Show Me the Way (Fight for Me 1)

Crazy how everything I’d lived my life on suddenly felt like a lie.

With Rynna, I knew it was all or nothing. I couldn’t keep shutting her down and shutting her out. Couldn’t keep giving her these warnings without giving her a reason.

It was time I gave her all of me.

I needed to fess up the bullshit that haunted my life. Tell her everything. I just didn’t fucking know how to drag it all out into the open. If she would run. Hate me like I deserved for her to.

Agony cinched down on my chest, and my mouth flopped open and closed. The words too thick on my tongue. Finally, I forced them out into the stilled, deepening night. “Warned you that you don’t want my mess.” It came out hoarse. Choked.

Rynna didn’t look back at me. She just sent all that belief floating out to the stars that were beginning to blink in the sky. “And I told you I wasn’t afraid.”

I sat forward on the rocker, elbows on my thighs as I rolled the beer bottle between my palms. “Lost the first girl I loved when I was seventeen.”

Fuck.

A lid had been ripped off, and all the torment that’d boiled inside, contained and hidden, escaped.

Bubbling out and spilling over the sides.

Overflowing.

Burning and singeing and scalding.

Pain shocked through me. As shocked as the breath that left Rynna on a gush of air.

Waiting patiently. So goddamned kind and understanding.

A soft puff of laughter rippled out. Dubious and low. “I loved her, Rynna. I fucking did. Can still feel exactly the way my stomach would feel any time I thought of her. The way I felt when I touched her.”

She glanced back at me. I worried I was giving her too much. Being too honest. Maybe I couldn’t burden her with everything. Not yet. But she needed to know this.

Of course, because it was Rynna, sympathy lined her striking features, her mouth and those eyes that always seemed to see so much deeper than I wanted them to.

My chin fucking trembled. “Ollie’s younger sister, Sydney.” It left me like the whisper of a confession. “She was a year younger than us.”

Surprise flashed before she tamped it down. She just sat there. Twisting her fingers. Listening.

“He would have killed me if he knew.” My voice drew tight. “That I’d been living in his little sister for the past six months. Sneaking off with her every chance I got. Two of us lying through our teeth about where we’d been when we’d been in each other.”

Pain slithered up and down my throat.

Constricting.

Suffocating.

Could almost feel the ghost of her. The faint brush of her hand. Couldn’t tell if I welcomed it or hated it.

“We were all out at the lake. We were drinking, sitting in the bed and on the tail of my truck. Kale was off doing God knows what with his girlfriend, and Ollie had invited a few other girls out. One of them was coming onto me. Sydney—”

Her name hitched on my tongue.

My stomach coiled in knots.

White-hot agony.

“Sydney was there. Watching. Hating it. Hating that I couldn’t say a damned thing and that girl was straddling my waist. I laughed it off like it wasn’t a big deal while Ollie goaded me. Telling me I was nothing but a pussy and it was about time I saw some action. About time that I got my dick wet.”

“Rex,” Rynna whispered. Pain radiating from her. Or maybe it was just mine echoing back.

I blinked against the memory.

“She jumped out of the bed and stood next to my truck, demanding I take her home. She was so mad, Rynna. So fucking hurt. And I laughed at her and kissed that girl because that was what I thought Ollie expected me to do.”

My eyes squeezed closed.

It didn’t matter.

That same fucking vision flashed.

The last time I saw her.

The words dripped. Soured. Old decayed wounds. “I won’t ever forget her face, Rynna. I’d broken her right there, and I didn’t even mean it. Ollie shouted at her to just go home, telling her she didn’t belong there, anyway. She looked at me one last time . . . torment in her eyes. Then she turned and started down the dirt road. And I let her go.”

I let her go.

Fuck.

I let her go.

“No one ever saw her again.” Guilt stampeded through me. Over me. Trampling me into the ground.

Rynna gasped. “Oh God, Rex,”

“I just watched her storm off into the night, Rynna. I fucking watched her go. I didn’t chase after her. Had no fucking clue she was even missing until the next day.”

She shifted onto her hands and knees and crawled the short distance across the boards of the porch until she was at my feet.

Tears shined in her eyes.

“What happened?”

A tremor rolled my throat. Horror. Hate. Fear. I’d carried it for twelve fucking years. That girl chasing me through the days and haunting me in the night.