Page 46 of Reckless
“So uncomplicate it for me.”
Alex pulled back, staring at her through the soft overhead light and the softer evening shadows beyond. The fact that she’d blown his goddamn mind in bed had been reason enough to give him pause. But now that he sat next to her, in her kitchen of all places, not just ready but willing to listen to all the things he usually kept on emotional lockdown?
Yeah. This couldn’t fucking end well.
He opened his mouth anyway.
“You were surprised the other day, when you picked me up at my house.” He’d seen it on her face as soon as she’d gotten out of her car, and she certainly hadn’t been the first person to go brows-up over his zip code. “Probably wondering why I live in suburbia, right?”
Zoe’s forehead furrowed in confusion, although the blush that said Alex was spot-on with his assessment didn’t get by him, either. “Well, yeah. Most young, single guys live a lot closer to the city.”
He nodded, his rib cage going tight as he thought of where Brennan lived, and Cole and O’Keefe and even Crews, who had a family. “They do. But I live in my neighborhood because that house belonged to my parents.”
Her confusion turned to clear surprise. “You bought your parents’ house?”
“No.” The truth crowded up, shoving its way out of his mouth despite the rust on the words. “I inherited it.”
“You…oh.” Zoe froze, her copper stare going wide. “Oh, my God, Alex. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It happened a long time ago, so not a lot of people do. My parents both died in a car accident, coming back from a long weekend on Sapphire Island.” He took a deep breath, waiting for the rest of the story to logjam in his throat. But instead, the words spilled out. “It was late, but they decided to come home at night rather than get up early the next morning to make the three-hour trip. A guy driving a tractor trailer fell asleep behind the wheel and crossed the center line on Route Seventeen to hit their SUV head on. All three of them were killed instantly.”
Zoe’s breath released on an audible exhale, and Alex steeled himself for the inevitable pity party that always accompanied the story on the rare occasion that he actually told it. But Zoe didn’t offer one, and hell if that didn’t make him want to talk even more.
“How old were you?” she asked simply, and his gut twisted hard before dropping toward his knees.
“The accident happened two months after my eighteenth birthday.”
She paused, her fingers tightening over his on the dark wood of her kitchen table. “Oh, Alex. I don’t know what to say. That must have been so hard.”
“It was,” Alex replied with honesty instead of heat. “Our family was just the three of us, aside from my great-aunt and uncle who I’d seen maybe six times in my life. Even though I was legally an adult, my parents left everything to me in a trust. For all intents and purposes, I was pretty much an orphan.”
He shifted, his chair scraping softly over the ceramic tile. As if she’d grasped his need to do anything other than be still, Zoe let go of his hand, tilting her head slightly toward the center of the kitchen in a nonverbalc’mon.
Alex followed her to the counter, a thread of relief spreading out in his chest as he continued. “College was really important to my old man, and he and I were close. Although he had a good job with the city, he’d never gone to college, and he always regretted it. My parents left me everything they had, with the one stipulation that I had to earn my degree. So, I started at UVA that fall.”
“That must have been difficult, going to college so soon after they passed away.” Zoe reached into the fridge for a pair of beers, handing one over. The simple act of uncapping the bottle, then trading it for the other to repeat the process, chilled him out, and he rolled his shoulder in a shrug.
“Actually, it saved my ass in the long run. I’d already been accepted, and I landed a decent baseball scholarship. My parents had thankfully planned for a lot of the rest. In truth, without that stipulation in their will, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college after their accident, and I damn sure wouldn’t have stuck through it for all four years to get my degree like my dad wanted me to.” God, those first few years after his parents had been killed had been a blur, just motions to get from one step to the next. College had been the last freaking thing on his mind.
Alex took a sip of his beer, letting the smooth flavor linger for just a second before continuing. “Even though I knew enough people from baseball and stuff like that, I never really fit in. All they cared about was getting through exams and hanging out and drinking. Meanwhile, I was going home over Christmas break to fix leaky pipes in the bathroom and sort through personal property taxes. Looking back, I probably could’ve tried harder to find a place to belong. But at the time, I just didn’t want to.”
“You felt like friends would replace your family,” Zoe said, and although her tone didn’t make it a question, he answered anyway.
“I didn’t realize it then, but yeah. Going to college got me thinking about all the things my parents never got to do. Part of me was so angry that my dad would never be able to go back and get a degree like he’d wanted, or see me get mine.”
She bit her lip, but didn’t shield her suddenly tear-bright gaze. “All things considered that anger seems justified.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t even have anybody to be madat,you know? And after a while, spending all that time angry just seemed like a waste. No matter how hard I tried, or how pissed I got, I couldn’t change what had happened. I couldn’t rewind, make my parents come home earlier, get sick so they couldn’t go at all—I couldn’t do anything. So, instead, I decided I was going to do everything.”
“Oh.” Realization wrapped around Zoe’s single syllable, her beer bottle finding the counter with a muffledclunk. “That’s why you take so many risks.”
He nodded. “Once I graduated, I was determined to experience every single thing I possibly could, the wilder, the better. I enrolled at the fire academy about fifteen minutes after graduation.”
“Not a whole lot of places with more opportunity for an adrenaline high,” she admitted, and Alex didn’t even bother biting back the ironic laugh welling up from his chest.
“Or with so many rules.” He may not have been short on the balls to do active fire drills or haul himself a hundred feet in the air on nothing more than a ladder and a few scraps of hope. But scraping up the patience to follow the regs while he did it had damn near killed him. Figuratively and literally. “Even though I nailed both the physical stuff and the written exams, I still didn’t want to fit in or fall in line, and my attitude made that wildly clear. I found plenty of trouble at the academy, and I nearly got tossed out twice. Even though I was at the top of my class, by the time I graduated, none of the captains in Fairview wanted to take a flyer on me. Except for one.”
Zoe leaned against the counter, a tiny smile of irony playing on her lips. “My father.”
