Fighting Solitude (On The Ropes #3)(54)

“Stop worrying. Blakely will probably dub you as her favorite aunt if she finds out you delayed me telling her dad about her period.”

“Hey!” Ash objected.

Eliza lifted a hand to hush her. “And for the rest of it. Fine, no Baileys. But Quarry can answer his own e-mails today. This is more important. And I think he’d agree.”

She had a point. He definitely would agree with her. And I desperately needed to talk all of this stuff through with someone who wasn’t him.

“Yeah. Okay,” I relented.




An hour later, the three of us were sprawled out in Eliza’s art room. I had just filled them in on the last month of my life—starting with the night of the Gala and ending this morning, when I’d snuck out from under Quarry’s arm draped possessively across my hips.

“Wow,” Eliza said then looked at Ash. “Well, do you want to start or should I?”

“I’ve got this.” Ash dramatically cleared her throat then offered me a healthy dose of pity by way of a tight smile. “You’re f*cked.”

I ignored her and turned my attention to Eliza only to find her nodding.

“Well. Awesome. That clears it all up,” I smarted, pushing to my feet.

“Sit down!” Ash called. “I was just getting started.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and gave her my full attention for what I was positive was going to be a waste of time. “Go on.”

“I never understood why he was with Mia.”

I flinched. Never would I have expected those to be her first words.

“It’s harsh, but true,” she continued. “You’ve heard about when Quarry was fourteen and his mom tried to regain custody, right?”

I nodded, settling back down on the futon.

“Then I’m sure you also know that she was married to my dad and that Quarry lived with me for about a month. Well, every night, we would stay awake until the early morning, talking. I was mostly pumping him for information about Flint, but he filled my ears with you.”

“Seriously?” I blinked in shock.

Those were the years Quarry and I hadn’t been speaking. The years when I’d had my head low, pretending I hated him for having locked me in the closet when, really, I’d just hated him for having proved me right—I couldn’t trust anyone.

“Yep. I knew all about Liv James,” Ash assured me. “The little Hispanic angel who used to bury her face in his back. The one he vowed to protect from the silence. The one who he regretted failing more than anyone else in his entire life.”

I sucked in a sharp breath. “He…told you about that?”

“He wouldn’t tell me why you were afraid or why he was so attached to you, but yeah…he told me all of that. Multiple times.”

My eyes flashed between the two of them. We were tight, but I never would have revealed Quarry’s secrets to them. Even if he was telling mine.

“Did he tell you why we stopped speaking for those years?”

“No.” Eliza jumped in before Ash had a chance. “Your dad told us about the closet. Quarry has never once spoken about it, not even when I cornered him after I’d heard what he’d done.”

I glanced at the floor and lied, “It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.”

“It was to him,” Eliza said. “He was a mess. After Vegas, Quarry was never the same. He didn’t come out of his room for weeks. He started skipping school and getting into fights. He eventually got kicked out of school, and then he quit boxing.”

“What?” I gasped. “He quit boxing?”

“Yep. You have no idea how bad things got with him. Back then, we were so focused on Flint, but what we failed to see was that Quarry was equally as injured. His wounds just weren’t on the surface.”

I swallowed around the lump in my throat. Mine weren’t on the surface, either, and I knew firsthand that that was exactly what made them lethal.

“Neither Till nor Slate could get through to him. We tried counseling, but he refused to go, and the harder we pushed, the harder he fought us. The thing was that we all assumed he was torn up over what had happened with Flint and me, but it wasn’t until he talked to your dad one night that things started to turn around.”

“My dad?” I breathed. “What…what did he say to him?”

Eliza shrugged. “No clue. Till just said Quarry came out of Slate’s office almost in tears and Leo looked murderous.”

Well, that wasn’t all that shocking. My dad wasn’t exactly a teddy bear, especially when it came to me. But one thing stuck out to me.

“And things got better after that? I mean…with Quarry?”

“Yep. He started going to the gym again the very next day. No more fights at school. He started laughing again. Hanging out with his brothers. It was like he just reappeared.”

“Wow. I didn’t figure my dad for the inspirational-speech kind of guy.”

“Flint looked for me for three years,” Ash announced randomly. “We had only been together for a month and he ripped up the weeds from his old apartment and planted them at his house just to take a piece of me with him when he moved.”

Eliza picked up with more randomness. “Till climbed through windows for eight years. He was so afraid to step out of his fantasy world because he couldn’t bear the thought of it changing us. But, when he finally walked through my door, things went from zero to married in a year.”