Page 106 of Last Chance Love

I had to smile at that. “Well, you’ve always been?—”

“What?”

“You and her have always, I don’t know. You’ve never seen eye to eye, and it always feels like the two of you are ready to get into a slapfight at any moment.”

“So? Clearly, I have a reason.”

“Your reason before was that she was always messing with you, doing her…Mona thing.”

“Yeah, and I always thought it was weird that it felt like she was constantly pushing me, yet trying to pull me back too. Little did I know the two of you were taking care of things when I was out of the room.”

“Okay, now you’re just being ridiculous,” I said with a huff, feeling my patience slipping away. “I’m not going to sit here and claim you shouldn’t be mad at either of us, especially me. Like I said, it was stupid and underhanded. But please don’t make this out to be like we were in some smokey back room, trading state secrets, plotting your every move like some weird chess board.”

He glared at me. “That is not?—”

“Yeah, that’s how you were making it sound.”

“How the hell are you the one mad right now?”

“I’m not pissed…yet. But I won’t let you take something bad and make it out to be one hundred times worse. Can we maybe avoid turning this into a cloak-and-dagger tale of the grand betrayal you suffered and instead focus on what it is?”

His eyes narrowed further. “Fine, tell me what it is.”

“It’s a case of Mona and I being stupid,” I admitted with a shrug. “Both of us, for our own reasons, should have known better. Her because it wasn’t necessary, and she should have just tried to level with you. And I didn’t need an excuse to hang around you, and I knew I wasn’t going to do it anyway.”

He turned away with a huff, shaking his head. “I don’t even know how pissed I am right now. It’s all bundled up with other things. Like, on the one hand, I’m pretty pissed, but on the other, you didn’t do it?”

“I mean, you were right. Ididencourage you and try to give you that extra push when I could, but I did that years ago. What Mona wanted me to do was something I would have done anyway. I didn’t do itbecauseshe wanted it, but because that’s how I’ve always been with you. Iwantyou to do better. I want you to be the best version of you that you can be.”

“And I’m incapable of figuring out what that is on my own?”

“I…” I hung my head and sighed. “I know sometimes you fight that sort of thing. I don’t know. You’ve always struggled between doing better by yourself and just stagnating. Like you think you deserve nothing but bad shit or average shit, I guess.”

His eyes swiveled to me, looking me over slowly. After a moment, he took a deep breath and clasped his hands together in his lap. “I’m not happy with you.”

“To be fair, I didn’t expect you to be. But if I was more worried about you being upset with me than I was about you knowing the truth, then I would have kept it to myself.”

“You could have. I never once suspected you were in on her nonsense.”

“Just because there was a high chance of you never knowing doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have told you…and sooner than this.”

“Is that why you’re so worried about her?”

“I don’t…” I began and then stopped, thinking back to minutes before when I’d seen her watching me. She was naturally intense, but I had never seen her stare someone down as hard as she had me. It had been ominous, “think so. Maybe? She didn’t seem all that pissed when I told her I wasn’t going to keep going with her plan.”

His brow shot up. “Really? When did you do that?”

“Eh, a few weeks ago, I guess. She came to see me in the clinic for some reason, and I told her I wasn’t going to pretend to keep going with her idea. As far as I could see, she was just normal Mona about the whole thing, wasn’t upset or anything.”

“And now?”

“Now I guess she was right, and you’ve rubbed off on me because every instinct in my gut tells me something is seriously wrong and I’m in trouble.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I know. But it’s there.”

I almost expected him to dismiss my concerns. It wasn’t like I had any proof to make my case. But at the same time, I wasn’t dealing with a person who was the type to dismiss a gut feeling. Leon might sometimes question his own, but he still believed in the concept.

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