“Anna!” My fist pounded against her door. I knew she was home because I saw her car out front. The car I’d bought for her. Was this her way of paying me back? “Whose life were you trying to screw up, Anna? Hers or mine?”

Whatever she’d said almost fucked up the best thing I’d ever had. The expression on Lane’s face...

I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’d never had make-up sex because I’d never fought with anyone I was fucking. Yeah, it was phenomenal, but not enough to ever want it to happen again. Nothing would ever put things back the way they were. One well-placed lie had changed everything. Lane wasn’t as trusting as she’d been. I could tell she was more protective, had lost that freedom we both got to enjoy. And it was one person’s fault.

“You have no idea what you did to her!” I screamed at the door. “You wanna fuck with me then fuck with me. But leave her alone. She has nothing to do with any of this.” I didn’t care why Anna did it. I just wanted to make sure she never did it again. “Open the fucking door!”

As soon as she did, I pushed past her and stormed into the living room, surprised my footsteps weren’t leaving skid marks on the wood floor.

“If you ever—” I saw it as soon as she came into the room—a cut on her cheekbone and a busted lip. “Damn it, Anna.” In the time it took to say her name, my voice dropped to a whisper and my anger disappeared. No. It didn’t disappear—it redirected. “Who did it?”

She looked at me with dead eyes, expressionless. No pain, no life, no emotion. No words either.

“Who did it?” The longer she was silent, the more frustrated I got. Until my heart was pounding faster than it had been on the way over here.

“No one you know.” She always said that, and I never knew if it was the truth or not. All I knew is that if she told me his name or I recognized his face, he’d be bleeding, too.

“It’s not that bad.” She winced when she touched it. Fresh.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I figured you’d be too busy with your girlfriend.”

I didn’t correct her because it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Plus, after the little stunt she’d pulled, she probably thought Lane was long gone.

“Let me see it,” I said. She tried to turn away. “Knock it off. I need to see it.” I smoothed the hair off her face and tucked it behind her ear, then took her chin and gently turned her face to one side and then the other. Split lip. Cheekbone bruised not broken. Swollen but didn’t need stitches. Both areas meant it had been more than one hit. More than one hit meant it wasn’t accidental.

Probably no more than a few hours old, so it must have happened pretty soon after she messed with Lane. Coincidental or deliberate self-punishment?

“Why didn’t you ice it?” I went into her kitchen and grabbed the ice pack out of her freezer and a towel off the stove handle. It wasn’t normal to always have an ice pack ready to go for when you got hit. And it wasn’t normal for your stepbrother to know where it was because you waited until he got here to use it.

It wasn’t infrequent, either.

When I put the ice pack on her cheek, she flinched and then put her hand over mine. “I’m sorry about what I told your girlfriend.”

I ignored her apology and focused on her injury, making sure she was holding the ice pack before I slid my hand away. “You okay?”

“Never better.” Bitterness ruined her laugh.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I said I was sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“What won’t happen again, Anna? He won’t hit you? You won’t go back to him? You won’t just move on to another loser? What?”

She bit her lower lip, gasping when her teeth touched the cut. She didn’t lower her hand as she spoke. Hiding. “Why don’t I stay out of your life and you stay out of mine?”

“We already tried that. Didn’t work out so well.”

“I’m sorry, Carson. Okay? I’m sorry ten thousand times over. If I could go back in time, I would do everything differently. But I can’t. Your mom can’t. And our…fathers can’t either.” She sat down on the edge of the sofa.

“This isn’t about the two fuckers in the ground.” We both knew how wrong that was—everything was about them.

“Did you know that, despite everything, you’re one of the least screwed up people I know?” That was depressing. She needed new friends.

“I’m completely fucked up.” Just ask the guy I kicked the shit out of. “You think I don’t have to try? That I don’t think about who I could turn into if I stop trying? I do. All the fucking time. But with you…it’s like you don’t even see that anything’s wrong. This”—I motioned to her face—“it isn’t normal. You don’t have to keep doing it.”

“It’s not like I try. Somehow they always seem to find me.”

“Okay, but how long do you stay with the guy after the first hit? How many second chances does he get?”

Her body tensed, but she didn’t look at me. “You have a life now and it seems like a good one, so why don’t you just go home and live it?” She turned her back to me and walked towards her room. “Now that you have someone else to take care of, you can forget I even exist.”

I followed disgustedly. Her manipulation was usually subtler. Why did I bother? She never heard a word I said. She just wanted… I didn’t know what she wanted. And I was done caring.

“Because you’re unhappy, I should be too, right?” I grabbed the top of the doorframe and stayed just outside her room. “If you want to fuck up your own life, go for it. But you don’t get to fuck up the best thing I have just because you need more attention.”

She spun around. “Get out!”

I knew she was hurting. I was the only one she had, who knew what her dad did to her without her having to admit it. I’d tried to get her out, to stay with Renee and me, even though we were just moving on to another asshole. I’d tried but I’d failed.

So I spent the last eight years trying to make it up to her. I couldn’t. Not then, not now. Especially not at the cost of someone who was completely innocent of all the shit Anna and I had dealt with. Not that either of us had dealt with it well. But Lane didn’t deserve to be involved in our dysfunction. I wasn’t ready to give her up yet.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” I asked quietly.

“Are you really going to leave?” She looked at me through her lashes and lowered her chin—her damsel-in-distress mask.

I ran my hand through my hair. Every fucking time. “Yeah, I’m gonna go.” But I’d be back. Because I always came back. No matter how many times, how many different ways I said the same things and she gave the same fucking excuses, I always came back. On the off chance that someday things would be different. I wanted to be there on the day she realized she was worth more than she’d always thought she was and she didn’t have to manipulate me to get me to care about her. Because I already did.

