Page 190 of Wicked Angel
“Then that’s meaningful, isn’t it? Maybe there’s something special between us, and we should both lean into it.”
“Yeah.” A haunted look flooded his eyes. “I wish I could. It’s so fucking tempting…” He shook his head again. “But it wouldn’t be fair to you to do that, to lean in and let you lean in too, let you feel like you had something solid to lean on. And then let it crumble around you when you realize the truth.”
There it was again, that creeping dread. “What truth?”
His eyes dropped. “That I never told you the most important thing about me that there is to know. The thing that shaped me more than anything else in my life.”
I could see,feel, how hard this was for him, whatever it was he was referring to.
I leaned toward him a little more. “The most important thing about you, to me,” I said in a whisper, “is that I’m falling in love with you, Johnny O’Reilly.”
He met my eyes, and his shone wetly.
“And that means,” I went on, “that nothing you could say would change that on a dime.”
“You might not love me,” he said in almost a whisper, “when you learn.”
I reached to take his hands. “Then teach me. And trust me that I can love you through anything, because that seed has already been planted and it has room to grow. Well… anything except that road littered with empty bottles and other women, and empty promises. Because I won’t put myself through that, even for you. And even if I still love you.”
We held each other’s eyes for a long moment.
Then he forced out, “I suffer from symptoms of PTSD. I have for a long time. From a single traumatic event in my childhood.”
I squeezed his hands tighter, my heart thumping in an increasing rhythm. I knew that my heart was going to break from whatever he told me. I could feel it, in the way he spoke.
“Tell me,” I whispered.
“It was a carjacking.” He said it plainly, like he’d removed himself from it. Like he was describing something he’d seen on TV. “My mom was driving me home. To my dad’s. They were divorced. Dad had custody of me, but I’d just spent a few days visiting my mom. It was nighttime. It was already dark out and it was raining. The car was stopped at a red light. And a man opened the car door. My mom’s door. He got in the car.”
He stopped talking abruptly. He’d looked down again, avoiding my eyes as emotion started to color his voice, taking him from describing something he’d seen on a screen to something he’d witnessed firsthand. Something he’d lived through. Just barely.
Something that was still so very real for him, vivid and alive. Something buried that was clawing to get out, just under his skin.
I just held his hands. I could feel his anxious heartbeat thudding in his fingers, but I didn’t release the tight hold. I didn’t move. Birds chirped distantly in my parents’ yard and a breeze whispered through the trees of this safe place, my childhood home, where nothing terrible had ever happened to me.
I barely breathed because I didn’t want to disturb him as I held on for his next words.
When he didn’t go on, I offered tentatively, “Johnny, that’s… awful. I can’t imagine going through something like that.” All the while, my thoughts were spinning madly.
What happened next?
Did he get out of the car? Did he get kidnapped? Hurt? My stomach squeezed into a sick knot, the dread coalescing.
“The memory is muddy.” He paused, like he was choosing his words, rather than actually trying to remember. “It’s hard to go back there, even with Rory’s guidance. But I know for sure the man had a gun. He had a gun and I picked it up.” His eyes met mine, filled with pain and a terrible, searing guilt that took my breath away. “I shot him.”
Those words, just a whisper on his cracked voice, seemed to ring through the air and whisper through the trees. I could feel the anguish in those words, the anguish that hadn’t fully healed.
“I knew if I told you,” he said quietly, “you might hate me. But I also knew I couldn’t not tell you.” He looked at me with a kind of helplessness in his eyes. And in that moment, he looked so young. “I’ve never wanted to tell anyone so badly.”
I heard the truth whispered beneath those words.I’ve never wanted to trust someone so badly.
“Hate you?” I said softly, my voice wobbling. “He… he had a gun. He could’ve shotyou. He could’ve done terrible things to you.”
He looked away. “I know all that. But I still shot a man. I killed him.”
I sat in stunned, pained silence, with no idea what to say. I was scared that anything I said wouldn’t help. I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting him with my words right now. So I just sat in silence, holding his hands tight so he’d know I was right here.
“I killed him,” he said again, like he was making sure I heard. Or maybe to make sure I understood.
