Never Have I Ever(59)

He shrugged, giving me another sheepish grin. He was good at them. “Eventually.”

But that was getting ahead of the story. He talked Pete into giving her a break, and he offered Roux a place to crash for a night or two. No strings, though he admitted he would not have made the offer to some beardy hipster guy in equal trouble.

I couldn’t blame him. Roux had gone full damsel on him, and I knew how charismatic she could be when she chose to shine it on.

“Ange and Randy Renault” stayed with Tig for a few days, until she got in touch with a friend who wired her more money. I translated this in my head: She played her game and found a local client, or she retapped an old one. Either way, she got flush, and Tig drove her and Randy to the airport. She didn’t tell him where they were going. She said it was safer if he didn’t know.

But I knew. They had gone to Boston. She was hunting me by then. Tig had somehow put me on her radar. The story she’d told Tig sounded like lies to me, but maybe not all lies. She was on the run from something.

I still thought a warrant was the most likely scenario, considering her profession and her use of fake names. Roux, who loved Botox and raw silk and sparkling water from France—she wouldn’t be in a beater Honda unless things were desperate. And the timeline was so short. She’d been in enough of a hurry to come at me unprepared, claiming to be Lolly Shipley.

“You told her about . . . what happened with us, when we were fifteen. About me,” I said, not a question but asking for an explanation all the same. I wondered who I was in Tig’s version of our shared story. The spoiled rich girl who sold him out? But then why had he greeted me like the dearest of old friends?

“Yeah. Like, her third night here,” he said. He still didn’t ask the questions I expected, but I could see them rising in his eyes. “I told her a lot of stuff. That woman, she’s a good listener. She asked me a thousand things, about everyone I ever met, felt like.”

That sounded familiar. It was what she’d done at book club, getting everyone talking, playing games that made them overshare. She’d had her ears cocked for any useful story, anything that might lead to a payday. Someone in my neighborhood was covering her rent, I was pretty sure. I hoped not Tate and Phillip.

“Why did you bring me up?” I said.

“She asked about these.” He ran his hand over the faint letters on his knuckles. “A guy with tats like this has been inside, nine times outta nine. Women see tats like this, they ask. Smart women anyway.”

He had been inside, and that was on me. “What about the tenth time?”

“The tenth time he lies and says he wasn’t,” Tig said, wry. “I mean, you meet a woman, it goes good, and she asks about the tats. You don’t want to lead with, ‘Yeah, so me and this friend, we kinda caused this lady’s death, but it was a long time back, and hey, you want to come on back to my place?’”

“So you had an edited version. To get women to sleep with you?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. But to be fair, I told it to women who were probably already gonna sleep with me,” he said, and shrugged. “Look, Smiff, I was nineteen when I got out, and these tats were so fresh that girls could see ’em from space. They would ask about them. It was shorthand. A way to ask if I was safe. My story of how I ended up in juvie—it was a way of telling them I was not the kind who would hurt a woman. My story of how I got sent up is not a hundred percent true, but the girls who asked weren’t looking for a husband. They wanted whatever they wanted from me and to feel like they wouldn’t get killed or beat while having it. I got asked a lot, back in my twenties. I was kind of a dog. I told that version of the story so many times I stopped thinking of it as a lie. I wanted it to be true. So bad. When I was telling it to some girl, it would almost feel true. Does that make sense?”

Yes. God, yes. I nodded.

“I grew up, though. I stopped tomcatting around like a fool and started having actual relationships. I was with this one lady six years. And then, about seven months back, she bailed. It’s okay. She wanted something different. I haven’t been seeing anyone, not since she left. So here’s this Ange, right? Beautiful. Staying here. And her third night, Randy bagged out early. She gave him half an Ambien. Said the kid hadn’t been sleeping good on the sofa.”

I swallowed a scoffing noise. I’d have bet a million dollars that “Randy” had been sleeping just fine. Roux gave him the Ambien so she could work on Tig. She was protective, I’d give her that. But drugging your teen so you could weaponize sex hardly made her mother of the year.

“And then she asked about the tats?” I said.

“We were talking back in my room, so we wouldn’t wake him up. We smoked a little weed, and she was playing with my hand, like, tracing the letters, asking me a million questions. One of them was about the tats. I knew she was heading out soon. She was a ship. She was passing. And I found myself telling that old story.”

“The story I’m in,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was high, and it was this déjà vu situation. I told her about Ragweed. Sneaking out. The accident. I told her you were driving, but I didn’t talk mean about you. I never did, not to Ange or anyone. In the story you’re the classic poor little rich girl, all the money in the world but no one who gave a shit about you. From what I remember, that part’s accurate. I make myself out to be this up-and-comer, talk up my scholarship, a bad kid about to make good, except this awful accident happens.” To me that sounded accurate as well, but he was still talking. “In the story version, I don’t sell you out. I never tell the cops a damn thing. I eat the blame, so I come off real noble, right? It’s shitty, but I always wished so hard it had gone down that way. It’s the story that I always wanted to be true.”