Page 53 of Snowed In with Benefits

I shrug. She scoffs.

“I’ve been staying in your room! I slept with you! I trusted you, damn it, and you were in prison?”

I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I guess it’s true. She did trust me. But I don’t see what that has to do with what we’re talking about right now. It’s not like I brought prison home with me. She shakes her head.

“You’re not who I thought you were.”

My jaw tightens. I’ve heard that before. I’ve seen this before. The way people shift after they find out. The way I go from being a person to being whatever they think a felon is.

I almost had a landlord once. Nice guy. Shook my hand when I came to look at the place. Told me he liked renting to guys who worked with their hands. Then the background check came back and he stopped returning my calls. Didn’t even have the guts to tell me no. Just went quiet.

There was a woman at a bar in town. We talked for an hour. She laughed at my jokes. She went to the bathroom and when she came back her whole face was different. She’d Googled me. She finished her drink standing up and left without saying goodbye.

A job interview that ended in the middle of a sentence. The guy looked at his paper, looked at me, and said, “I think we’re done here.” Just like that. Middle of a sentence.

So yeah. I know this part. I know the exact moment when someone decides I’m not a person anymore. I can see it coming the way you can see rain coming across a field. You watch it move toward you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“You don’t know me.”

Her eyes widen. I take a step forward and keep talking.

“Whoever you thought I was, whatever you think I am, those are your own assumptions. You’ve been here less than a week. You don’t get to decide who I am based on one piece of information.”

“Oh, great. I don’t know you at all, do I? That’s just fucking fantastic. I don’t know your history, I don’t know… anything! I know nothing about you, and now this?” She’s hyperventilating, clutching her chest with one hand and her locket with the other, staring over my shoulder like she can’t stand to look at me.

My impulse is to leave. I don’t need to take this shit. I don’t need to hear it from her, and it doesn’t matter what she thinks anyway because she’s leaving. But last night flashes through my brain and I see it from her side for the briefest moment. She surrendered to me completely. She put her life and her safety in my hands when she let me fuck her.

I owe her an explanation. I take a deep breath and roll my shoulders, loosening the tension there. She’s not attacking me. She’s freaking out. There’s a difference, and I’m a big enough man to see the difference and accept it.

“What do you want to know?”

She stops. She smooths her hands over Emmett’s coat and takes a long breath through her nose. Her eyes stop roaming the barn and come to settle on me. She swallows hard.

“Let’s start with the basics, I guess,” she says miserably, like she doesn’t actually want an answer. “What did you go to prison for?”

Everything in me goes still. There’s a blunt answer that will send her running for the hills, but it’s the easiest thing to say. There’s a way to break it to her gently, but I don’t have a lot of practice in gentleness. I take a deep breath and do my best.

“There was a fight,” I tell her. “A guy was getting jumped by a group of assholes. He was outnumbered. He probably would have died.”

I watch her face. She’s quiet, listening, not hyperventilating anymore. Just listening.

“Me and Hunter got there and jumped in. Fought on the guy’s side. Cracked the ringleader in the face, and he went down hard. Fractured his skull on the concrete.”

It’s the truth. It just isn’t the whole truth. I’m not going to tell her that it was Hunter who threw that punch. I claimed the punch that night, and I’ll keep claiming it until the day I die. My life was already damn near done by then. Hunter’s was just starting. I wasn’t going to let him take the fall for what happened.

Three years. That’s what it cost me. Three years in a cell the size of a parking space. Three years of eating when they told me to eat and sleeping when they told me to sleep. I came out and couldn’t get hired anywhere that ran a background check. Couldn’t rent an apartment. Couldn’t get a credit card. My parole officer called me by my last name like I was a dog he was trying to train.

I’d do it again. That’s the part that people don’t understand. It wasn’t noble. It was math. Hunter had a shot at a great life, and I’d always been the one in trouble. I’d already been picked up by the cops once or twice—not for anything big, just stupid shit when I was younger, but enough that nobody would think twice if it were me. The arithmetic was simple. One of us was going to lose something, and I just made sure it was the one who had less to lose.

Josie sucks in a harsh breath. “Did he die?”

I shake my head. “No. But it was damn close. The fight happened after we had left the fire crew, and I did three years in prison for it. I’ve only been out for a couple of years.”

She processes silently, her eyes looking at nothing, her hands twisting around each other. She’s still shaking. I can see it in her fingers. Eventually she nods.

“I mean, if it was necessary to save a life…”

I shrug. I want to be as honest with her as I can be. I couldn’t tell you why, but I do. It feels important. “I don’t know if it was. We probably could have run them off without cracking skulls. We could have called the cops. There are a lot of things we could have done, but that’s what happened.”