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“Done.” I push open my door. “Come on.”
She follows me, walking fast. She’s in flats, her hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. “I’m not your secretary. I’m an executive assistant.”
“Call yourself whatever you want.” I unlock the door and head inside. The Lonely Cat lives up to its name in the daylight—lonely, strange, out of place. Strip clubs are set up to exist at night when the lights are down low and all the flaws can be hidden over with glitter and tits and loud music. During the day, the place just looks sad. It always fucking depresses me, coming in here so early.
“And I won’t dance. Just to be clear.” She glares at the pole like it insulted her late mother.
“Nobody asked you to. Besides, you’re too skinny.”
“Fuck you. I’m not.”
“Skinnier than the last time I saw you. What have you been eating? You giving everything to your sister?”
“Asshole. My weight isn’t your business. You do know I can push a sexual harassment suit now, right?”
“Go ahead, I’d love to talk sexual harassment with you in court.”
She pauses at the bar, frowning thoughtfully at the bottles. “Seriously, Nolan, what am I doing here?”
I study her for a long second as she avoids my gaze. I last saw her when I was twenty-three and she was eighteen, just another hard girl from a shitty trailer park with a rough life trying to do whatever she has to do to survive. Now I’m thirty, seven years later, three of them spent in prison, and she’s twenty-five. She’s still the same girl I remember, still hard, still heartbreakingly beautiful, with that thick dirty-blonde hair, all that dark eye makeup like she’s trying to hide herself, straight nose, sharp skin, small ears. She’s gorgeous in an off-kilter way, like she comes at her beauty sideways, surprising me all the time with it.
But she’s skinny, I wasn’t lying about that. She’s still got the same body I remember, but even more grown now, even more mature—fuck, we were so young back then—and it’s like all her sharp angles, her anger, her pain, her elbows and hands and hips, it’s like the years compacted her down and left her a diamond of herself, left chiseled and cleaned away, only the core of her left.
“I hated you for a while,” I say softly, hands curled into fists remembering those first months in prison. “The way things went down, I hated your fucking guts.”
She still can’t look at me. “I don’t blame you, but you know it wasn’t my fault.”
“I know you did what you thought you had to do. Your momma was sick and you had Kady to think about. She was just a little girl back then.”
“Still is, at least in my head.”
“I get it. Send everyone else to rot. You’ve got other problems to deal with, right?”
“We’re doing this now, huh?” She turns, face hard. “How about your part in all that?”
“Explain to me again how I made you do it.”
“You asshole, you fucking prick, you know how you made me do it.”
“You took the money. You know the price.”
“You made the damn deal.” She comes closer, practically gets in my face. “I’ve been thinking about this for seven years now and I still try to tell myself you didn’t know what might happen, but I’m not so sure anymore. Now I think you just didn’t care about what might happen.”
I glare at her, seething. There are a million things I want to scream in her face right now. From how the whole thing wasn’t my plan to the fact that she’s still living and breathing even after snitching on members of the mafia, which has to count for something, and more than that, all the strange little happenstances that led to her arrest, the coincidences, the odd occurrences, and how it all keeps me up at night even seven years after it happened. But she wouldn’t understand any of that, because all she can see is her dead mother and her ruined life.
Like she’s the only one suffering.
We stand there glaring pure hate at each other. All the pent-up emotions from years and years of daydreams and wondering what-ifs simmer on the surface. Other memories intrude: sitting out in the woods with her, back aching from getting whipped by my daddy, while she reads from one of those porno books she loved so much, and thinking maybe if I kissed her like the men in those stories kissed their girls, maybe that would make my life okay, and how even when I didn’t, I still felt good with her leaning up against my leg in the woods. How it was always Cora I went to when something went wrong, and how it killed me when I was the one she turned to when she was the most desperate she’d ever been, and I let her down in the end.
