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I was angry for him, angry at him. But everything we were discussing had gone down when he was Seamus’s age, and maybe because of that, I couldn’t be all that angry. My kid was one of the smartest people I knew, yet he couldn’t figure out that putting a red shirt in a white load would turn everything pink.
He was capable of debating current world issues in a way that decimated me into dust, but when it came down to figuring out which way was left and which was right? He had to make an ‘L’ shape with his left hand.
My kid was clever with a capital ‘C’. But he was capable of some monumental feats of stupidity.
Why shouldn’t his father have been the same way at the same age?
“I thought you were going to tell me I needed to donate them to a museum.”
“Why show me if you thought that was a possibility?” I queried huskily.
“Because I wanted you to know something about me, and that is one of the biggest ways I can show you.”
“What did you want me to know?”
“That I’m ruthless, that I’m a pack rat, that I don’t share.” He released a breath, not a shaky one, if anything, if a breath could be rueful, his was. “If I want something, I go after it. From a young age, I knew what I wanted and when, and it fucked me over because I got what I wanted, but lost you in the process.”
“You mustn’t have wanted me enough,” I said sadly, but I wasn’t offended.
We’d been young. So young.Tooyoung.
“I did,” he countered, with an instantness that was soothing. “It was complicated. Back then, I never imagined you’d take off. I had to worry about Da, had to worry about the Haitians.” He sighed. “That goddamn war went on until 2010. It was a clusterfuck. One that fucking Cillian and I perpetrated.”
I blinked at that. “Is Cillian the one blackmailing you?”
“No. He died back in ‘09. In the war with the Haitians.”
“Ah, karma’s a bitch.”
“Yeah, it is. I didn’t die, but look what I lost out on because of what we did. You. Seamus. I fucked up. I fucked up badly.” He scrubbed his hand over his face, looking so weary that it hit me in the feels.
“Why did you look at me like you hated me that day of her funeral?” I whispered, my eyes on his. He’d answered this once, but I found it hard to accept that he could look at me with such loathing over his ex’s coffin. And that had only been the start. After months of him ignoring me, he’d struck the killing blow outside his local pub.
Just thinking back to that night had pain ricocheting inside me worse than a gunshot wound, and the memory of it was a shadow in comparison to the event itself.
“I told you already,” he rasped. “Because I’d just gotten my first ransom demand. They were asking for more than I could afford. Which meant I had to get a touch creative. Of course, as I moved up the ranks, things got easier. Now, it’s like paying Netflix.”
Even though the pain had crucified me before, I had to laugh at that. “You privileged little shit.”
“Less of the little,” he countered, but his grimace said it all. He hurt too.
Our pasts were mutually painful.
But whatever I could have expected when we got together, it wasn’t this.
Could never have been this.
But it felt right.
So right.
And so goddamn good.
His scent was in my nostrils, his heat beside me in a bed that was loaded down with more of him. His beautiful face, a face I’d depicted so many times in my art, was right in front of me. He had scars and nicks that hadn’t been there once upon a time, but he was still so fucking beautiful and so dark that it made me feel luminescent.
I was, by no means, a person who was light.
I was just as dark.
