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“What did you do when you were my age?” I demanded. “What dreams filled your head? What excitement roared through your veins?”
“I’ve ridden my bike from coast to coast,” he said. “I’ve seen shit…doneshit you can’t imagine. I didn’t stay in my town or settle for the status quo.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I said. “You have no idea why I am the way I am.”
“Whyareyou the way you are?”
“Because I’ve been on my own for a long time. I don’t need anyone. I don’t rely on anyone. If I wanted to pick up and leave, I could have. I didn’t. But I could have. No ties. No boyfriend. I do what I want when I want. That’s why I lived the way I lived.”
“And yet you’re glad we burned down your home. So clearly it wasn’t working for you.”
I glared at him. “You sure you don’t want to go back to your own room?”
“No. I’m having fun.”
“You’re havingfun? You. Rhett Maxwell is having fun and actually carrying on a conversation.”
“Do notcall me Rhett.”
“Why not? It reminds me of Rhett Butler.”
“That’s who I was named after,” he said.
“Your mother had a thing for the antiheroes, huh?” I asked.
“The villains.”
“Rhett wasn’t a villain. He loved Scarlett despite her flaws. He waited for her, hoping she got past her teenage infatuation with a weak man who lived with his head in the clouds.”
He tapped the side of the bottle. “I wasn’t talking about Rhett being a villain. I meant my dad.”
“Oh…what did he do?” I asked softly.
“Knocked her up. Then took her to Vegas to marry her, but on their way to the chapel, stopped at a casino where he proceeded to gamble away the small inheritance my grandma had left her.”
“Oh fuck, really?”
He nodded. “She was young and stupidly in love with him—and ended up marrying him anyway.”
“Damn,” I murmured. “They still together?”
“Nah. She divorced his sorry ass when I was five. Worked two jobs to support me. Scrappy. She was a scrappy woman.”
“Was?”
“She died a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is.”
I raised my glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
Chapter10
“You’ve had enough,”Viper said.
“You cutting me off, barkeep?” I asked.
