AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Not a new thing for me.” He cheers the air with his drink. “I think Jay will be okay. Explained a few fuckin’ home truths to him about that life and he started looking a little green.”
I cross my legs on the sofa next to him. So many questions push at me, but I’m not sure where to start, like who are the De Lucas? What’s an enforcer actually mean? He can fight and he’s seasoned. He’s got a gun. Worse, he was confident enough to lay it down.
What world is he in now?
I don’t think it’s above board but it’s not that gang shit, either. And he’s come to help me. I’m not going to judge.
“Diego, I—”
“Remember when you used to follow me around? Your parents were going through that awful divorce, and kids were mean, and you seemed to think the sun shined from me?”
“You protected me. You looked at me like a friend, like someone you liked, and it . . .” Made me fall in love with him when I had no idea what that really was. “It made me safe and happy.”
“Because kids what? Thought I was cool?”
I let the note of bitterness in his voice slide. “I thought you were the coolest thing. Had nothing to do with other kids. You scared Cameron Ross into being nice to me and he was always mean. You listened to me and laughed at my dumb ass jokes. I thought you were the coolest.”
He groans, and whatever bullshit he was going to say goes by the wayside.
Diego thinks other kids thought he was cool because he could fight. He got into trouble with the law, and his dad let him do what he wanted.
They thought Diego was into drugs and banged all the hot girls.
He was sixteen then, so he probably did. I never asked years later when we started seeing each other because I was the girl he wanted, not for one night but, it seemed, forever.
What they never knew was Diego never touched drugs, didn’t drink much then either. He learned to fight because he said, it was the only way to get people to leave him alone when he was fourteen, before he started to grow and fill out. He learned to scrap.
Diego grew up poor. His mom took off when he was ten. His father, the town drunk, Xavier never cared what Diego did.
He got into trouble because sometimes he wanted to eat and there wasn’t anything, and sometimes because he was just angry at everything.
But not me, never me. And that meant something too.
“I was a little kid, but I always thought we saw the other person entirely.”
He rolls his eyes. “No, you didn’t.” But the color on his cheeks that flares beneath his beard and scrapes gives him away. “You liked to annoy the shit out of me, and I felt bad, so I protected you. Then you grew up into a pretty thing.”
“Ass.” I kick him with my foot, and he sets down his glass and grabs my foot, rubbing it gently. “You liked me.”
“You were all right. For a skinny kid.” But he smiles and my heart skips and dances. I could live on one of his smiles. “Nadie, I’m very different from that sixteen-year-old kid. Different from the twenty-year-old who felt like a sick perv developing a crush on you when you were sixteen or seventeen. You just grew up overnight.”
I stare at him. I’d tried to kiss him once around then, and he’d turned me down. I . . . “Diego.”
“Not proud of it. I tried to forget you. Dated around but it was you and when you were eighteen and kissed me, I lost my fucking head.”
The first boy I had sex with, the boy I fell in love with all over again, if you could call it again, when you were already so lost . . .
“I was twenty-two, and you were this sweet, spiky eighteen-year-old, and I’m not ashamed to say I fell in love with you, Nadie. I got to call you mine for a whole year.”
“And then—”
“What’s done is done,” he says.
“It’s not done. Is it?” I gaze at him, taking a swallow of my drink. “After everything with Dad, and—”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“And what about what I want?”
