Ravenous (The Finn Factor 4)

“Did Scott ever tell you?”

She set down her pizza. Thinking about her ex always made her lose her appetite. But she wanted to tell Trick. Maybe if she opened up, he’d return the favor. “He didn’t speak a lot as a rule,” she replied dryly. “Unless he was complaining.”

“You were with him for a long time. He must have had a few redeeming qualities.”

So everyone claimed. Even her friends in high school gave Scott the benefit of the doubt for her sake. Surely Jennifer Finn wouldn’t be with him if he weren’t something special. Her brothers would have sent him packing. But she was, and they didn’t. She wiped her mouth, took a sip of her tea and turned to meet his gaze. “You want the truth? I warn you, it’s kind of sad and clichéd.”

“Tell me.”

“I was shadowing the nurse and school counselor for a report in my last year of middle school. They were my two role models. Compassionate, but tough. Intelligent though incredibly underappreciated, in my opinion. Scott came into the nurse’s office with injuries. A lot. He’d say he fell or got into a fight with a bully, but no one really believed him. It was obvious he was being abused at home. He came in to see the counselor and we started talking while she was on the phone. Back then, he seemed more sad than angry, but I made him smile.” She shrugged. “He wasn’t with me because I was Jennifer Finn or because I was pretty. He needed me. No one had ever relied on me or trusted me with anything before. It was that simple. And in the beginning, I helped. He smiled more. The fact that he didn’t idolize my brothers the way every other male of the species seems to was also a nice change. At first.”

“Florence Nightingale Syndrome?” Trick queried, stealing a circle of pepperoni off her pizza.

Jen snorted. “You need to stop auditing classes. Especially if you’re going to play on your phone instead of pay attention.” She tilted her head, thinking. “It was dysfunctional. But by the time I realized it, being his girlfriend had become a habit. A security blanket. No one asked who I was dating or worried about what time I got home. No one liked him, and my brothers gave me a hard time, but I guess they considered him harmless. ‘As long as I was happy’ was what my mother would say whenever they got too out of hand.”

“No one noticed you weren’t?” Trick’s expression was disbelieving.

“It’s not that simple,” she defended. “They noticed I wasn’t unhappy. He made a lot of mistakes with his own life, and we fought, but he never actually hurt me.”

“You deserve so much more than that.”

“I’m not sure I did back then. I still defended him every time he did something wrong. Every time anyone tried to talk to me. Even when I knew they were right.”

“Because you have a good heart, Jen. You wouldn’t be working toward getting this degree, to spend your life helping people if you didn’t.”

Or she was a sucker with horrible taste in men. “Sometimes I think it was just stubborn pride. I wanted to be right about him. I wanted to save him. Change him. But no one can do that. I mean, I know people can change, but it has to be their choice. They have to put in the work. You can’t drag someone kicking and screaming down the path you think they should go.”

She saw Trick shift uncomfortably and knew he’d understood what she was trying to say. “It all worked out in the end, though. Stephen’s happy, Owen’s happy, Seamus is usually happy, though I wouldn’t mind him having an actual date once in a while. And Scott is gone and forgotten, having taught us all a valuable lesson in monitoring our public displays of affection. Problem solved.”

“You didn’t add yourself to the everyone’s happy list.”

She’d be happy as long as Scott was living in a box somewhere complaining about his shitty life to his only friend, Dead Cat. But she didn’t need to say that out loud. It sounded petty.

“I’m happy everyone is happy.” She patted his knee before getting up to take her plate to the kitchen. “Thank you for that. I was starving.”

Jen depressed a button at the base of the trashcan with her toe and tossed the paper plate and napkin inside. When she turned around, Trick was right beside her.

“I’m thirty-eight.”

She wondered vaguely if he’d hit his head. “Yes, I know. I’m twenty-six.”

“I have a record, and that’s something that kind of runs in the family. My father died in prison and I was raised by my older brother—who is currently serving a life sentence—but I haven’t been in serious trouble with the law since I got out when I was twenty-two.”