Page 37 of Conor
If her intention was to wound me with those words, she’s done a bang-up job of it. This conversation is going nowhere fast, but I can’t let it die.
“I saved your arse when I could have just put a bullet in your head. Have you even thought about that? I gave ye a home. A safe place for Archer. I don’t know what more ye fecking want from me. Ye’re alive, and ye haven’t been captured by the Locos, so it seems to me ye have it pretty good.”
Her head dips, and all the fight leaches from her body. “You’re right. That should be enough.”
But what’s she’s saying is that it isn’t. And it only confirms what I’ve been thinking myself all along. She’s here because she has to be. She’ll never see me as anything else than the man who fucked up her life. I don’t know what the bleeding hell I’ve been doing, playing house with her like we’re a fucking family. Kissing her and fucking her and whispering bullshit words in her ear at night. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s perfectly clear now. Ivy despises me for what I did, and she always will.
I’m no hero.
And I guess it’s time I remembered that.
“Are you alright, mate?” Reaper’s voice breaks through the stillness of the basement, and I blink up at him.
His eyes are on my hands, still speckled with the blood of the two useless wastes of human life I extinguished tonight. It didn’t occur to me to wash it off, and it speaks volumes to how far I’ve come since I first began. But the fact that Reaper is even sitting here at all, asking me if I’m okay speaks volumes about him too.
The man was practically a robot when I met him, but his wife Sasha humanized him in ways I never thought possible. When I see them together, there is no denying the pure love in his eyes. They would die for each other. They will fight for each other. It’s the kind of love that starts wars, and I’ve always been a little envious of that.
We might be a crazy, murderous foul lot of muppets, but at the end of the day, we want to come home to a warm bed and a beautiful woman who loves us in spite of all that. I never fancied myself a bloke to want such things, but in my drunken state, I can admit that I do. But after what Ivy told me tonight, I don’t know that I’ll ever have it.
“She isn’t just a girlfriend,” I slur. “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
Ronan acknowledges my drunken confession in his usual fashion. “If that wasn’t bleeding obvious, I don’t know what is.”
I take another swig of the half empty whiskey bottle in my hand. “She isn’t like your missus.”
“How do ye mean?” Ronan asks.
“She isn’t with me because she’s crazy about my dumb arse. She only married me because she had no choice.”
Ronan shrugs and snatches the bottle out of my hand. “They don’t have to like you in the beginning. Time will sort out her feelings.”
“Maybe.” But I have other ideas. An idea that only a drunk bloke would think was a good one. “Would ye mind giving me a lift home?”
The house is quiet, and after a little investigation, I find Ivy asleep in Archer’s bed. I expected as much, but it doesn’t make it feel any less like a slap in the face. She wants nothing to do with me, and if her words didn’t let me know it earlier, this definitely does. Still, I hesitate in the doorway, watching her sleep while I consider my intentions.
There’s no coming back from what I’m about to do. The truth will change things. It will open my eyes and probably fuck everything up, but I’m done playing make believe with her. I need to know how she really feels, and there’s only one way to do that. But it doesn’t make me any less apt to go to her. To get down on my knees and beg her for sweet words and false promises. Promises that she could feel something else for me like the way I feel for her right now.
Only, that would make me weak and I can’t ever be weak. Not with Ivy. There’s one solution to this clusterfuck, and it isn’t in this room. I pull the door shut, obscuring her from my view before I stumble down the hall to our room. My eyes dart over the space that smells like her. Warm and inviting and so sweet I can almost taste her.
Her things are mixed in with mine. Her clothes in the dresser, shoes in the closet. She has so little, but what she does have is here. I rifle through all of it before I find what I’m looking for, tucked away in a small compartment of her backpack. The tattered pages of her journal that hold the secrets I’ve often seen her scrawling when she doesn’t think I’m paying attention.
I flip through the first few pages, dated a year ago, and what I find turns the whiskey in my gut sour. It’s a detailed account of her life with Muerto. A no holds barred narrative of the sick things he would do to her and the threats he used to keep her compliant. There are so many specifics I can’t stomach to read through them all.
In the later entries, her writing changes. Hurried notes scrawled in haste about how much she misses her son. On other pages, there might only be one sentence, but that sentence says it all. She prays for death to come, the only thing she believes will set her free.
I retrieve the flask from my jacket and crack it open. It’s the only way I can see fit to get me through the rest. But there are so many pages of this shite. Too fucking many. Maybe it’s selfish, or maybe I’m weak, but I can’t finish them. A sinking feeling weighs me down as I flop onto the bed and skip ahead to the part where she meets me. Before I even get started, I know I’m not going to like what I find.
Our situation is different, but in many ways it’s the same. Ivy was right that it doesn’t matter what I do or say. In the end, what it boils down to is that she’s here because she has no other choice. These same thoughts are reflected back at me in the pages of her journal.
I don’t know how I got myself into this mess, but I need to find a way out. I can’t be with a guy like Conor. I can’t be stuck with him for the rest of my life. I just need to get through this. I need to get as far away from him as I can. I hate him. I hate him so much it pains me to pretend otherwise for even a second.
I slam the pages of the notebook shut, tucking it away from my sight. If I had any notions that this would end differently, I’m over that now. The truth isright there in black and white. Ivy hates me and that’s all I need to know.
“When is Conor going to be home, mama?” Archer asks.
“I’m not sure, buddy.”
It’s been almost a week since our argument, and I’ve barely seen him at all. He leaves before we get up in the morning and comes home long after we’ve gone to bed every night.
