Released (Caged #3)(9)

I just shook my head, unable to say anything with any meaning or worth. I could taste bile in the back of my throat, but I couldn’t let myself fall apart now—I had to get through to her first. She was young and na?ve, just like I had been before. She didn’t realize what could happen.

“Can I tell you?” I asked. “I just…I should tell you first.”

“You should have told me months ago!” she cried out, and her hand reached up to wipe away tears.

“I know. I should have told you in the beginning, but I’ve never really told anyone except Yolanda, and she quite literally beat it out of me.”

“I know how she felt,” Tria muttered. She tightened her fingers around the edge of the robe.

“You can hit me if you want,” I told her.

She tilted her head enough to look up at me and scowled.

“No, I really don’t, Liam,” she said. “I just want to move on.”

My gut felt like she had hit me anyway. Of course she didn’t want to do that; it wasn’t her style at all, which was her point. It was just another way she was so much better than me.

“Will you listen?” I asked.

“Go ahead,” she responded with a slight wave of her hand. “At this point I might as well at least hear it.”

“I…” I stopped, not sure how I was supposed to start this now that the time was here. I cleared my throat and tried again. “You see…”

I faltered, and Tria just crossed her arms and looked at me.

I have to do this, I told myself. If I don’t do this, there’s no chance—none.

Shuffling back and forth on my feet, I tried to figure out where the best starting point might be. There really wasn’t one, so I figured the very beginning was as good as anything.

“When I was in high school,” I started, and then paused almost immediately, wondering how stupid I sounded.

“Go on,” Tria said. “I’m not going to let this drag on forever. Stop stalling.”

“I’m not!”

She glared at me, and I tried to remind myself that her anger was definitely justified.

“This isn’t easy,” I told her. “Outside of the people who were there, Yolanda’s the only other person who knows anything about any of this.”

“I can’t stand any more excuses from you,” she said as she shook her head back and forth. “Everything has changed now, and I have to grow up and stop playing around. Someone is counting on me, and I seem to be the only one in this room who realizes that.”

“I do…I realize…”

“Bullshit! You just want to take care of it, you son of a bitch.”

Her voice cracked, and she turned her head away from me as she wiped more tears from her face.

“I’m…I’m sorry, Tria…I didn’t mean…I’m just…”

“Yeah, you’re scared. I get it. Fatherhood would suck.”

“No!” I yelled back. I clenched my hands into fists and felt as if a huge hole in my chest had just been ripped open. “That isn’t it at all! You just have to let me…let me tell you!”

She turned her eyes back to me—hard, glaring, and full of animosity I had never seen in them before.

“Do it, then!”

My knees felt weak, so I dropped down to the floor in the middle of the room. I knelt down and rubbed my sweaty palms on the legs of my jeans. With one gigantic breath, I began to tell her.

“It was…um…my junior year,” I said. “In the second semester, a new girl started. It was one of those special schools, um…magnet schools or whatever they call them. One that was supposed to be for the brightest kids around, but it’s really for the rich ones. Every once in a while, they had to pick someone for a scholarship, ya know? Um…well…Aimee won the scholarship.”

Tria leaned back in the chair a little but said nothing, so I went on.

“She was really smart,” I said, remembering. “She deserved to be there more than the other girls did, I’m sure. She got picked on a lot for being from the part of town the rest of us wouldn’t have been caught dead in. She and her mom lived in a trailer park on the southwest side of town. It’s a little better than the area we…I live in, but not by a lot. Her dad was never in the picture, so it was just her and her mom. People gave her a lot of shit, but she just took it in stride.”

“We started going out just a month or so after she started going to my school. We went to prom together, all the weekend parties, studied together and all of that. She was…she was so different from all the other girls there. She was real. She was genuine. I never felt like I had to remind her who my father was so she’d remember her parents would be okay with her going out with me. She was more like you.”

I glanced at Tria, but her expression was unreadable. It was no longer a death-glare, so I took that as progress. I licked my lips a couple of times, swallowed hard, and continued.

“Of course, my parents weren’t too happy about the whole thing. There was a girl I had been seeing the year before who was the daughter of one of Dad’s lawyers. We broke up, which didn’t go over well in general, but when I brought Aimee home, and they figured out where she was from…well, they weren’t pleased. They put up with it, but I knew they were ticked. They were probably just hoping it was a phase that would pass.”