Page 248 of Obsession

I smiled with him, grateful that fate was at least kind enough to make him look like the parent he loved.

“She never wanted to talk about him or what had happened, and the suffering I endured from an early age made me develop a tough, vindictive personality, but she always forbade it. Every time I mentioned him, she put her finger on my lips and begged me not to hate him. How could she ask me to do that?”

He gritted his teeth as he ran his fingers through his hair, pushing back the soft curls. Helplessly, I tried to calm him down.

“Before she died, she made me swear that I would never go looking for him, that I would move on with my life and be a good person, as if that was possible for me.” He snorted. “I tried, but when you are alone, wracked with pain and surrounded by people who hate you, you break. I was a minor at the time, and since I had no family to take care of me, I was sent to an orphanage. My grandparents obviously didn’t want me, especially him. I ran away from there. That place was hell, and I preferred to try my luck on the streets and look for food in the garbage. I was homeless for a while, and since I hated begging, I started stealing. I needed something to distract me from the nightmare I was living in. I’d always loved cars, and when I discovered Carter’s racetrack, I spent every day there, watching the races and wishing I belonged, but I was nothing but a poor, unwashed kid – a very tall, well-grown kid – despite my age and malnutrition. They ignored me and sent me away every time until one day I got angry and stole one of their cars.”

He smiled briefly as he remembered that moment, and I fell silent as I listened to him, glad that at least he was no longer crying. I wiped the water from my face, then hugged his arm again and snuggled up to him in the position that was already numbing my feet.

I was shivering pretty badly and freezing because of the slow, cold rain that made my clothes stick to my skin, but I couldn’t even think of interrupting him because it seemed like he didn’t even notice the rain.

“My bad luck, or good luck, was that I stole one of Carter’s cars. He’s the leader of our group. He organizes our races, gives us the cars and gets the police off our backs every time we screw up. I’d never driven before, and experiencing it for the first time in a car with a lot of horsepower under the hood wasn’t such a good idea, but at that moment I felt alive again. I could feel the speed pulsing through me and my heart seemingly startedbeating again. I knew then that cars and racing would become my life.”

I smiled a little and imagined Harris as a 14-year-old boy sitting behind the wheel for the first time.

“I drove around town like a maniac until I ran out of gas and they caught me,” he chuckled nostalgically, “I thought I was dead, but Carter saw something in me. I really wanted to be part of his group, and he promised me that if I won a race, I would be welcome and get to keep his car. He treated me like a son back then.”

A moment of silence followed, during which he just smiled.

“I lost the race, of course. I was agitated, scared, and I had no idea what to do. I crashed into a wall after the first hundred feet.” This time he laughed at the top of his lungs, which made me laugh too. “I wrecked his car, but instead of breaking my neck, he promised to teach me everything I needed to know to become the best. He made me wash everyone’s cars so he would let me practice on them. Carter promised to teach me, but I had to drive the car I was taught in. Little by little I became part of the group, an important part and Carter’s right hand. I was ambitious and addicted to speed, so I quickly became one of the best on the tracks and earned the nickname “Street Demon” the first time I jumped over a train. We used to just ride across the tracks in front of the train, but one night we were out of sync and the train had already passed. I couldn’t bear to lose, so I drove my car straight onto the mobile bridge and jumped over it. That’s how the train jump was created. Later they added the ramp and called it the Demon’s Jump.”

So he had invented that madness. That didn’t shock me, and I smiled at how I was slowly getting to know him.

“Carter is the one you worked for as a bodyguard?”

He looked at me, then nodded.

“Yeah, much later, when I started working out a lot to get bulky and strong, and I started boxing. I was a lot bigger at seventeen than I am now because I was full of steroids. I stopped taking them before my heart burst, but they served their purpose. I was angry all the time and started fights for no reason. One night, Carter’s usual bodyguard couldn’t come with him and I volunteered. He didn’t take anyone else after that.”

I leaned my head against his shoulder, understanding all the choices and decisions he’d made as a teenager who wanted to become stronger than everyone else because it was the only way he felt safe.

“I started doing drugs and stopped going to school for a while.”

“Sophomore year?” I guessed, remembering what Kristen had told me on the first day of school.

He nodded and looked at me curiously, to which I just shrugged.

“Information about you travels fast at school.”

That made him laugh, and I was glad.

“I was truly broken and rabid back them. I developed a passion for tattoos and started tattooing my skin myself, then I met Jay, who was awetback then.”

I shuddered when I heard that word. I knew exactly what it meant. Wet was the term for those who used PCP excessively – I had been awet,among other things.

“I helped him diminish his addiction and switch to lighter drugs. Fate had not been kind to him either. He didn’t know his parents and lived his whole life in an orphanage. V and Ty came to live with us soon after. Jay brought V with him, as they grew up together in the system, and Ty was a kid like me who wanted to escape the world and invest his life in something else. His mother died when he was young and his father abused him repeatedly. He was a drunk who used his son as a punchingbag. Ty was and is extremely intelligent, but his father didn’t like that. This guy should be at MIT right now, not in a garage installing speed programs for illegal race cars.”

I took a deep breath and realized that these guys’ joy was nowhere near as great as it seemed. They were runaways who had each other’s backs, and racing and illegality made them happy.

I knew first hand how much that kind of forbidden freedom helped when you wanted to forget everything and become someone else.

“We got the garage and moved in together, but I had started to take too much advantage of my new life, and I’m glad you didn’t meet me then.”

I frowned, disagreeing with his words. I wished I had met Harris when he was just a kid, to be with him and reassure him like no one else did.

I wondered what our relationship would have been like if we had met then. I could have sworn there would have been an explosion.

“Something woke me up!” I winced as his tone turned serious again.

---