Page 33 of Offside Angel

MIRA

I don’t mean to, but a surprised laugh bursts out of me. “Sorry, I didn’t realize two in the morning was blocked off for Chutes and Ladders.”

Zane smirks, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. There’s still a shadow in them. The same one I saw when his eyes first opened.

I thought I’d lost you.

I can’t shake the feeling that he’d be better off if I had died. That he and Aiden and all of our friends would all be safer.

“Not that kind of game.” He twines his fingers through mine and lays our hands across his lap. “This thing between us is… intense. But it’s still new. There’s a lot we don’t know about each other.”

“You know more about me than anyone ever has,” I admit.

Something sad flickers across his face, but he shrugs it off. “The game is One Truth Per Day.”

I already don’t like the sound of this. “Is that trademarked?”

“Considering I made it up thirty seconds ago, let’s call it ‘patent pending.’ What do you say?”

I chew on my lower lip. “How long is this supposed to go on? I have more skeletons in my closet than most, but I don’t have that many.”

“It doesn’t have to be deep, dark secrets. Just… truths. Things that are undeniably true about you or your life or your thoughts or the world in general. Whatever you want.”

I quickly flick through the stack of most-recent truths in my brain.

My brother wants to kill me.

I’m putting everyone I love in danger.

If I was selfless, I’d leave and never look back.

I wince. “I don’t know if I?—”

“I’ll start.” Zane’s calloused thumb smooths a circle over the back of my hand. “Today’s truth is: I miss my family.”

“Your parents?”

He nods. “And a younger brother. Caleb.”

“You never talk about them.”

“There isn’t much to say.” He sighs. “There isn’t much to say that isn’t fucking depressing, that is. I don’t like to spend much time talking about all the ways I fucked up my rather charmed life.”

I want to ask a million more questions, but I don’t want to pry. His truth was that he misses them. He doesn’t need to say more.

But he does.

“I hurt them,” he admits. “When my addiction got bad, I stole from them and lied to them. I put them all through hell. They loved me and they never knew when they were going to get the call that I was in jail or the hospital or dead. It got to be too much for them, and they cut me off.”

“But you’re clean now.”

“I got ‘clean’ a couple times before it stuck. They’d welcome me back with open arms and, by the end of the weekend, I’d slip cash out of my mom’s purse and disappear for another six months.”

I try to imagine that version of Zane—out of control and unreliable. But I can’t picture it. He’s so steady. So certain.

Zane Whitaker is the most stable thing I’ve ever had in my life. I can’t imagine ever cutting him out of it.

“Part of my get-your-fucking-life-together process involved making amends. I wrote letters and apologized to them, but I never heard back.” He lifts his shoulder in a shrug. “Maybe they got lost in the mail.”

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