Fallon sighed and puckered her bottom lip in sympathy. Heartbreak sucked no matter what way you looked at it. Caring about someone put you at a high risk for being let down. And Fallon could understand that kind of hurt even if she couldn’t understand Jade’s reaction. But then, everyone dealt with pain a little differently. Everyone had different ways to distract themselves. It was harder for some than for others. And Jade had decided to find her distraction with a needle to the vein.
“Who’d you call, Jade?” Fallon asked, wanting to rip apart whoever had provided her with her Kryptonite.
“My old dealer,” she mumbled, averting her eyes to her hands. “I didn’t think he’d still have the same number after two years. I just needed to go through the motions, ya know? But when he answered, the idea of just forgetting, even if just for a minute, won out.”
Biting her teeth together, Fallon stared at the wall, shifting through the words that were jumbled in her head, attempting to unscramble them so she could speak.
“If you can just give me a few days—three max—I’ll be gone.”
Fallon snapped her head to Jade, her brows pulling down between her eyes. “You’re not leaving, Jade.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said. But I’m not going to kick you out because you screwed up.” That wouldn’t solve a damn thing. It would just leave Jade alone, and scared, left to deal with her mistakes by herself. She would never do that to her. She would never abandon Jade the way her parents did her.
Jade’s eye glossed over with unshed tears. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You could start with ‘I’m sorry’ and end with ‘I’ll never scare you like that again.’”
She nodded. “I knew you loved me,” she teased. “And if I was a hugger, I would hug you.”
Fallon laughed, grateful for that little piece of Jade to slip back into the shell she was staring at. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I will be.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“And no more drugs—I mean it, Jade.”
Making an X over her chest with her finger, she said, “Cross my heart.”
“And Graham’s here?” Fallon questioned, still unsure as to what part Graham played in Jade’s life.
Jade perked up and wiped at the black dried flakes beneath her eyes. “He is?”
“Yeah, and apparently he and ‘Bad Boy’ are friends.”
Her interest sparked. “Wait, is he here too?”
“His name is Rafe, and yes, he’s here with me. Do you want me to let Graham up or not?” she asked. She wasn’t ready to answer the question she knew Jade would have asked if she divulged any more information. Fallon didn’t have any answers anyway.
“Yeah, send him up.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Dammit,” Rafe said, swiping his finger across the red ignore button on his phone before he tossed it into the cup holder between the seats. He’d just exited off of I-25 and pulled onto Bijou Street toward Wright’s house when his phone rang, waking Fallon up, who was sleeping in the seat next to him.
She stirred and stretched, dropping her feet from the dashboard. “What’s with all the hostility?” She yawned, straightening up against the seat.
“Just someone from my past trying to fucking slip through the cracks,” he muttered before he realized he was opening up the proverbial can of worms.
“The someone you’re trying to forget,” she stated as she looked out the window.
“Pretty much.”
He saw her head shift back to him from the corner of his eye, the light from the window illuminating the golden streaks in her hair as it tumbled over her shoulder. “What’d she do?” she asked simply, as if asking him what his favorite football team was.
Rafe laughed. If only the answer were that fucking simple. It was a question with so many different layers of answers he couldn’t even begin to peel them away from the messed-up situation that lay beneath. But he said the very first one that sprang to the front of his mind. The one that obviously made him the angriest. His jaw clenched tight as he pushed the words through his clamped teeth: “She turned me into the type of man I never thought I’d be.”
He glanced at Fallon and watched as sympathy crossed her face, but her eyes still squinted in confusion.
“For what it’s worth”—she smiled at him—“and please don’t make me regret saying this, but, from what little I’ve seen of the type of man you are, I’d say you just might be one of the good ones. Arrogant, and maybe a little bit intimidating. But I see the good. And I’ve seen a lot of the bad to recognize when I see the good.”