Page 28 of Tripped By Love
Mel rolled her eyes. “This is Artie.”
“Arthur,” he corrected her. He gave me a once-over and then dismissed me in a way I hadn’t been dismissed in a long time, especially not from some teen punk who thought his shit didn’t stink. “We gotta jam. Smokey expected us a half an hour ago.”
She shifted, uncomfortable.
“You could stay and have dinner with us,” Jonas offered, and when I looked at my foster brother, his eyes were hard, hands fisted tight, stance as wide as my own.
“No, she really can’t, asshat,” Arthur spoke for her in a way that raised every hair on the back of my neck.
“I think the girl can speak for herself,” I said.
Arthur’s eyes narrowed again, his hand settling on the piece hidden below his tank.
Mel seemed to read all the tension and put a hand on Arthur’s chest as if to reassure him. “I’m coming. I just wanted to say hi to Jonas before he took off for the summer.”
Arthur’s eyes flew to Jonas, and some of the tension seemed to leave his shoulders. He lifted his chin in Jo-Jo’s direction. “Yeah. I heard. Have a good vacation.”
Then, he pulled Mel’s fingers into his hand and started tugging her away. She looked back at us with a large smile and waved. “Bye, Jonas. Nice to meet you, Marco!”
Jonas deflated once she was gone.
“He’s bad news,” I said.
“That’s what I was telling you. Who’s going to be here for her when all hell breaks loose?”
I had no doubts that taking him to Grand Orchard was the right move now that I’d seen Arthur and Mel together. If he stayed this summer, unsupervised, as Maliyah healed, he’d be heading right into the middle of that shit, trying to protect a girl who seemed to understand what she was getting into. Would I like to pull her away from it? Sure. Would I like to shield her from the darkness she was bringing to her door as much as Jo-Jo wanted to? Damn straight, I would. But I wasn’t her parent, her bodyguard, or her friend. She’d have to rely on those people to look out for her. I already had one too many people on my list to try and cover.
It didn’t stop me from feeling guilty, though, which was probably only a tenth of what Jonas felt. He was quiet on the way home, quiet while we ate, and then said he was going to sleep, hours before I knew he really would.
“Jo-Jo,” I said as his feet hit the bottom step. He looked back at me, and I spoke the truth. “I know you want to keep her safe, but there’s nothing you can do for her if she’s chosen this path. You being at her side is only going to provoke him to take things out on you both.”
“So, I should just slink away? Hide like I’m afraid. Is that what you did? When your captain gave you that order and you refused?”
It hit me so hard in the chest that I was left speechless. I hadn’t thought Jonas knew what had happened when I’d been court-martialed. I’d thought, at eight, dealing with his own transition into Maliyah’s home and his past running rampant through his nightmares, that my issues had gone unnoticed—at least until Maliyah had her first takotsubo cardiomyopathy episode. Till I’d literally caused her broken heart.
When I didn’t answer, he just stormed up the stairs away from me.
For the first time in my life, I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to seek solace from someone who might have actually understood what had happened. The choices I’d made. I laughed at myself sarcastically. Who was I kidding? What I truly sought was absolution. Forgiveness. I’d made a mistake that night. I’d miscalculated the strength of the anger and humiliation of the team. I’d thought my saying no would be enough to stop the ball from rolling downhill. It hadn’t.
I hit call before I really realized it, aching for something light and good. Aching for a joy that filled the air when Cassidy O’Neil walked into a room.
“Hi, again,” she said. It was the second time I’d called her tonight. What a moron I was, pushing forward instead of retreating. Loving the sound of her silky voice when I shouldn’t. Just hearing it was like putting a salve over the wounds that Jonas had broken free. “Marco?”
I finally spoke. “Hey. Sorry. Were you getting ready for bed?”
God, the thought did all the wrong things to me. Just like it had the first night here, when I’d texted and she’d said she was in bed but not sleeping.
“What’s wrong? Is it Maliyah?” she asked, reading the bleakness of my tone even though I’d tried to hide it.
“Maliyah’s good. At least, she was when we left her,” I said, battling my emotions, trying to force them back behind the barrier, failing and floundering a bit.
I eased open the back door and sank onto the stoop. The noise of the city filled the air, even at night. A rev of an engine. A car horn. So far removed from the quiet of the orchards that I’d run through back in Grand Orchard.
My silence leached into the phone, taking her normally happy voice and littering it with the ache of my own when she asked, “Is it Jonas?”
It was, and it wasn’t.
“He’s gotten hooked up with some bad characters.”
