Page 61 of Stone Rules

I hope Natalie keeps her word.

She comes over to me and holds her hand out for her phone. I give it to her with a nod. She pulls me in for a hug. I have a feeling she wants to say something to me, but that she’s in too much shock to have any kind of sensible conversation. My eyes connect with hers and we share a moment. A moment of shame. A moment of recognition. A moment that makes me wonder if something similar once happened to her. A moment she’s saving her daughter from ever having.

“I’m going to my mother’s,” she tells Karl. “You will have your things out of here by dark tomorrow or I’ll have you thrown in jail if Charlie doesn’t.”

Two minutes later, Natalie and Kelsey are out the garage door.

Ethan takes my elbow, escorting me out to the front porch, Karl’s sobs echoing behind us.

We walk in silence to his car over on the adjacent street. I’m still shaking from the whole encounter. His strong arms are around me, holding me up. He opens the door for me, getting me settled into my seat before he walks around and gets into his.

He doesn’t start the engine just yet. I breathe and breathe and breathe. I breathe so heavily, the windows fog up on this cool April afternoon.

“I wish you would have told me,” he says.

I laugh. “Right. Because I go around telling guys I want to sleep with that a dozen people molested me. And I tell them it’s because my mom basically sold me to them for blow. Or for the chance to revive her broken career. And I tell them she slapped me around just for the hell of it. Oh, and, news flash—now I can tell them she hit my fucking dad, too. She hit him so much he left me there to rot.” I take a breath. “And let’s not forget that I should tell them that thanks to Mommy Dearest and all her friends, I went on to sleep with guys for sport.”

He cringes. “Shit, Charlie. I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what to say.” He runs his hands through his hair and as he turns away from me, I see him wipe a thumb under his eye as he tries to get his own breathing under control.

He reaches over and takes my arm in his, pushing up the sleeve of my hoodie. “And these?” he asks, his eyes bleeding emotion as they rake over my scars. “Was this your mom?”

I look at my lap and nod.

“When did it stop, Charlie?”

“When Piper and I left the country after graduation.”

“My God,” he says, looking repulsed.

I point to his face. “See that. That’s why I didn’t tell you. You’re disgusted.”

“I’m not disgusted, Charlie.” He turns in his seat so that he’s facing me head on. “I could never be disgusted with you. Quite the opposite, in fact. Those horrible things, they happenedtoyou, Charlie. And the person you became after was a result of all those things. You shouldn’t be ashamed of the way you are; you should be proud that you survived.”

I nod, feeling tears burn the backs of my eyes. “Why did you follow me?” I ask.

“A hunch, I guess. You turning up injured. You wearing a hat and hoodie to Morgan Tenney’s place. So I did some more digging into the names you gave me. Some of them were drug dealers. It scared the shit out of me to think of the danger you were putting yourself in. And after I saw the scars. I just knew something bad had happened. So today, as soon as I had Gretchen email you the names, I started following you.”

I sigh. “I guess I should thank you for stopping me from killing him.”

“I think you’ve had enough drama in your life. You don’t need to add a prison sentence to it,” he says.

I study him, thinking about something he said back at Karl’s house. “You said you know what it’s like to want to kill someone who took something from you.”

He nods, bringing his hand up to rub the back of his neck. Right over his tattoo. “Do you have time for a ride?” he asks.

“A ride?”

“Yeah. I think it’s time I introduced you to Cat.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

Where is he taking me, I wonder? I’m curious. I’m terrified. I’m jealous of a woman named Cat that he loved enough to brand her name into his flesh.

Ethan breaks the silence. “You asked about the tattoo on my neck that day at the pool. But how come you never asked about the one on my chest?”

I think of the times I traced it with my finger, wanting to ask him about it, but not wanting to hear the answer. He knows everything about me now—the worst things about me. There is really no reason for anything but candor at this point. “I was afraid it might be a woman’s name. And if it was, I didn’t want to know.”

He takes his eyes off the road for a second so he can look into mine. “It’s not.”

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