AllFreeNovel
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Typical man.
“I love playing sports but watching.” I pull a face, as it’s really not my kind of thing.
He tilts his head. “Maybe I can get you into it.”
“Maybe I can get you into watching movies.”
“Perhaps.” He grabs his beer and takes a swig. Silence falls between us as he doesn’t move to switch on the TV. And so to break it, I ask a question that’s been on my mind for a while.
“Why did you run from your family?” I blurt out.
His entire body turns stiff. “It’s not something I normally talk about.” Archer’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows hard. “But I guess I know your secret, so only fair I share mine, right?”
I nod. “Right.”
He stands and goes over to the fridge in his open-plan kitchen, grabbing another beer. “Do you want one?”
I shake my head. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Where to start?” He looks at me. “My family is in control of Dublin and has been for many years before I was born.”
“Ireland?” I ask, totally shocked as Archer has no accent at all.
“Yeah, the accent is confusing, isn’t it?”
“A little,” I confirm.
He sits back down next to me, shifting to the side to look me in the eye. “I did something that led to a target on my back.”
“What?” I ask.
“My father had got remarried to a younger woman about two years before I fled.”
I roll my eyes. “I think I know where this is going.”
He actually looks hurt and shakes his head. “She was always suggestive toward me from the moment she came into our house. I was fifteen years old. And within a short space of time, she touched me inappropriately.” He shrugs. “Now I’m not saying I wasn’t up for it. I mean, what fifteen-year-old boy is going to say no to hand job from a beautiful twenty-four-year-old woman?”
I wonder then if that’s why he’s always been such a man whore, sleeping around. His previous experience with women, particularly at such a young age. No matter whether he was willing, that woman shouldn’t have touched him. He was a minor.
“In Ireland, the age of consent is sixteen, and I was a couple of months off that age, anyway. She didn’t think it was wrong, I guess.” He grinds his teeth. “And that turned into a full-blown affair until a couple of weeks before my seventeenth birthday when my father found out the truth.”
There’s a weird look in his eyes that I can’t quite decipher. “I was at a soccer match that afternoon and returned to my room to find Fiona in my room on my bed with her throat slit and a note.”
I can tell it’s difficult for him remembering it as the look in his eyes is haunted.
“It said I know what you’ve done.”
And within a few seconds, I’d thrown all my most important possessions into a bag and climbed out the window, running and never looking back.
“So they blamed you for something she started?”
He nods. “Yes, but I knew it was wrong. She was my father’s wife, for fuck’s sake.”
“It’s not as bad as selling your whole family out to their biggest enemy, though, is it?”
“It’s different.”
“Did you have any siblings?”
