Playing for Keeps (The Game #2)(29)
Author: Emma Hart

“Why did I never think of that?” I look at Braden.

“Because you’re apparently a f**king genius in your own right,” he grumbles. “Am I the only stupid one here?”

“Oh, you’re not stupid,” Maddie soothes him. “You’re just a little bit slower than us.”

“You know what, Angel? It’s a really good job I love you.”

“I think so, too.” She smiles. “It means I can say exactly what everyone else is thinking.”

He gives her a look that says she’ll get it later, and she smiles wider.

“Hold up,” Megan pauses, staring at Braden. “Did you just call Aston a genius?”

“I did.”

“They’re not words I’d ever expect to hear in the same sentence.”

“Fuck off.” I tug on her hair, and she swats at me.

“I’m not jokin’, Meggy. This kid graduated with a f**king 3.8 GPA.”

Megan looks at me now, her eyebrows raised and surprise in her eyes. “You did?”

I shrug. “One of us ass**les has to be smart.”

“No, really? You did?”

She’s not acting here. She’s genuinely surprised, and I don’t know whether or not to be pissed she doesn’t believe me. “Yeah.”

“I can’t believe you have the same GPA as me. You don’t look that smart.” She smirks wickedly, and I know the smile is for Braden and Maddie’s benefit.

I hold the class door open for her, looking down as she pauses in front of me, and my hand brushes her hip. “Not everyone is what they seem, Megan. You should know that by now.”

She looks up at me, her startling blue eyes full of questions I know I have to answer.

“I know that. I just wish those people could trust in the people that care a little.” She sweeps past me to our desk. I bite the inside of my lip and follow after her.

“Maybe it’s not that they don’t trust,” I say. “Maybe it’s that they’ve forgotten how to.”

She straightens her books on the desk, slowly turning her face to me as I sit next to her. “Then maybe they should open their eyes and see that the person they need to trust is right in front of them. Maybe they should open up and share so they don’t have to bear the burden alone.”

“Not everything is made to be shared. Not every scar is on the body. Some scars are on the mind. Some scars can’t be seen. They’re inside, burned in so deeply that they’ll never be healed.”

Her eyes are earnest and soft. “Just because a scar can’t be healed doesn’t mean it can’t be soothed,” she whispers.

Fuck. She’s so right, and this weekend is the perfect time with everyone gone. But am I ready? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to talk about my childhood, but I don’t have a choice if I want to keep her. If I want to keep this girl in my arms, secret relationship be f**king damned, I have to be honest with her.

I take a deep breath and make a decision I know I’ll regret. A decision that will change everything.

A decision that will change me.

“Sometimes the dark truth is too much for some people,” I warn her.

A decision that will change her.

“Sometimes a light dusting of the truth isn’t enough,” she responds.

A decision that will change us.

“Is the dark really better than the light?”

She nods. “Sometimes. Sometimes you need to get lost in the dark to truly appreciate the light.”

“This weekend,” I drop my voice so it’s barely audible. “I can’t promise everything. I can only promise what is there to give.”

She blinks once, her hand twitching. She clenches her fist and puts it in her lap. “I’ve only ever had half of you. I’m sure I can wait a little longer for all of you.”

~

A night of fitful sleep, recurring nightmares and horror flashbacks aren’t how I wanted to start my day. Now, with the guys off to SF, Megan can get in and out of the house fairly unbothered. If anyone asks, she has a spare key to Braden’s room and left some books there. If anyone asks why she’s in my room, I borrowed one of the books. It’s hardly foolproof, but then again, no one here will care that much.

They all secretly want in her pants.

“You really wanna know?” I look at her across the room.

Her light blue eyes are wide and earnest as she meets my weary gaze. She pulls her knees to her chest and bites her thumbnail, nodding slowly. I sink onto the bed opposite her, the springs creaking under the heaviness of my body, and gaze out of the window.

“It’s not an easy thing to listen to,” I warn her.

“I want to be there for you,” she replies softly, shifting a little closer to me. “But I can’t be there if I don’t understand, not really. And I want to, Aston – I want to understand. I want to know all of you.”

I take a deep breath. It doesn’t matter if I’m ready or not anymore – it’s too late to back out. I have to tell her everything, tell her things I’ve never said out loud before. And somehow, when I look into her eyes, I find the strength within me to say the words.

“I have no idea who my father is. My mom got herself knocked up at seventeen to a guy whose name she didn’t even know.” My voice is hard, bitterness coating every word thickly. “She palmed me off on my Gramps whenever she could; she wasn’t cut out to be a mom – at least at seventeen. Gramps insists she suffered from post-partum depression, but she didn’t care. Not really. If she did, she would have seen a doctor instead of medicating herself with alcohol and the cheapest drug she could get ahold of.

“CPS kept in contact with us until I was sixteen and considered ‘stable’ by them. I stole my file once and read it. It says that ‘Mom’ moved us into a stingy little apartment when I was two, and although there were complaints from neighbors about hearing a child screaming and being left alone, whenever they visited everything was perfect. I was clean, the apartment was clean, and she was clean. They couldn’t do anything without proof.” The view from my room is a far cry from the dirty alleys of the Tenderloin district in San Francisco. “Despite the area we lived in she always managed to make it seem like we lived somewhere else whenever they showed up.

“I didn’t need to read the report much further. I have memories from when I was about four, spanning the next two years. ‘Stepdads’ that came and went repeatedly. All the same. All big, tattooed, and more stuck on drugs and alcohol than even she was. They all hated me with a passion.”