As the details fall into place in my mind, clicking together like so many puzzle pieces, the inevitable question follows.
Why?
“But why? Why would you do that?” Nash has the decency to look ashamed. Deeply ashamed. But I don’t care. I want to twist the knife. I want to hurt him. Like he wanted to hurt me. Like he did hurt me. Like he is hurting me. “Did you hate me that much?”
Much to my dismay, I feel tears well in my eyes. I’d thought my heart was breaking before, but nothing compares to the pain I feel now. He used me just like my father used me. I was nothing more to him than a pawn, just like I was never anything more to my father than just a pawn. Maybe I just moved on from one bastard to another.
“It had nothing to do with you,” Nash says simply, quietly.
“But it did. You . . . you touched me. And kissed me. And you . . .” I trail off, embarrassment stinging my cheeks as I think back to what I let him do to me. What I enjoyed him doing to me. “Oh God. You . . . you . . .”
I look around for somewhere to run, for a place to hide. I’ve never been more hurt and humiliated.
Perceptive as he is, Nash takes my arm before I can bolt and leads me back through the front doors to the sidewalk outside. He pushes me toward the end of the building, but I jerk free of him. “Don’t touch me.”
He looks wounded and I feel the tiniest bit of gratification that he can be reached, that he’s not completely impervious to pain. But the small amount of guilt I might be able to inflict upon him is a raindrop in the ocean compared to what he’s done to me.
My stomach twists and I bend slightly at the waist, fighting the urge to double over completely, to somehow protect my vital organs from the unbearable pain of it all. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. I let you do those things to me.”
I feel nauseated.
“Let me explain.”
“What is there to say? I get it. You hated your brother so much. You wanted to hurt him and you thought abusing his girlfriend would be a nice way to do that. You don’t care about anyone but yourself and your stupid revenge. What else is there to know? To understand?”
“For the most part, you’re right. All I could think of when I saw you on the balcony that night was that you were my brother’s girlfriend, that you were the beautiful woman who should’ve been mine. Only you weren’t. You were his.
“I went up there with the intent of getting back at him, with humiliating him. Humiliating both of you. I won’t deny that. But from the moment you kissed me, I wasn’t thinking about my brother. Or revenge. Or anything. Except you. I’m a bastard for wanting to use you, yes. For going through with it. But I’m the one who paid the price for it.”
“Oh, and just how, pray tell, do you think you’ve paid the price for it?”
“For all the fury and bitterness I feel, there’s one thing that’s always been at the back of my mind. One thing I’ve never been able to forget, no matter how much I tried. That night. With you. I’ve never been able to forget you.”
The pain is too fresh, the wound too deep to listen to one more word. The sincerity in his eyes isn’t enough to penetrate the cloud of shrapnel surrounding my heart.
I shake my head and close my eyes against him—against his face, against his words, against the love that just won’t die, not even under the sword of such betrayal. “I’m done. This is too much for me. You warned me and I didn’t listen. That’s my own fault. The only thing I can do now is keep from making the same mistake again.”
“Marissa, please.”
That one word is another excruciating slice to my heart. It nearly takes my breath, this star-crossed love I feel. In many ways it feels so right, but, in reality, it is so terribly, terribly wrong.
Without turning to look at him, I speak the hardest words I think I’ve ever spoken. “Leave me alone, Nash. Just go away and leave me alone.”
Squaring my shoulders and raising my chin, I swallow the devastation and make my way back into the restaurant, pretending to be the partly whole person I was five minutes ago before I was torn apart by Nash.
But it’s all a façade.
I know, deep down, I’ll never be the same again.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Nash
For the first time in seven years, I have to dig deep to find the anger I’ve lived with every day for so long. It’s buried beneath whatever this is I’m feeling for Marissa and that horrible guilt and pain I feel for what happened in New Orleans.
I know I hurt her. Badly. I feel it in my chest, in my gut, in my bones. It’s a deep, aching, nagging pain. Like a boxer took to me with nothing on his fists but fury. With nothing more than a few words and the devastation emanating from her, she beat the shit out of me. And, somehow, in the process, she stole the only thing that’s mattered to me for all this time, the only thing that’s kept me alive—rage. She took it the night she stood in front of a mirror and watched me ram my body into hers from behind. She stole it from me and I just didn’t know it.
Until now.
I can find enough of the anger and determination to see this through, but I know the driving force of my life is gone. And what the hell I’ll replace it with, I have no idea. I guess I’ll have plenty of miserable time to figure that out.
But first there are some things I have to take care of. First, there are loose ends to tie up.
Speeding toward the interstate, away from Atlanta, I dial Cash’s number. He picks up after one ring.
“Where are you?”
“We’re stopped getting gas. On our way back to the club. Why?”
“I’ll meet you there. I’ve got a few things to tell you. I’m bringing an end to all this, once and for all.”
He doesn’t ask questions, although I’m sure he wants to. But on the phone, a cell phone no less, it’s just not smart to talk in too much detail.
“Okay. We’ll be there in probably half an hour.”
“I’ll be a while longer. There’s somewhere else I have to go first.”
“I’ll wait,” he replies.
For the first time since seeing him again, I have the urge to hug my brother. To look him in the eye so he can see that I really have missed him and I really don’t hate him.
Maybe there’ll be time for that before I go.
We hang up and I take the familiar path to the prison. To see my father one last time. And then I’ll be gone.
* * *
The setup is a little different this time. It’s like the kind of prison visitation you see in the movies—two long rows of cubicles with a glass panel between them and dirty, black phones on the wall. If my first trip to the pen hadn’t made the consequences of a life of crime seem very real to me, this one certainly does.