Page 121 of The Spider & the Storm

The words soured against my tongue, sizzling and burning like acid, as I thought about Seth and the secrets my sister, Ray—Rain—had only told me and her husband. She had sworn me to secrecy, afraid our parents would demand she get rid of the baby growing in her belly. And I had kept those secrets, never speaking of them aloud until this moment, but I still couldn't trust her with my own.

I was too ashamed. Too embarrassed of the disaster I'd allowed my life to turn into while she had still managed to thrive despite it all.

“She just wanted to be with you,” Charlie quietly added.

“No,” I protested, shaking my head. “I think she …” I blinked away the moisture in my eyes to stare at the ceiling. “I think she just wanted to do something other than read and—”

“Trust me,” he said, pinning me with a gaze so full of pain that I thought I might crumble on the spot. “Shejustwanted to be with you.”

I didn't argue his point.

Hell, for all I knew, he was right. Even if it was hard for me to envision any world in which Ray would ever want to bewithme, let alonelikeme.

“Anyway …” I lifted my fork to do something other than stare at the heartache reflected in his eyes and poked at the rice in my bowl. “One night, when I was twenty-one, I went down to The Pit to get high, and I watched that guy, Billy, die. Right there on the side of the road with his best friend pounding on his chest and begging him to wake up, and, um …”

Fuck. I could still feel the bite of the February wind that night, stinging my cheeks and chapping my lips, as I’d stared over the chain-linked fence and watched in horror as Billy Porter took his last breaths.

We weren't kids, but I felt like we were, and it was surreal to say I'd known a guy who had died. A guy my age, one who I had gotten high with and fucked on more than one occasion.

“That kinda thing can really fuck you up,” I muttered.

“I'm sorry,” Charlie said, and I looked back at him then. Partly because I was shocked and partly because I couldn't understand.

Nobody had ever said they were sorry to me before. Not about that.

“Why?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“Because he was your friend,” he replied gently.

“He wasn't a good guy,” I countered while knowing I hadn't been a good person then either. “He was a drug addict whose best friend was his dealer. He cheated on his girlfriend pretty regularly, and I only know that because I was one of the girls he used to—” I bit down on my lip and shook my head, suddenly rethinking divulging that much of my strange and fickle relationship with the boy who had died.

“I don't care what he did or what you did with him,” Charlie replied, his tone even and kind. “If he had meant anything to you at any point, then I'm sorry. And I'm also sorry that you had to watch him die.”

I was quick to shake my head. “No. See, I won't let you be sorry forthat. Did it fuck me up? Yes. But it alsosavedme. Because if I hadn't watched him die from taking one of those fucking pills I was popping on the regular, I would've ended up just like him. What had happened to him scared mesomuch that I didn’t do it again.”

Charlie hummed a small, contemplative sound as he nodded, then grabbed for his fork. “They do say everything happens for a reason. I'm glad you found reason in his death.”

I cocked my head at the chill in his tone and the nonchalant way he began to eat. He was fire and ice embodied, a puzzle I was eager to figure out. But he was also predictable, and I'd quickly learned that these moments in which he'd shut down, it was directly correlated to something he didn't want to talk about.

So, I moved on.

“Yeah, so I started to take my life a little more seriously. I got a job at the front desk of a tattoo shop, and I apprenticed under their body piercer for a couple of years. Things were going okay for a while, but I was still living with my parents, and even though we kinda get along, our relationship is, um … let’s say, better at a distance. They could never accept that I'd changed or I was trying to, and I couldn't find the patience to force them to see it. Plus, they were always so much more interested in what my sister was doing, so …”

“You left,” Charlie finished for me before furrowing his brow and scrubbing the palm of his hand over his mouth.

“Yep. I came up here, bounced around between a few shops for a while until I found Salem Skin. Blake and Cee adopted me, and the rest is history.”

The memory of walking into Salem Skin for the first time brought a little, nostalgic smile to my lips. The way Cee had looked up from the front desk's computer to watch me come in, forcing an air of confidence I couldn't convince myself to actually feel. I'd known of Blake Carson for a while, watched his climb to celebrity through social media, and when I'd seen the announcement on their feed that they were in need of a skilled and experienced body piercer, I had talked myself out of applying about six times before I finally worked up the courage to step into the shop.

My connection with Cee had been instantaneous, whereas the friendship I'd built with Blake took time. He wasn't an easy guy to know, and the walls he'd raised around his heart were high. Eventually though, I'd become not just a part of the shop, but a member of a family who accepted me just as I was. They never looked the other way when I broke down and admitted the gritty details of what had happened to me. They gave meshoulders to lean on while I worked on building the bridges I'd burned with my biological family. They had become my brother and sister, unbound by blood, and I loved them in ways I’d never known possible to love someone you hadn't been born to.

From the look on his face, Charlie didn't understand what that was like. And I couldn't say it surprised me, but my heart ached just the same.

I wasn't sure he'd had anyone in his life in a long, long time.

“Your friend seems nice,” I carefully said, changing the subject. Afraid I'd pushed him too far by telling my story. “Ivan, right?”

He nodded without looking my way. “Yeah. And he is. Weird as hell, but aren't we all?”

---