Page 12 of By His Side

I checked my watch for real this time. “I really do have to go. I have an appointment at four.”

“Another soul to save!” The bite in Felix’s words was a reminder of how combative he could be when he chose. He was far more subdued today, though. And if I was honest, I wasn’t sure I liked it. It made him seem too real, too flawed, too vulnerable.

“Something like that.” I backed off toward my car, Felix tracking my progress with those cool gray eyes of his. “If you need to talk before we meet next week, call me. That’s what I’m here for.”

“I thought you were here to keep me on the straight and narrow?”

I paused with my hand on the door of my Toyota. “I’m here to help, Felix. I promise I’m not your enemy. I’m the furthest thing from it.”

“So whatever I ask of you, you’ll say yes? Is that what you’re saying?”

The slight mockery in those gray eyes of his had me choosing my words carefully. “If it’s reasonable, yes.”

Felix moved to lean against the gate, the position bulging his biceps impressively. Levi often joked about his physique never having been the same since he gave up his “prison routine” and the evidence of how much time could be spent on it when you were locked up in a cell was right there in front of me. “And what if it’s not reasonable?” he asked.

My gaze snapped back to his face, and I realized too late that he’d caught me checking him out. Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I hoped I was far enough away that he wouldn’t pick up on it. “Then I’ll say no.”

“Will you?” There was a flirtatious edge to Felix’s question. One that made it clear what path his thoughts had traveled down.

“Yes!” I opened the car door and climbed inside before he could say something else provocative. I lifted a hand in farewell without making eye contact, relieved when I could no longer see him in my rearview mirror.

Chapter Five

Felix

I didn’t get out of bed until midday on my first two days of freedom. Whether it was a fuck you to the prison system who demanded you were up and ready to start the day by eight, or simply not knowing what to do with myself, I couldn’t have said.

On the third day, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling just wasn’t doing it for me. I heaved myself out of bed, dressed, and went downstairs to find my mother, who’d always been an early riser, sitting at the kitchen table with a breakfast of toasted bagels and coffee.

She lifted her head when I entered the kitchen as an acknowledgement of my presence, but said nothing. Barely a second passed before she returned to her study of the newspaper spread out in front of her. I took the seat opposite her at the kitchen table and stared at the top of her bowed head, her hair color the same dark blond as mine where my father had been darker. “You haven’t been around much for the last couple of days.”

“No.”

No.Was that all I was going to get? No excuses. No elaboration. Just no. The huge house had seemed empty without her in it, the number of rooms complete overkill when I’d grown used to a space no bigger than ten square meters for the past seven years. She’d taken Samson with her, so I hadn’t even had the dog for company. “I hope you haven’t been avoiding me?” My aim of making it sound like a joke didn’t pan out. Instead, I sounded sad. Sad and lost. Like a child who needed their mother.

“Of course not.” Her words were brusque. “I had things to do. You didn’t expect me to cancel everything and stay home, did you?”

Had I? Maybe I’d thought she’d take a day or two away from the charity events she was involved in to make sure I was okay. But I got it. I was here under duress. She hadn’t wanted me here, and now that I was, she had every intention of pretending I wasn’t. Something I’d made really easy for her in the last couple of days. She probably hated me gatecrashing her breakfast. I’d thought by giving her space, it would give her time to adjust to the idea of me being here, but all it had done was cement the frostiness between us.

I picked at a rare crumb on the pristine white tablecloth. Everything in this house was pristine, a cleaner coming in twice a week, so my mother didn’t have to bother herself with it. “You got rid of my things.”

That comment earned me a sharp look, and although it was spiteful of me, I was glad to have shaken her out of her peaceful bubble. She took a sip of her coffee, eyeing me over the rim of her mug. “Did you expect me to keep them forever? You should have taken them with you when you moved out if you wanted them?”

That was a crock of shit, and we both knew it. My bedroom had stayed the same when I’d left home at eighteen, even down to the KatyPerry posters on the wall put up during a time when I’d thought I might be straight, such was the strength of my adolescent crush on the popstar. Either my mother had gotten rid of it all while I was in prison or before I’d been sentenced. “What did you do with it all?”

I crushed the crumb between my fingers while I waited for her answer. Perhaps it had been boxed up and put in the attic. If so, I could spend the day going through things and wallowing in memories. I could put some of it back in the bedroom to make it look lived in. Not the Katy Perry posters; they could stay in a box. As far as I was concerned, Orlando Bloom was welcome to her. My tastes ran more in his direction these days. But there was probably other stuff I could use. Some figurines I’d painted during my teenage years, or a football scarf. Anything but bare walls and surfaces.

“I gave it to charity. I didn’t know if you were ever getting out.”

So before I went to prison, then. When there was still talk of pinning a murder charge on me, so that just like Julian, I would have received a life sentence. “All of it?”

“’All of it,’” my mother echoed. “Most of it was tat, anyway.”

My clothes. My exercise books from school. My report cards. The scrapbook I’d put together on exotic places I’d wanted to visit one day, meeting Julian putting paid to that. And a hundred other things I probably couldn’t even recall, but that had been in that room and I would have been glad to see again. All reduced to “tat” in my mother’s eyes. An ache started in the center of my chest. One that I refused to give her the satisfaction of giving in to.

While I’d been fighting my emotions, my mother had gone back to reading her newspaper like the conversation had never occurred. “We used to be close,” I said. No accusation in my words. No emotion. Just a statement of fact. We had been close. Back when my father had died,we’d been all we had, propping each other up and acting as the other’s emotional support system.

What happened to us?

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