Page 47 of Red Flag Bull

I hold her gaze for all of three seconds, before I surrender. “I should have thought. Sorry.”

She nods and gives a long, shuddering sigh. “So I tried to do better. Hoped I’d have something decent to present you with when I could eventually work up enough courage to face you and beg your forgiveness, and being a selfless surrogate seemed like a good start, but that didn’t turn out so well, as you know.”

I lift her chin and look into her eyes. “There’s nothing to forgive, Mandi.”

Her eyelashes flutter, and she glances away. “I let you down,” she says. “More than once.”

I swallow hard, my stomach knotting at her tone. I shake my head and release her chin. “You didn’t.”

“I did.” She faces the fire. “I wanted to come to you sooner,” she says in a shaky tone. “I’ve spent more time falling off the wagon than I’ve spent on it; I hated who I was, I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted the pain in my soul to stop. Only you had ever made that happen, but I couldn’t bring myself to face you when I was such a huge waste of a life. So I drank until I was numb, and then I got behind the wheel of some guy’s truck at a bar. The keys were inside.”

“No.” The sudden slap of grief and family trauma knock the wind out of me. Mandi knew my sister was smeared across the highway by a drunk driver. She swore to me she’d never drink and drive. She understood it was unforgivable. A deal-breaker. I shake my head. “Stop.”

“I was drunk, but I knew the consequences,” she continues anyway.

“Mandi, no.” I say it as if she can hear me in the past — like I could have stopped her in her tracks, so she’d never get in that truck.

“I knew you’d hate me, and I knew it was deadly, and I didn’t want to hurt anybody” — her voice breaks — “but I still did it.”

I can’t hear any more. Can’t hear that she hurt or killed someone. I don’t want to be angry with her ever again, but I won’t be able to help it. She has to stop. “Dingle-hammer,” I blurt out.

“I drove straight at the wall,” she says at the same time. Eyes wide, she clamps a hand over her mouth. She lifts three fingers to speak. “I was already saying it. I’m sorry.”

She tried to kill herself by drunk driving? Was it a way of doubly punishing me, for not being there for her when she needed me most? I stare at her. At the scar near her hairline.

What if she’d died?

I ease back against the couch, wanting to strangle her and cuddle her all at once. “Are you sorry you lived?” I ask, choking back the thick emotion so I can speak.

She watches me a long while, and then sighs. “Depends on the day.”

“Today,” I say without pause. “Are you sorry to be alive today?”

She shakes her head. “Today has been the best day I’ve had in a long, long time.”

“Twenty years?” I give her a small smile.

“Nineteen,” she says, returning it. “Will you forgive me?”

“For driving drunk and nearly killing yourself?” I let my tone denote how angry I feel about it.

She abandons eye contact and swallows hard. “If it makes you feel better, that incident is what got me sober and focused on reasons for living.”

“That does make me feel a little better.” I pull her close and rock with her. “You’re telling me that you drank and drove, and it saved your life?”

She strokes my arched eyebrow into a more natural position. “Yeah, kinda. Not directly. And it was by no means a good idea or something I’d ever do again.”

“Good.” I close my eyes and try not to fucking purr when she rubs at the tension in my brow. “Tell me what made you stop drinking and want to live, Princess.”

“Love, I think.”

How much of that could she have found in our time apart, when her experience sounds so awful?

“Love?” I ask.

She nods. “I was on a random group-outing from rehab — something about observing more functional humans interact with each other and their environment or some shit. So there I was, sitting next to a bunch of other fuckups on the sideline of some suburban sports field, when I looked up from rock bottom and saw…” She twists her pursed lips and cocks her head, like she can’t think of the right word or something.

“Saw what?” I ask. “God? The man of your dreams?” I fail to keep the edge from my voice, and she frowns as she shakes her head.

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