Page 21 of Hard to Forgive

Silas’s very existence bothered me, because I was pretty sure I could’ve handled my dad’s bullshit if I hadn’t already been on such high alert because of him. The anger and resentment?That wasn’t just my dad. That was the memories of what had happened between us. It was the memory of a stolen kiss in a locker room, hope that maybe, justmaybe, the guy I liked might like me back. It was the realization that it had meant nothing. It was the laughter the next day.

I punched the back of my couch. The couch absorbed the hit, not giving me the bite that I needed in that moment. I needed more than that. I needed the pain that came with a punching bag. It helped, sometimes, and maybe this time it would help. The idea of leaving the couch, even to go to the makeshift gym our landlord had put in the basement of the building, felt like too much.

Just do it, I nagged myself.You’ll feel better.

I hauled myself off of the couch and forced myself to my bedroom. I forced myself out of my work clothes and into my workout clothes. I ignored the fact that the tank top I pulled on smelled like stale sweat and that the sweats had a stain from spilling something on them. It wasn’t like I was going to impress anyone. I was going to fix myself, to get myself out of this trash mindset I was in.

A few minutes later, I was in the basement gym. Music pumped through the Bluetooth speaker the landlord left down there for people to use, and eventually, everything began to fade away.

Time. Bitterness. Stress. Anxiety. It all found itself made meaningless by the feeling of knuckles on the punching bag. The adrenaline pumping through my veins burned them all away, and the sweat turned the burnt remains into something tangible.

By the time I went back upstairs, my knuckles were red, my muscles burned, and my mind wassomewhatclearer.

So, of course, it all had to go to shit.

8

It had taken everythingin my power not to march over to Jonas’s desk and slug him when Isabel returned with a tear stained face. I’d told her not to go after him. I’d warned her that he was a mercurial asshole who seemed to get off on snapping at his coworkers.

Okay, so maybe he just seemed to get off on snapping at me, but I felt the same principle applied to my best work friend. It seemed that I was right, because he’d made her cry.

He’dmade her cry.

It was unforgivable.

For the rest of the shift, I mentally tried to set him on fire. Well, when I wasn’t focusing my energy on calming down and cheering up Isabel. It wasn’t my most productive day at work, but I couldn’t say that I regretted it.

When the shift ended, I dragged Isabel with me to Firelli’s. She’d told me once that it was her favorite restaurant in King’s Bay. I’d always found it to be a bit overrated, but if it was what she wanted, then it was what she would have.

Over pasta, we shared stories about our lives and our childhoods. When we got to the topic of families, I desperately searched for something else to talk about. “What did he say to you, anyway?”

I wasthatdesperate to talk about anything other than our families. She eyed me suspiciously as she twirled her pasta around her fork. “Why do you want to know?”

“Call me curious.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she answered with a shake of her head. “I’ve already wasted enough of my mental energy replaying it.”

If she’d been spending her entire day doing that, then that meant it must have been bad. She was the most optimistic person I’d ever met, and the thought that Jonas had somehow torn that down? It made me sick to my stomach.

I met her eyes and placed my fork on my plate.

“Tell me.”

Isabel tried to make me promise that I’d stay out of it. She didn’t want him to think that she’d run to me, reported back to me the way he’d accused her of doing. The accusation had upset her, which was stupid. Why should she care about whathethought of her?

The anger grew hotter with each and every passing moment until it hit the boiling point. I couldn’t sit back and wait for this rage to fade. I knew that there was no way in hell that Jonas was going to apologize to Isabel, and she deserved that. She deserved him to fuckinggrovelfor the way he’d treated her.

And if he wouldn’t on his own, then I was obligated to convince him to do the right thing.

Finding his address was easy. I wanted to kiss Yvette for her obsessive documentation of our personal details and my uncle for showing me a little too much about the Brighton network. I drove the short distance to the address and met my first hurdle. It was an apartment building, and his address didn’t have an apartment number on it.

I didn’t let that small hurdle deter me. I followed someone in through the doors, acting as if I belonged. I went up a flight of stairs before pulling out my phone. I put it up to my ear and pretended to be making a call. When I spotted someone else, I forced my face into a frustrated mask and groaned.

“Everything okay?” the woman asked from a few feet away from me. She hitched the bag of groceries she was carrying higher in her arms and continued to mess with her key.

“Yeah,” I groaned. “I’m just supposed to meet with my coworker, and he’s not answering his damn phone, and I can’t remember what apartment he said he lived in.”

She pushed the door open and rested the bag of groceries on the ground. “Well, you’re in luck. I know everyone in this building. Who are you looking for?”

---