Page 40 of Close Quarters

“Yeah,” he said, opening his hand and staring at the locket. “Thanks. This uh…this means a lot.”

“I figured,” I said, keeping my distance while I watched his expression shift slightly. Something was clearly going on in his head, and if I wasn’t completely dense, I could barely catch several sad emotions. “I uh…who are they?”

“They’re…” he began roughly, then cleared his throat, closing the locket back in his fist. “My sister and my grandmother. One of my sisters anyway.”

“I guess the other siblings aren’t as important to you?”

“Useless wastes of space, users, and abusers. Just like our parents, just like?—”

I winced as he stopped. “You’re not…you’re not an abuser.”

His eyes moved to mine, his brow furrowing. “What would you know? You’re the one who accused me of it.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “I was just saying that to get under your skin, piss you off. Weird as it might sound, I know you’ve got a temper, but…you don’t strike me as the domestic abuse type.”

“And what if I said I got in here because I beat the living shit out of my ex-boyfriend and his best friend?”

“I’d say they don’t let domestic abusers in here.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Well…no, but?—”

“But what? I beat the shit out of you, didn’t I?” he asked with renewed heat in his voice. “And I did it to Riley without cause, right?”

“I…are you trying to get me to agree that you’re a shitty person or something?” I wondered. “Like…is that what you want? I mean, I don’t know why you’d want me to say that.”

“You already have,” he said, turning away and shoving the necklace into his pocket. “That’s all any of you have to say about me. Which, fine, whatever, I fucking deserve it. But don’t turn around and act like I'm suddenly not a bad person. So fuck off.”

It was only the realization that he seemed to want me to treat him like a terrible person that kept me from spitting the acid I could feel building on the tip of my tongue. I didn’t know what had happened in his life to make him so…God, I didn’t even know the right word, difficult? Who the hell wanted to be treated like the bad guy?

Well…no, I suppose I couldn’t blame him too much for that. Not long ago, I was a teenager and then a young adult who pretty much faced life with a devil-may-care attitude. Who cared if I got hurt? Who cared if I caused trouble? No one had ever cared what I did unless I was making a mess of things, so why not just be the mess everyone already believed I was?

Was that what happened with Reno? Had he just…reacted to how he’d grown up in a way that made him stand out? If his family was as bad as he said, I doubted he had a happy home life, and I remember once being told that the tallest nail gets the hammer…or something like that. Was he like me, a tall standing nail that felt the brunt of the hammer’s impact one too many times and was now stubbornly being what he’d always been accused of?

Then, a thought occurred to me. “You apologized to Riley.”

He paused. “What?”

“You apologized to Riley, told him you fucked up, and it shouldn’t have happened. And you wouldn’t do something like that again.”

“Yeah, so? Pretty sure he threatened me.”

“Pretty sure he told you it wouldn’t happen again because he’s probably better at handling himself than we think.”

“Okay, so?”

“Say whatever the fuck you want, but people who are abusive don’t apologize and mean it.”

An unexpected, ugly laugh emerged as he dipped the brush into the bucket. “Trust me, Elliot, they do it all the time. They sound very convincing.”

“Alright, I guess I’ll pretend you didn’t just say ‘they,’ not ‘us.’ We can just pretend.”

“Whatever.”

I walked around him, standing before him until he looked up. “You know what?”

“No, and I don’t want to know, but you’re sure as shit going to tell me anyway.”

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