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Chapter Ten
Nala
“‘I forgive you for being a dick.’ That’s all you said?” Isa blows out a breath and gulps from the beer in her hand. “You’re more of a badass than I gave you credit for.”
I roll my eyes and flop down on her couch, tucking my legs under me. “You know what was curious?”
“That you just became British?” Isa’s voice is sarcastic and amused. I hate that I like her so much. “Curious?You mean weird, right?”
“Yes, smartass, I do.”
“What’s that?”
“How Malcolm knew where I was.” When Isa shifts uncomfortably, I pin her with a stare. “We haven’t really lived in the same town in years. We definitely haven’t hung out. And still, he was there where my group meets, waiting for me. In a borrowed truck nonetheless.”
Isa gulps from her beer, looking anywhere but at me. When I say her name, she rolls her eyes. “Fine, I confess. I may have received a text from him this morning asking where a certain group usually met. And I may have answered it.”
She gulps more beer. And then, because she’s not as much of a hard-ass as she pretends to be, she slides her eyes to mine again. “Todo bien? I mean, it didn’t make you mad, or hurt you or anything that I told him where you were?”
I think about how he looked at me on the beach. Even while I’ve been working to hate him, I’ve waited a lot of years for Malcolm to look at me like that.
“I’m fine. A little thrown off. I was ready to hate him, having confirmed my belief that he really was an insufferable asshole.”
Isa stretches out her minimal legs. We’re roughly the same height, and she’s as dark and sultry as I am sun-kissed. Her skin remains a beautiful shade of brown all year, matching her black hair and near-black eyes. We’re like day and night in the literal sense, but months of hanging out has taught me that she’s someone I can trust, and more, she’s someone I can talk to.
“But you don’t think he is anymore,” Isa says.
“Oh, I know he is, but he also reminded me that he’s more. It’s like there are two Malcolms,” I tell her. “The Malcolm I knew when I was younger; the one who was gruff, and quick to be mad, but he was also so loyal, and so strong, and so protective.”
I swallow down some of my beer, rolling the bottle between my hands. “We were friends for a long time,” I admit. “Friends that no one else we were close to really understood. Not until we blew up.”
“And since then…” she prompts. I think of the bad choices I made at fifteen and sixteen, that I spent most of my seventeenth and eighteenth year recovering from. That I still have days I have to recover from, and then I think of Malcolm and how much I hated him.
“And since then,” I begin. “I’ve just always thought he was a selfish prick. It didn’t matter what he did, I wasn’t ever going to let myself remember the boy he had been, because the one I wanted? He broke me to pieces.”
Isa tilts back the rest of her beer and then stands, pulling me up behind her so we go to the kitchen together. “That’s a heavy past,mija,” she says. “Can I say one thing?”
“If you promise to feed me afterward.” I sniff the air, my mouth watering at the spicy scent that lingers there.
“Of course. It’s Mamá’s chicken in coconut sauce. She drops dinner off once or twice a week when Viejo is gone,” she explains. “And then she berates me to join them for dinner the other nights.”
“Tell her she’s more than welcome to cook for me whenever she has the urge.”
Isa laughs. “Careful what you wish for. She’s gone back to knocking on Felipe’s door now that I’m not there, and I don’t think it’s only to bring him dinner.” She sobers up, looking down at her hands and then me. “Who we are when we’re younger? What we go through and what we witness other people go through? It shapes who we think we’re allowed to be with, who we think weshouldbe with. I don’t know everything about your Malcolm,” she says. “But I know enough, and from what Hunter told me about Mal’s dad…I just, I can see why he left the way he did. It wasn’t right, but maybe, in his own way, he was trying to be honorable.”
I stare at her, hating the fact that I can see her point. Mal’s dad…he was awful. Worse than his temperament was the way he never told Malcolm he loved him, not even in the end when Malcolm sat by his deathbed and made certain he wasn’t alone. Which makes me wonder if Isa is right, and Mal left because he was afraid.
I think about it all through dinner with Isa, and then on my way home. Because it keeps nagging at me, I turn away from campus and my apartment, and head further into Mission Bay, parking behind Isa’s work truck and Mal’s Challenger. Unlike my mother’s street, Mal’s driveway is the only one that’s full. Now that I look around, it looks like his house is the only one that’s occupied, and all of the other lots are not.
Somehow, I feel like Mal made that happen. Like he knows how to make a lot of things happen.
Turning off the engine, I swing my legs down right as Mal pushes open the front door. Without moving closer to him, I take a minute to admire his strong shoulders that stretch his T-shirt, even visible while he rests on his crutches. My eyes travel the length of his long arms, the beautiful gray and black ink that I know starts at his shoulders covering his arms all the way down to his wrist. They’re wrapped around his crutch handles, but I know his fingers are long and his hands are big.
I once thought I had studied Malcolm Brady enough to know everything about him. Now, I wonder if that’s true.
When I meet his eyes, they’re all kinds of stormy, and for once, I let myself really look at them. What I see—it has me trembling, but I snap myself straight and continue to stare at him equally, because I’m not that girl. I don’t tremble, and I don’t back down. I never have.
“I have a question for you.”
