Fall Guy (20 page)

The word barely manages to choke out.

"I know you didn't think it was funny when I joked about the guys I was with. But it wasn't
that
many. And I was always safe.
Always.
So if that's what's stop--"

"
Shh
." I kiss her so she cuts her crazy confession short. "Stop it.
Now.
Stop."
I look down at her. She's keeping her jaw tight and strong to offset her shaky, embarrassed words. "I don't care if you've been with a thousand guys before me, alright? We're together now. That's all that matters. It's not you, nothing to do with you. There's nothing--"

I break off and look her up and
down,
letting it show on my face how sexy I find every single thing about her. "There's
nothing
at all about you that's stopping me. Trust
me,
it's like an opposite problem. I feel like I
gotta
finish telling you some stuff. It's not fair to let you get involved with me if I don't.
Alright?"

Her smile is supposed to make me feel all good, like nothing could split us apart and
everything is a-okay, but she has no clue. Not many girls outside my family's circle would want anything to do with the life I lead, which is why everyone in my life is pro-
Lala
.
And would be anti-Evan on principle.

You have to be raised our way to understand how we do things and why.

Even I don't always understand. But it's my code. So I have to make it work, and now that I got Evan involved with me,
I have to at least explain it to her. Or try. Even
if it means I'll probably get
an invitation to back the hell off her balcony in a few minutes.

I give her one last hard kiss, trying not to regret all the things I'm going to miss when she tells me to leave. I thought I'd be
able
to keep her separate from the rest of my life. I didn't count
on
feeling this impossible-to-ignore need to tell her everything.

I sit up again and rub my hands over my face, trying to talk myself back into a few more minutes with her curled in my arms,
but I can't do it. It's all or nothing with this girl.

I say a quick prayer that I might get another swing after I tell her everything anyway and just dive in.

"This tattoo isn't really my thing." I push my sleeve up and hold my arm out while
I'm talking, like
it's
evidence in m
y criminal case, and I’m making one final appeal to Evan, asking her to save me from myself
. "I got it to protect Remy."

She sits Indian-style, those gorgeous legs all folded up and long and tan and--

Focus
, I tell myself.

"This tattoo was something I had to get." I flex my arm and the
pooka
jumps. Evan wants to ask, I can see her working to keep her mouth pinned shut, but she definitely wants to know, so I just tell her.

"
Remy'd
been fucking up and causing shit everywhere he went. He's always been..." I need
to tell her more, but my inner loyalty sucker punches me. This is my brother I'm about to talk shit about. I have no business revealing his secrets to someone outside the family.

I look over at her, her eyes right on my face, totally trusting, and I realize that I trust her, too.
Blood or not, this girl belongs to me
in some kind of elemental way I can’t deny
, and she deserves to know my truths.

"Remy's always been
a fucking
loose cannon.
But not
hing
too serious.
Then he met his ex or whatever they are, and things got good for a while. He got her pregnant, and then...he just wasn't ready I guess. He just didn't get that he needed to grow the hell up. It was like he was thinking he'd get to be an even bigger kid now that he was having one or something. And his girl got tired of all his stupid
shit,
and she left him."

I rub the heels of my hands into my eyes, wishing brain bleach were a real thing, because I'd love to sanitize some of the crazy, stupid, awful despair I watc
hed my brother go through from
my memory
forever
.

"I'm sorry for him," Evan says, laying
her hands loosely in mine. "I know how that can be. To have someone in your life, and when they leave, it's like they were that last patch holding all the water back, and your ship just starts sinking without them.
Even if maybe the two of you weren't right together."

I try to picture her that night in the orchard, the flames licking the grass, the mulch, the bark of those big old trees, and I bet I know exa
ctly what she was feeling; this weird
mix of
panic, adrenaline, and newness, like the slate is finally clean
.

The problem is
,
it never lasts. Destruction never solves the situation in the long run. Remington crushes things, smashes them, rips them apart, punches them, demolishes them, and feels that surge of satisfied power for about an hour or two.

When it all falls apart, when I come in to act as his personal cleanup crew and reluctant witness, all he's left with is an emptiness that he can't ever beat his way out of.

"I'm sorry for him, too." I kiss her palms, one,
then
the other. "But he's a black hole right now. He sucks everything in and destroys it. He's dangerous.
To himself.
To the people around him."

"To you?"
Her voic
e is just-above-a-whisper
hushed.

I stare at the
pooka
. "I got this tattoo because Remington went on a bender. He did a shit-ton of stupid crap in a few hours, and the tattoo kept getting brought up in descriptions."

I look up at her face, but she hasn't recognized the ugly constellation for of all the dull stars I've thrown into her sky.

"You got a matching tattoo?" Her finger
s
drum on her thigh. "Why?"

