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I push down the knot in my throat. “No.”
“Jamie.” He lifts me until I’m sitting sideways, my legs over his. I’m not sittingonhis lap, but I may as well be. He holds a hand to the side of my face as his eyes search mine. “I obviously hit a nerve.”
“You didn’t.” I remove his hand and hold it in both of mine. “It’s fine. Who’s turn is it?”
“Mine.” He watches me a second longer, and when I don’t give in to my hurt, he says, his voice low, “When did you stop drawing?”
“Wow. We’re going straight to the hard stuff, huh?”
“I have one night with you and five years’ worth of questions.”
“Right.” I suck in a breath, hold it, and try to come up with a response that’s just enough to satisfy him. “After Beaker died and the cops went through his house, the main thing they were focused on was the drug lab in his basement. I’d always known it was there, but I never really caught on towhy. It’s obvious now that he was dealing. It turns out he was trying to create a new, affordable drug similar to oxycodone that wasn’t heroin or meth. So you can imagine what it was like living with daily drug trials…”
“Holy shit,” Holden murmurs.
I nod. “Beaker—he was actually really smart, genius-level smart. His real name’s Raymond, but his friends named him Beaker in high school because he excelled in chemistry… enough to go to college and come out a pharmacologist.”
“So what the hell happened to him?”
“When I was young… not yet school age, he was in an accident. Hurt his back pretty damn bad. That’s how his addiction started—with pain meds. And of course, at some point, doctors stop giving scripts for them, but he had access to them, and when he was caught and lost his job, he turned to other drugs for relief, and well… you can guess the rest.”
“That’s fucking crazy,” Holden murmurs.
“Right? It’s like a supervillain origin story.”
“I mean, not really,” Holden states. “I’m sure a ton of people go through what he did, and they don’t end up being the scum of the earth.”
He doesn’t know the half of it.“Anyway, law enforcement was determined to figure out how deep his dealings went, so they ran forensics on his phones and computers. Turns out he had alerts set up for me and my mom.”
“But you didn’t have anything out there,” he’s quick to say. “You weren’t on social. I never posted about you because you asked me not to, so… how…” His gaze shifts, as if searching his mind for answers.
“The school newsletter,” I tell him. “It was about my entry in the art contest. It was three fucking sentences that almost killed you.”
“Stop it,” he says, throwing an arm over my shoulders to bring me closer.
I settle my head on his chest, right above his heart, and try to keep my voice even. “Ever since I found out, I haven’t been able to draw.” Tears prick behind my eyes—tears of hatred and despair. “I pick up a marker, and all I see is you lying next to your truck with blood—”
“You can’t let him take this from you, Jamie.” Holden’s words are firm, and I wish I could make them mean something. “He’s already taken enough.”
I wipe the wetness from my eyes onto his t-shirt, trying to settle my breaths, my anger, my rage. I know he’s right. I’ve spent five years trying to convince myself of it, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that I can’t do the single thing that brought Holden and me together. “My turn.” I sniff once, my mind rushing to change the subject. “When did you realize you wanted to come back here?”
He takes a moment to answer. “When my dad called and told me there was a chance we might lose it.”
“Was it instant? The need to save it?”
“Strangely enough, yeah. It was like a flick of a switch. And I don’t even know where it came from. One minute I was perfectly happy barely working for Joseph, and the next, I was contacting banks trying to get loans and figure shit out.”
“It’s good you could get one so fast.”
Holden scoffs, and I pull back so I can see him. “I wish,” he says, shaking his head. “No lender would even take me seriously. I’m twenty-three years old with student loans up to my eyeballs and no actual work history or steady source of income.”
“So… how…?”
His eyes meet mine, his smile sad. “I made a deal with the devil, Jamie.”
I think for a moment, and then it all becomes clear. “You got the money from Joseph?”
“Yep.” His lips press tight.
