“Don’t cry for me.” I offer her a weak smile and brush under her eyes. Her soft skin begs me to keep touching her, to keep soothing her and never stop.
“I’m not,” she repeats although she wipes her eyes and tries to hide it. “Don’t talk about you dying… and we have a deal.”
She doesn’t look me in the eyes until I tilt her chin up, lifting my shoulders off the ground to kiss her gently and whisper, “deal,” against her lips. I can feel her heart beat against mine. This is the moment I want to keep forever. If ever given a choice, I’ll choose this one.
“Tell me something else.” She states it like it’s a command, but I can hear the plea in her voice.
“Something nicer to hear?” I let a chuckle leave me with the question in an attempt to ease her.
“No, doesn’t have to be nice. Just something more about you.” The fire sparks beside us as I look down at her. Her bare chest presses against mine and I drink her in. The goodness of her, the softness of her expression.
“Hal, the man I killed… he hurt Angie. You heard me mention her before.”
The mention of another woman’s name makes her pause and I remind her, “She wasn’t mine and I didn’t want her like that, but I’ve always felt responsible for what happened.”
“What happened to her?” She doesn’t blink as she whispers her question staring into the fire.
“She came and went when we first… opened the club… she was one of our regulars on the weekends. Buying whatever she wanted to party with her friends.”
“Drugs?” Bethany asks and I nod, waiting for judgment but none comes.
“One day she came to the bar on a weekday. I thought it was odd. She was dressed all in black and her makeup was smudged around her eyes. She wanted something hard. That’s what she asked for, ‘something hard.’” The memory plays itself in the fire and brings with it a hollowness in my chest.
“I told her to get a drink, but she demanded something else. So I told her no. I sent her away.”
“Why?”
“I thought she would have regretted it. She’d just come from her father’s funeral. There was nothing I had that would take that pain away and I knew she’d chase it with something stronger when it didn’t work. She went to someone else. And I regret sending her away. I wish I could take it back. I wish I could take a lot of it back. By the time I saw her again, she’d changed and done things she didn’t want to live with anymore. She was so far gone… and I’m the one who watched her walk away and sent her to someone else. Someone who didn’t care and didn’t mind if she became a shell of a person who regretted everything.”
“You tried to help her. You can’t be sorry about that.” Bethany’s adamant although sorrow lingers in her cadence.
“I can still be sorry about it, cailín tine,” I whisper the truth as I brush her hair back. “And I am. I’m sorry about a lot of things. Mistakes in this world are costly. I’ve made more than my share of them.”
“That doesn’t make you a bad man,” she whispers against my skin, rubbing soothing strokes down my arm, desperate to console me.
“You remind me a little of her in a way,” I admit to her. “She was a good person. Angie was good, what I knew of her. She was good but sometimes dabbled in the bad and was able to walk away. I needed her to be able to walk away. To go back to everything and be just fine. To still be good. It made me feel like it was fine. I thought what we were doing was fine; that it was a necessary evil. It’s simply something that’s inevitable and something we’d rather control than give to someone else. But it’s not fine and it never will be.”
Bethany asks, “You think I’m a good person, dabbling in the bad?” Her voice chokes and she refuses to look at me even when I cup her chin.
“It’s the same with you. I’m not comparing you to her. She’s nothing compared to you but the good. You have so much good in you. Even if you cuss up a storm when you’re mad and try to shoot strangers.”
The small joke at least makes her laugh a small feminine sound between her sniffling.
“I’m not willing to let you go though – I’m afraid you’ll never come back to me. Or worse, that you won’t be able to go back to the good.”
“You are not bad,” she says and her words come out hard which is at odds with the tears in her eyes.
“I’m not good, Bethany. We both know it.”