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I can’t catch my breath. “Donnelly?” My knees sink on either side of his waist, and I pat his chest, trying to peer into his eyes. Please be okay.
He grimaces a bit, pushes a pillow away from his face and then lifts his head, his fingers slip tenderly against my neck. “You alright?” He’s trying to see my bleeding ankle. Dust and wood splinters are in his hair.
I hear rushed footsteps.
“Is everyone okay in there?!” my dad calls out. My heart hammers violently.
Just as I turn my head, my dad has rolled to a dead stop in the doorway. And I’m on a mattress, straddling the bodyguard he hates.
26
PAUL DONNELLY
I’m done thinking that Loren Hale controls my universe. Even the bad parts, I’m not giving it to him or to anyone. It’s all me.
And some cosmic alignment.
I can’t figure out how else to explain me and Luna. Not just her being Illyana—but falling through a ceiling and managing to land on a fucking bed.
Under other circumstances, I’d laugh. I hate that I can’t even laugh with Luna about this, because 1.) She’s bleeding, and 2.) Her dad is growing a third horn between his angered eyes.
“Dad,” Luna says slowly.
“What the hell is going on?” Lo asks, his voice like knives.
“We fell,” I explain, and I want to check her ankle, but she’s already climbing off me.
“You fell,” Lo says dryly. “No, I thought you broke the ceiling with your fists.”
I look up at the gaping hole. “Well, that’d be pretty difficult to do.”
He glares. “Donnelly.”
“Loren,” I force back, hitting a breaking point with him.
Lily has entered the bedroom in a parental panic. “Luna.” She races to her daughter near an old dresser with butterfly knobs. “Lo, she’s bleeding.”
“I’m okay,” Luna says softly while Lily starts calling Farrow on the phone. “Mom, he’s already on his way.”
Lo assesses Luna with a softer gaze, but his anger reroutes back to me while I’m sitting up on the bed. “You were alone up there with her?”
“He was helping me find Kinney,” Luna tells her dad, but she’s still wearing my silver alien antenna headband. “We ended up in the wrong attic and then my foot got stuck.”
Lo is still staring me down.
I don’t give anything away.
There is truth in his fears. Even if this part was innocent, I did kiss his daughter tonight. I have gone down on her in the past. I did break his trust years ago and tattoo her when I told him I wouldn’t.
I’m not perfect.
I’ve made questionable choices, and I’ll probably keep making them.
And he’s going to keep hating me for it.
I’m just so frustrated. So irritated that he’s doing this to us. “I’m not the bad guy, Xander’s dad,” I tell him more tightly than usual.
“I don’t know that, Paul.”
I stay on the bed, my arm on my knee, but my muscles are more flexed and taut than I probably look. “You think I’m not good enough for her?” I say coarsely, just as Farrow slips into the room with a trauma bag.
I ignore my friend’s gaze while Lily speaks quietly to him.
Lo hasn’t moved an inch, except his jaw tics. “You don’t want to know what I think.”
“You think I’m shit,” I assume. “But I’m not shit. I’ll never be shit, and no one can make me feel like I am.”
His nose flares, and I can’t read him anymore than I think he can read me.
“You think I’m worthless,” I shrug. “A nobody. You’d be right in that where I come from, no one will remember me. I’ll die forgotten unlike you. But even on my worst day as a kid, I’d love this city. And this city would love me back, and no one and nothing could take Philly from me.”
I climb off the bed.
Lo hasn’t said another word. He’s hanging on to mine, and I go up to him.
I’m so angry, but I can contain rage easily.
“You’re twenty-nine,” Lo says like it’s the easiest, most tame thing to say. Probably is. This feels deeper than my age. Deeper than his trust I broke. It’s boiling down to one thing.
He’s scared of me with her.
I don’t know how to get a parent to believe in me. I just don’t, but he should believe in her choices, at the least.
“Dad,” Luna says angrily.
I cut in to tell him, “You know what your problem is, man? Your problem is that you think I’m the problem. When in reality, it’s you. How long has it really been you?”
His eyes break away from me like I punctured something raw. I expect him to have the last word, but he can’t even speak or look in my direction.
I almost feel bad.
Almost.
Because on top of everything, I know Lo is just trying to protect his daughter. I just wish it wasn’t from me.
