Page 54 of The Last Good Man

I meet his enthusiasm with a reserved expression.

My mother looks at me with interest.

My eyes move between the two of them before she speaks.

“I thought it was Angelina.”

“Who’s Angelina?” my brother and I ask at once.

Noah dips his hand inside the pastry box and picks up a cookie. He won’t go back to sleep anytime soon.

“It’s the florist’s younger daughter,” my mother says.

“I have no idea who that is. Have I met the woman?”

“I thought so.Shewas at our house a few years back with her father.”

I shake my head, baffled.

“I still have no idea who she is. What made you drop her name just now?”

Bits of walnuts crunch between my brother’s teeth as he munches on his cookie and reads my mother’s eyes.

I’m not surprised his boyish looks bring the girls to our door. He may be slender and not yet a man, but his charm is addictive like a drug.

He must lead these girls into believing all kinds of crap only to validate himself, and I don’t blame him.

I was the same at his age, which wasn’t that far back.

It’s just that spending some time in jail has changed things for me in many ways.

The most striking one is how I look.

I used to be lean like him. NowI’ma walking tower of muscles. If I drop a door too hard, the walls shudder.

If I fall into a chair without much care for the frame, I break it.

IfI put my fist through something, I destroy it.

Spending so much time working out to control my anger and avoid killing someone for real has etched resentment in every hard line of my body.

But it’s not only my muscles.

It’s how I deal with people and look at life in general.

I no longer take things for granted and fight with everything I’ve got for what I deem important.

Noah is in a different place. He’s young and innocent and likes to play with things.

And sometimes, those things are women.

But who am I fooling?

Those girls like to play with himtoo.

“She wants it to be Angelina,” Noah says to me, his dark eyes gleaming with a smile. “Like she wants me to stick with one girl. Settle down and all that shit.”

“I never said that,” our mother retorts.

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