done it then by rebelling, and since then by keeping intense emotions at a distance. I pushed that little revelation down.
Johnny’s mouth firmed in clear self-recrimination. “Still, it’s no excuse. And poor Caitie was stuck in the middle, trying to keep us both from killing each other. I always wanted to do woodwork...but not just any woodwork, bespoke work, the stuff you saw. Mary couldn’t understand how I’d ever make a living out of it.”
His mouth quirked and he looked at me. “She’s in recruitment now but she hadn’t always wanted to do that. She’d wanted to do drama and arts but had had to drop out of that degree choice and go for a more reliable career to take care of me and Caitie. I think on some level she resented me wanting to follow my heart when she hadn’t been able to.
“And in spite of everything I was pretty good in school. She pushed me to get a decent degree so I’d be okay...I did calm down for a bit and got enough marks to do architecture. But soon I got bored again. I felt like my life was slipping out of my grasp... I had a huge row with Mary and left home, determined to prove to her that I could succeed at what I really wanted to do. I got the tattoo as a kind of reminder to not let anyone step on my dreams.”
I thought of how Johnny had been fascinated by the structure of the Standard hotel as we’d passed underneath, and my chest tightened. He would have made a great architect, but then I thought of the exquisite furniture he made.
His voice got huskier. “Leaving them behind, her and Caitie...it’s unforgivable. They needed me, and I just walked out. Time went on and I got too ashamed to go back.”
He smiled, but it was bleak. “If my Da were alive he’d thrash me.”
Carefully I asked, “You haven’t spoken to Mary at all since then?”
He avoided my eye now. “No. I let them know I was okay, and sent money home when I could. But I avoided more meaningful contact.”
I felt as though I might be walking into a minefield when I said, “It seems to me as if now is as good a time as any to get in touch. Caitlin is here and you’re succeeding at what you want to do. You could just...pick up the phone and call.”
Johnny looked at me and I was relieved to see a lightness in his expression. “Could I now?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Sure.”
He looked at me for a long moment and then looked at his watch, and a more familiar expression came over his face. He expertly rolled over so that I was underneath him and his body was wedged between my legs.
I almost groaned at the way I was so eager. Already. Again. Forever. That little bomb hit me right in the chest, but then Johnny pressed a light kiss to my mouth and said throatily, “We have a little time left. Seems an awful waste of an exorbitantly expensive hotel room to spend our time talking, don’t you think?”
In silent answer and as keen as he was to avoid inviting any further intimacies or rogue revelations I widened my legs, inviting his body into a much safer form of intimacy. The physical kind. Where no talking was necessary.
* * *
When we arrived at the bar, disheveled and guilty-looking with jelly legs from an overdose of sex against a hotel window, Candy spotted it straight away, as any connoisseur of sex would. She grabbed me and dragged me into the office as soon as she could and said, “Okay, Sullivan, spill. I haven’t seen anyone so sexsatisfied-looking since Liam and Caitlin were wafting around on cloud multi-orgasm for the first month they were together.”
Then she grimaced. “And actually it’s not much better now. Hopefully the holiday might have taken the edge off.”
Her eyes narrowed on me. “What’s going on with you and Ryan?”
I scowled at her, feeling far too raw to engage in a girly sex confessional, even though a part of me longed to just blurt it all out to make sense of it.
“Weren’t you the one who encouraged me to go for it? I’m going for it, and that’s all you need to know.”
Candy shook her head, gaze far too assessing. “I don’t know, Ash. You’re looking far more glowy than someone should be if it’s just down-and-dirty-get-rid-of-the-itch-before-you-take-the-world-by-storm.”