“I’ll call you later. I wish…” I sighed, knowing it didn’t matter. She’d go back for more, probably to that guy at the gallery opening...who I wanted to kill. “Do you have any idea how bad I wish you’d look back on the past few years and see how many times you made the wrong choice even when you knew it was wrong?”

“What the hell does that mean?” She chucked the ice pack at me. Not even close. I would’ve made a joke if I wasn’t so goddamn frustrated with her.

“If I can see the carbon copy of your dad in every guy you’ve been with from fifty feet away, then you should be able to see it when he’s close enough to hit you.”

“Fuck you!” She came at me fast. “You don’t get to judge me, Carson. You don’t get to.”

I dug my fingers into the doorframe when she hit me in the chest. Harder the second time she did it. And when she started shouting that she didn’t need me and hated me and that I didn’t matter or care, all I could do was stand there and take it, ride it out until she was done, understanding that it was the only way she knew how to hurt.

If it wasn’t me then it would be someone else, so I made sure it was me.

“Do you know why I lied to your girlfriend?” she asked, her voice all broken up. “Do you?”

I shook my head, part of me wanting to punish her, tell her a hard truth that she would never stop being able to hear.

She beat me to it. “Will you bring Laney ice, too? Tell her it won’t happen again?”

I shoved backwards, but the words had done what she’d wanted them to do. I’d never unhear them. The thing I could never get away from no matter how far or how fast I went. Because you can’t outrun something that’s a part of you.

“I’m not going to hurt her.” Because I didn’t let her come close enough. I wouldn’t hurt her because I didn’t love her. I didn’t love anyone.

She shrugged. “Yeah well, I used to think I’d never be with anyone like my dad.”

“No fucking around, do you really think I could be like him?” I could’ve been talking about her dad or mine—same asshole, different packaging.

We’d never even been close to talking about this before. I never knew I needed to. But her opinion mattered more than anyone else’s. Because she’d been there, lived through a lot of it with me. She knew a part of my life I never wanted Lane to know about.

Anna knew me before I even realized most people didn’t live like I did, like she did. That most men didn’t tell their family they loved them while they were beating the shit out of them. That most moms didn’t tell their kid the same thing while washing the blood off them and then bringing them back to the man who’d caused it.

“Do you honestly think I could do that?”

“You’re far from perfect, Carson.” She crossed her arms and shrugged, a smug look on her face. “You act like you have it all together, but you’re not perfect.”

Motherfucker. She was fucking with my head to prove a point. “Is that what this is about? Proving you’re better than me? Is that what this is?” I couldn’t breathe. “You are, Anna. Congratulations, you win. Okay? Can you stop now? Can we both please just stop doing this now?”

I wasn’t talking about this moment or this conversation. All I wanted was to move on, for both of us to stop doing this to ourselves and to each other. For everything to just stop.

“Yes,” she whispered after a long pause.

I sighed. Thank god. One word didn’t actually prove anything but it was a start and—

“Yes, I think you could be like him. Like all of them.”

“What?” I shut my eyes, my stomach tightening so quickly I thought I was going to puke. The idea wasn’t new to me—it was the reason I lived the way I did and was the way I was. But to know for sure that someone who’d lived part of it with me thought the same thing was…indescribable.

“So does the guy you put in the hospital,” she said. “You don’t actually believe that was an accident, do you? Being drunk was an excuse. My dad used it all the time. Did yours?”

Yeah, but not a lot. My dad preferred to be sober, so he could make sure I knew he was doing it for my own good. Because he loved me.

“We are who we are, Carson.”

I’d known. I’d always known. But I’d never had the balls to say it out loud. Turns out I didn’t have the balls to hear it, either. I slumped against the wall without thinking. When there’s no solution, no way out, what the fuck is there left to think about?

“Carson?” Her voice was sharp and demanded attention, so I opened my eyes and looked at her. When I saw the look of triumph on her face, I felt even sicker. Because I finally understood who she was. Whether or not she was lying didn’t matter. She’d said it to…to what? To destroy. Yeah, she’d won and she knew it. Now she was just gloating.

I still didn’t know what to say, but I knew what to do. What I should’ve done a long time ago.

“Where are you going?” she asked when I walked away.

“I’m done picking you up, Anna. Done.” With all of her bullshit, her lies, her manipulation. “Go find someone who hasn’t had to do it for a decade. Because I’m too fucking tired to do it anymore. I have my own shit to wade through and now, thanks to you, I have more.”

“Carson, wait.”

“For what?” I spun around, watching her shift from one leg to another.

“Don’t go.” She looked younger, a girl dressed up to look like a woman. Unsure of herself and in pain.

“I’m the only one who hasn’t hit you, and I’m the only one you hit. I take it, and I don’t hurt you back. So why would you use that against me? Because I can finally be alone with someone for longer than an hour without worrying I’m going to do it? Jesus, Anna, why that?”

“I…” After a minute, she lowered her head and whispered an apology that was too late and too little and always would be.

---

About halfway home, I noticed how white my knuckles were and how sore my jaw was. I pulled over to the side of the road, put my forehead on top of my hands, and closed my eyes. If I was lucky, maybe someone would rear-end my car. And end me.

After a few minutes, I sat up. After a few more, I peeled one hand off the wheel and grabbed my phone. Because I knew I needed her. Because she was the only thing that made me feel right.

“Hi,” Lane said quietly. “Why did you leave so fa—?”

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Can I come get you?”

“I think I should stay here tonight.”

“Please, Lane. Can I come get you?” I leaned my head back and stared at the roof while I waited for her to answer. “Please,” I whispered.

She sighed. “I’ll meet you out front.”

“Thanks.”

“Is everything okay, Carson?”

I shook my head. “I’ll be there in a few.”