Page 80 of In the Air Tonight

“I’ll bet, but the final product is amazing. I’m impressed.”

“That was my only goal for this project. To someday impress an important new friend.”

I roll my eyes at him.

He’s too cute for his own good—and mine. And it occurs to me that before he decides he might like me, he needs to know why I came to town in the first place. Hearing my story might make him never want to see me again.

After he washes his hands, he dries them on a towel as he studies me. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

I shake it off and force a smile. “Nothing.”

“Something…”

“I want to tell you why I’m here, but I’m afraid you won’t want to be friends with me anymore.”

“And it would bother you if we weren’t friends anymore?”

I think he might be asking about more than just basic friendship. “Yeah, I think it would.”

He surprises me when he tosses the towel aside, takes my hand and leads me into a cozy living room with a wood-burning stove and two full walls of bookshelves.

I scan the shelves stuffed with books. “All this,andyou read.”

“I saw a thing once advising women to quickly run for their lives if they come to a guy’s house and he has no books. So I bought these at a yard sale.”

“You did not.”

Laughing, he says, “Made you wonder, though, didn’t I?”

He’s fun, funny, handsome, talented, smart, sexy, sweet and kind. He’s all the things. And he deserves to know what I did before he decides if he wants to spend more time with me.

When we sit next to each other on the sofa, he doesn’t release my hand.

I’m one hundred percent sure that if I give even the slightest tug, he’ll let go instantly. The only fear I have of this man is the possibility of losing my heart to him. I’ve never experienced this kind of connection before, and I’d be sad to lose him before I ever got the chance to really know him.

“Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.”

“It is. It’s terrible.”

He turns to face me. “Tell me.”

I fix my gaze on the far wall, so I won’t have to see his revulsion when I confess my sin to him. “When I was almost seventeen, I witnessed a crime. For many reasons that made sense to me at the time, I didn’t report what I saw. Keeping that secret for fourteen years has all but wrecked me, and this week, I finally reported it to Houston. That’s why I’m here.”

“Are they pursuing the case?”

“Houston thinks it’ll be presented to a grand jury in the next couple of weeks.”

“How do you feel since you came clean?”

“I feel free of a horrible burden but still ashamed that it took so long to do the right thing. For what it’s worth, I always knew it was wrong not to say anything.”

“It’s worth a lot. You were really young, Blaise. We all did things back in the day we’re not proud of.”

“This was a big one.”

“What was the crime?”

“I saw a guy I grew up with rape a girl who was relatively new to our school and who’d had a hard time there. She was beautiful, so of course she was treated as a threat by the other girls. It was a party I wasn’t supposed to be at here in LE, where I wasn’t allowed to go with the car. He’s my brother’s best friend. His brother had been dating my best friend for years by then. Those are my excuses, but at the end of the day, I stayed quiet while the victim was savaged online after she reported the crime a few weeks later, and I was afraid that would happen to me, too. The whole thing was horrible.”

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