Page 66 of Truth or Dare

Angel almost tripped when I’d halted as she was still walking but I caught her by her waist and pulled her back against my side protectively. Deb gave her the once-over and then her eyes were back on me. I turned on my heel and steered Angel the other way.

Angel said nothing. It was pretty obvious that Deb and I knew one another and that I did not want to see her.

I walked, with purpose, back to the car, and opened Angel’s door.

“Dario!” I heard Deb, who was following.

I shut the door after Angel was inside and ignored the voice, that fucking voice. I got into the driver’s seat. As I was pulling out of the spot, she was only twenty feet from my car, eyes on me. Fuck that. I glared at her and then pulled out of the spot and squealed, fish tailing it outta there.

“Are you okay, Dare?” Angel’s voice brought me out of a daze after a minute. An angry daze filled with images of the past.

“Sorry, baby. I’ll find us another spot.”

“Okay,” she said softly.

“Ex-fiancée,” I muttered.

“Oh.”

She didn’t push.

After a few minutes of quiet I said, “Guess you don’t have any of those, at least.”

“Ex-fiancés?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, no.” She said that with hesitation.

“No?” I glanced at her.

She looked like she was measuring her words. Her face paled. “I was asked. I, um, I declined.”

“Broke the guy’s heart.” It was a statement, not a question, because I knew any guy who asked her and got told no would have a shattered heart.

“Not exactly.”

I pulled in to the parking lot for the park I’d been at with Lisa the other day.

“Care to explain?”

“Turning down the proposal probably started the chain of events that led to me being here with you right now. My saying no wasn’t…wasn’t taken too well.”

It was the start of her revealing things to me. I didn’t want to push and make her clam up but didn’t want to seem closed-off either. I took her hand across the center console and rubbed it.

“Want to tell me more?”

She chewed her cheek a second and her eyes got a faraway look. Her body went tense. She started to tremble.

“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to.” I touched her face with my fingertips. “I can’t promise I’ll wait forever to push for answers, baby, because if we’re a we – we need everything on the table. But also because I gotta find our way out of this world eventually so I may need information from you to help me do that. But you don’t have to do it today.”

“Thanks for giving me time,” she said and loosened up. “You say you’re all in and I wanna be, too. I’ll try. It’s just been such a lot of…” She winced.

“It’s okay. Don’t worry today,” I tried to reassure her.

“Can you tell me? What happened with her? She’s beautiful. Um, unless you don’t wanna talk about it.”

“We were together from 16 until we were 22. She cheated. Few months before the wedding. It’d all been booked. Walked in on her givin’ head to the DJ we’d hired.”

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