Page 49 of Our Secrets and Scars

“Nah, Uncle Mack.” I chuckle, but it’s a sad sound. One of defeat, not of humor. “She doesn’t want anything to do with me anymore.”

“Don’t be an idiot, kid. Go over and say sorry for whatever shit you did to fuck it up and make it better. You’d be a damn fool to let a girl like that go.”

I risk another glance over my shoulder and find her being dragged onto the dance floor by Isla. She chews her pillowy lips, her discomfort palpable. I ache to go and save her, bring her back to the table or take her home, but I don’t.

Many men don’t know how to take no for an answer. But a woman only has to tell me once for me to back off. Violet told me to stay away, and even though it makes my heart sink with an unbearable heaviness, I’ll respect it.

“It’s better this way, I guess.”

“How’d you figure?”

“She doesn’t even know about my past.” I sigh. “If by some miracle, I convinced her to date me, you think she’d stick around if she found out I was an ex-con?”

“It ain’t as simple as that and you damn well know it.” His palm slams down on the table as my uncle tries to rein his anger back in. “You should never have been in that fucking cell to begin with, and I dream every night of killing the fucker who put you there.”

I lay my hand on his shoulder in an attempt to calm him. “What good would that do but put you right where I was?”

“I’d get locked up if it meant settling the score, kid.”

His fierce protectiveness of me has always taken my breath away. Even when I was locked up a state over, he made the long drive to visit every other week. He’d sit opposite me in the visitor’s room and swear to help me turn my shit around the moment I walked out the gates. He’d keep the hope in my heart alive with his promises of setting me up with a future I could be proud of.

He’s been more of a father to me than my own.

And it’s not that I had a bad relationship with my parents growing up. They loved me as much as possible, keeping me fed and clothed. My ma did my homework with me at the kitchen table every night, and my dad would take me to T-ball practice on Sundays.

But we weren’t affectionate in the way many families are. I don’t remember having stories told to me at bedtime or being held when I was scared. And when I decided to move in with Mack at age fifteen, they barely even batted an eyelid.

It’s not that they were bad parents, and it’s not even that I didn’t love them enough to stay. I just loved Mack more, I guess.

It doesn’t matter anyway. They haven’t spoken to me since the day of my arrest nearly five years ago.

Mack’s eyes grow dark, narrowing into sharp slits. I watch as a threatening, almost dangerous energy washes over him like crashing ocean waves, and instantly, my shackles rise. There’s only one person in the world that could make Mack react this way.

Owen.

I feel him like an evil energy, a smoke that rises from the pits of Hell to poison the lungs of all those here. It makes me choke.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Mack demands, rising to stand, metal chair legs screeching across the dusty wooden floor.

“He goes to the U.”

“You knew?”

The heat in his glare is almost painful against my face, though I refuse to turn in his direction to see it for myself.

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t think to clue me in on shit like that?”

I brave looking at him then, meeting his eyes head-on despite the fury that still burns inside them. “Didn’t wanna cause you any unnecessary stress.”

“Unnecessary ain’t what I’d call it, kid.”

“Nothing we can do about it.” I shrug. “He grew up here, Uncle Mack. He has just as much right to be here as we do, no matter how much we wish he didn’t.”

“He fucking wouldn’t if five years ago, he’d taken goddamn responsibility for—”

“Don’t.” I cut him off. “No point rehashing the past if we can’t change it. Thought we were here for a good time, anyway.”

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