Page 69 of Four Seconds to Lose

“Thank you for the flowers,” she offers suddenly, adding more softly, “I never thanked you earlier. They’re beautiful. The color is stunning.”

I guide her face toward me with a finger at her chin. “Brown eyes are pretty, but violet eyes... I can’t stop thinking about them.” It’s true. I haven’t. I’ve been dying to see them again, since the day I hired her. “Why do you hide them?”

She pulls in her bottom lip, no doubt deciding whether she’s going to tell me the truth or not. With a sigh, she says, “Because I need to be forgettable.” The pain in her tone is unmistakable and it tightens my chest. Is this because of that douchebag Ronald? Or another guy like him?

I can’t think about that guy right now. It’ll make my fists curl, and Charlie will notice. I drove by his apartment building earlier tonight and almost stopped. Almost.

But I didn’t. By the mediocre building, I’m guessing he wasn’t showering her with money and gifts in exchange for sex at any point. I don’t want to cause her more trouble and until I know what’s going on, stalking the guy might not go over well. “You’re a lot of things, Charlie Rourke, but forgettable is not one of them, violet irises or not.”

When she opens her eyes again, there’s a sad smile touching her lips. “Why do you come out here to think?”

Bittersweet nostalgia washes over me. “It reminds me of my childhood, back in L.A. My grandmother used to take my sister and me to the pier on Sunday afternoons when we were young.” Despite raising the despicable man my father turned out to be, I remember my nan being a kind, soft-spoken lady who hugged us a lot. I think she did the best she could as a single parent, holding down two waitressing jobs to provide for them. I never met my grandfather. He went to jail for armed robbery years before I was born, where he eventually died of a heart attack. From the few comments that my dad made about his temper and how he “taught” my dad to fight, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

On those afternoons, she’d treat my sister and me to hot dogs and an ice-cream cone each. We’d sit side-by-side on a bench much like this one while we ate, my sister’s feet not even touching the ground, she was so young. I don’t know that my nan could afford to treat us every week. But when I was young, I didn’t think about things like that; I just took what was given to me. I don’t remember ever saying thank you to her. To this day, I don’t know if she ever knew how much I looked forward to those afternoons.

I wish I had told her when I had the chance.

“I don’t remember my grandparents,” Charlie says softly. “My mom said they used to care for me when I was really small. My mom had me when she was fifteen, so they helped while she was finishing high school. In my head, I see this older blond woman with blond hair and a red-checkered apron, standing on a big white porch, waving at me.” She frowns. “But I’m not sure if it was real or not.” Leaning in toward my body, her head nests itself in the crook of my arm. “What’s your sister’s name?”

“Lizzy.” The painful lump that used to come with uttering that name has long since vanished, leaving only faint bitterness.

“Lizzy,” Charlie repeats in a whisper. There’s a pause, a slight hesitation, and then she confesses, “I would have had a brother, but he died during childbirth. My mom was going to name him Harrison. She said she always wanted a son named Harrison.”

Wrapping my fingers around a strand of her hair, I start playing with it, marveling at its silkiness. “Harrison and Charlie?”

Her chest rises with a sharp inhale. “Where is your sister now?”

I pause to watch a ship sail by in the distance as I decide just how much I want to share with Charlie tonight. So far, she hasn’t seemed at all put off by what she’s learned. I can’t help but want to just off-load everything and find out quickly whether she’s going to reject me. Other than Penny, Storm, and Nate—and John, of course, who was the first officer at the scene that night ten years ago—I’ve never talked to anyone about my past. And no one but Nate knows the entire story. But do I really want to air all my shit in one night? I could end tonight’s conversation very quickly by leaning in and kissing her. That would end all talking. I’m sure of it.

I feel Charlie’s questioning eyes on my face and that’s all it takes for me to relent. “She died ten years ago, with my parents, in a drug-related murder. The cops were never able to nail anyone for it.”

Charlie’s body tenses up next to me and that makes me hold my breath. Is this the part where she starts wondering if she really wants to get involved with a guy like me?

“What do you remember about your sister?”

Air hisses through my teeth. I’d expected her to ask how they were involved with drugs, if they were guilty. If I miss them. This is one question I didn’t anticipate, and it somehow feels all the more invasive.

Charlie’s hand loops around mine settled on my lap. She pulls it to her, letting it rest halfway up her thigh, just below where her dress ends. Having my hand against her soft bare skin is definitely distracting.

My hard swallow fills the air. “At sixteen, Lizzy had a chip on her shoulder and an attitude that made you want to throttle her. She’d already been expelled from two schools, and suspended for fighting from another. She was into drinking and smoking pot. Older guys...” I shake my head.

Charlie’s manicured thumbs work small circles around the back of my knuckles as she asks, “Did you get along?”

“Honestly... I couldn’t stand her.” It’s painful even now to admit that, but it’s the truth. “She wasn’t the kid I grew up with. She changed. About three months before she died, I found out she was working for some douchebag strip club owner, giving blow jobs and God knows what else. She was working under the table and using the ID of a twenty-six-year-old Latina girl named Blanca who looked nothing like her. She was sixteen! The owner didn’t care.”

Exhaling heavily as if that act will release the guilt that still lingers ten years later, I continue. “And neither did I. Not enough.” With trepidation, I glance down at that doll face and find... I don’t know what that look is. It’s unreadable. Not judgment, not disgust. None of the things I saw in Penny’s eyes when I admitted this same thing.

It spurs me on. “I wasn’t much better than her, believe me. I moved out when I was seventeen and spent a year crashing on friends’ couches. I barely graduated high school. Then I started getting into the bigger fights. Making real money. Enough for my own car and an apartment. I let Lizzy come to live with me for a few months, but then I found out about the club and I kicked her out. She moved back in with our parents. I did nothing about the fact that she was selling herself. All because I couldn’t see past the tough, bitchy exterior to the girl who was still somewhere in there, needing someone to watch out for her. I doubt she was so tough when they...” My teeth crack against the clench. “I’m sure she was more like the little girl I knew growing up, those last few moments of her life.” At least, she always is in my nightmares, when the brutal and explicit details from the police reports come alive and I hear her screaming for me, for my help. For me to return the money that I’d stolen in the first place.

“And your parents? Did they know what was going on?”

Bitterness slithers through my body and, try as I might, I can’t help but feel the tension coiling tighter. “My dad dealt coke and pot. My mother...” I heave a defeated sigh. “... dealt sex. They were scum. If they knew what Lizzy was doing, they didn’t care. Fuck, for all I know, my mother was somehow getting a cut. Lizzy had no one to protect her from them.”

Charlie’s body turns rigid against me, reminding me of what she’s probably had to deal with in her own life. Curling the arm stretched out along the back of the bench around her small frame, I pull her close to me.

The warm night air hangs silently around us as I wait for Charlie to say something. To tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that I couldn’t have known what would happen, that I shouldn’t let the guilt eat me up. All the standard things I’ve heard from Storm and Nate, that don’t ease my guilt. But she doesn’t say any of that. Instead, she lifts my hand up to her mouth to kiss it softly before bringing it back down to her lap, where her dress has climbed up even higher.

“It sounds like she’s not the only one who needed someone for protection.”

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