"The last cops who caught up with my brother after his night of fucking mayhem?
One wasn't in my father's pocket. Remington went too far. An officer my dad has some pull with promised the other guy, the one with a hard-on for Remy, that someone would take the heat. He basically talked his partner out of dragging Remy to jail
that night. He let me come get him and take him home
. But the partner put a statement in, and the tattoo was in it. So I needed one that was the same when I showed up in court."

The missile of my
insane
confession just hissed from the sky to the ground and is about to detonate.

"You were with him that night?
You did some stupid stuff, too?
"

The desperate sadness in her eyes tells me she knows my answer before I have to say it.

The boom of this crash-and-burn scenario muffles my hearing.

"No."

I can see the moment it explodes in full force for Evan.

Her head tilts to the side and she squints at me, like she’s
s
eeing a different version of me
, one she isn’t sure she likes
.

Her words come out slow and low.
"You look enough like him.
Jace
thought you were him, close up. You took the blame."

A half dozen emotions ricochet over her face
, one after another, none of them good.

"You
take
the blame!” she accuses
, her eyes flashing, her head shaking back and forth
. “
'House of the Rising Sun' is Remington's ringtone. You know you have to leave when you hear it because you have to get your brother out of trouble."

She unfolds her legs and paces the room. I watch her walk back and forth, back and forth on those amazing
legs,
those legs that I wish were wrapped around me right now.

She turns to me and asks,
"Is this just a recent thing? Just since he broke up with his girlfriend?"

I give serious consideration to a couple handfuls of lies b
efore I settle on a soft variation
of the truth.

"It's gotten more extreme in the last few months."

She turns on her heel and stomps back toward me. If she wasn't so damn beautiful, I'd say she looked like a bull I just waved a
bigass
red cape at. She catches my wrist and twists my arm around so my tattoo is level with my eye.

"You marked your body. Permanently," she
accuses,
her voice ice cold. "You have a criminal record.
Permanently."

Her manicured fingers pack a bite I'm not expecting.

"You're being melodramatic, Evan. His blood runs through me. What's a little ink? And I
had a record before."

"
You
had a record for
your
crimes? Or you carried your brother's record?" Her chest rises and falls like a bel
lows with the maniac pace of this intense,
mounting fury.

"He's my family. You don't understand. His crimes
are
my crimes. His record
is
mine. The Youngblood name isn't a one member thing. It's all of us, together, against everyone else."

I lose my trademark calm and my voice picks up.

"Against everyone else?"
The question punctures the quiet left by my declaration of loyalty.
"Or against each other?
Because what he's doing seems to be hurting you pretty exclusively unless I'm missing something serious."

Her blue eyes hold wide and fierce, like some kind of battle leader.

It's obvious.

What she's saying, it's not like I haven't been thinking this for years.

I've been thinking the same exact thing since the first whipping I took for Remy,
and then after
every detention and suspension, four stints in
juvy
, six in community service,
and
three years on probation. My luck has held all these years, but the rope is getting shorter and my time is running out fast.

So
on people like Judge
Schwenzer
will work their asses off to rip this whole thing open, and I might go to jail, to prison, or get shipped to the family compound in no-name backwoods Hungary. That's the inevitable end to this road unless Remy makes some huge changes soon.

And I'm not enough of an idiot to hold my breath waiting for my dipshit brother to change his stripes.

But there's something about hearing someone gorgeous and funny and brilliant saying this truth to me, versus my own stupid brain coming up with it.

There's also the fact that, as obvious and partially true as this might be, it's also way more
complicated and still only
,
at best, no more than
partially true.

I can't tell her that, though. Mainly because I'd be using one of her least favorite words: complicated. There's a sick
,
sinking feeling right in the center of my gut, because this isn't jail or probation, but it's the beginning of the end of the first thing I've really wanted in longer than I can remember.

"I hear you. Really I do." I stand up and check my pocket for my keys.

They're lost in the bright mass of blankets and sheets on her bed, and I pick through all the bedding I was just rolling around with her in to grab them. She's looking right at the floor. "And I know
,
it's fucked up, especially if you're outside looking in. But it's the way we do things, all of us, every lowdown stupid Youngblood. It's my way. And not everyone is okay wit
h it. I can’t blame you for not being able to accept that
."

I'm so close I can smell the wildflower/burnt sugar mix coming off her skin, and I want to bury my damn face in it and breathe it all nigh
t. But she's just one more thing
on an increasingly long list of amazing things that aren't meant to be part of my life.

"Evan? I'm
gonna
get lost, alright?"

I run my finger along the smooth curve of her shoulder one last time, for luck.

"You're leaving?" Her blue eyes are perf
ectly still and focused on mine. Fury makes them look hot and clear.
"I get that you might not like hearing the truth, but that's it? That's all you can take?"

"Wait. I thought...you said...the whole thing with Remy?
The tattoo?
Wasn't that, like, an invitation for me to fuck off?"