Page 41 of Clear Your Mind

“How is she?” I ask as I relieve her of the bottle and take a swig.

Maxi shrugs and walks to the kitchen. I follow. The sagy scent of Krystal’s shop clings to Maxi.

Depositing the bottle and ice cream on the counter, I watch while Maxi relieves the steam on the pressure cooker. All traces of her slightly inebriated state seem to vanish.

“About what I’d expect for someone who watched her new man kill her ex while hearing how he’d been here for a while. She’s torn because she thinks she should feel guilty. I told her that’s bullshit, but her guilt is mostly about you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, she feels like she pulled you into her problems and now you’ve killed a man because of it. That seems to weigh on her pretty heavily.”

A ball of dread settles in my gut.

If there was ever a doubt about what to tell Krystal, it vanishes with Maxi’s words. Telling her isn’t about coming clean to start on the right foot, not anymore. Even if she is packing to leave at this very moment, she still needs to know. I can’t live with her carrying a burden I can relieve her of with a simple truth.

“Killing Jeff didn’t damn my soul,” I say to myself more than Maxi.

I turn to head upstairs, but Maxi has something else to say. “Joel.” My name stops me in my tracks. Maxi never uses our given names, never. “Please don’t treat her like a delicate flower. If you do, I think she’ll see that as not belonging or being trusted and we’ll lose her.” It isn’t lost on him that she sayswe.

As I step out of the kitchen, I hear Maxi’s soft voice float on the air. “If she leaves, I will too.” That causes me to trip over the building supplies I know are sitting there. Maxi loves it here, so she must love Krystal even more.

I smile as I take the stairs two at a time. I’m not ready to admit it to anyone just yet, but I feel the same way about Krystal as Maxi does, and that scares the shit out of me.

Opening the door to my room, I’m overwhelmed with that same sagy smell, but also incense.

Krystal sits in the oversized chair with her bare legs tucked under her, flipping through a book. She looks up through a few brown waves that have fallen over her brows. A slow smile crawls across her luscious lips.

The sight of her here soothes the rough edges of my soul. I want to unbox all my doubts, my past, and my pain for her while burying myself in her heart and body.

She stands and drops the book in her vacated seat. Wearing one of my shirts that hangs to her thighs, she couldn’t be any sexier, even in expensive lingerie.

In slow motion, we step into each other’s arms. I inhale deeply, trying to imprint her smell in my brain. I realize the sagy scent isn’t coming from her. She smells like me.

Looking around the room, I see little tendrils of smoke curling up from all corners. I brush the hair from her face with a raised eyebrow. That’s when her hazel eyes gut-punch me. They’re ringed in red.

I did that.

My actions caused her tears.

“I hope you don’t mind.” She indicated the smoke I noticed earlier. “It helps center me. That, and apparently rum-soaked ice cream,” she jokes.

“You can do anything you want. All this luxury is yours,” I attempt to joke back, but it falls flat.

“Joel.” This is the first time my name has left her lips when it doesn’t make me feel like Superman. Her tone suggests anit’s me, not youspeech is coming and my gut twists. I literally have only known her for a few days, and it makes no sense. But I know somewhere deep down that if I lose her, I will lose a part of me I haven’t missed until now.

“Wait. I have something I want to say first.” I brush the book to the floor and sit, cradling Krystal in my lap.

With a deep breath, I begin. “I’m sorry about how things went down today. If I had my choice—” I stop. What I want is irrelevant. What’s done is done. “What I mean to say is, I’m sorry you had to see what you did and that you had to relive the worst day of your life for his amusement.”

“I’m not.”

“What?” My question comes out more accusatory than I want, and she winces. With barely restrained control, I gently put her head back to my chest. “Sorry,” I murmur.

Krystal pulls her head up, looking me in the eyes, and I want to look away. Scared I’ll see something that condemns me. But I can’t. The deep hazel with its gold striations is glittering and bright from her tears.

It’s the openness that has me locked in like a tractor beam. The depth is endless. Like if I fall in, I will never surface and be a happy man for it.

“I’m not sorry for how it ended. I’m not sorry I purged that poison from my system. And I’m not sorry that Ripper is alive. I am, however, sorry that you got hurt. Sorry you and your friends had to handle my mistake, and sorry you had to take a life. If I could cleanse that from you, I would.”

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