Page 66 of The Bodyguard's Fall

“But he left him alone after that,” he added.

Something inside of me glowed. “Was that friend Will?”

He smiled sheepishly. “Yeah.”

“You guys have been looking after each other for a long time.”

His nose crinkled. “Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like the least manly way possible. We’ve been buddies for a long time. The end.”

I laughed, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear.

“Looking after you kept me the busiest, though,” he said.

“You did that yourself, so you can’t blame me.”

“I can blame you for a lot of things.”

“Ha!” I exclaimed. “You pulled over my boyfriend and made him walk the line and do a pen test even though you knew he wasn’t drunk.”

“I stand by that.”

“The whole school saw it.”

He laughed. “I forgot about that.”

“You knew he wasn’t drunk. But you kept making him do more tests,” I said, folding my arms. I was more curious now than anything else, but I had broached the subject. I might as well hear it all.

“If I remember right, he swerved right in front of me. I needed to be sure.”

“He dropped his can of soda on the floor, and then he swerved.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“We told you that,” I said.

“People tell me a lot of things.”

“But why did you keep making him do more tests? He proved he wasn’t drunk after the first one.”

“I wasn’t sure. Rookie cop, remember?”

He ran a hand through his hair, feigning a casual attitude, but he would no longer look at me. I couldn’t help the surge of annoyance that slipped through me at the memories.

“Alright,” he began, surprising me. “What if I told you that a week before I pulled you guys over, your boyfriend had been at a party and drove home drunk. Another cop was on him, but he somehow got away. So when I saw him driving my friend’s little sister home and swerving, I was definitely going to make sure he wasn’t drunk…and maybe punish him a little for the last time.”

I processed that for a long while. The news startled me, though not as much as it probably should have. Clearly, I had been right to dump Brock after I’d found out he’d been kissing another girl behind my back, but I was having a hard time working out how I felt about this newfound knowledge of the night I’d been secretly harboring resentment over for years.

“Okay, but you can’t tell me that you didn’t also enjoy ticking me off that night.”

He smiled. “Oh, I enjoyed it immensely. But I was mostly there because your boyfriend was a reckless moron.”

Our eyes met and held for a long moment before we broke the connection. The air between us became softer somehow. I had always liked Tate. I resented him at times, yes, but I’d always known he was a safe place for me to land, if I ever fell too hard or too fast. I thought I knew everything he’d done for me, but suddenly it felt like I had only cracked the shell of his safe-keeping throughout my life.

We walked in silence for a bit longer, a handful of birds chirping softly in the trees.