One step forward.  That’s what she keeps telling me.  I want to smile, to accept it and let my past go, but I have to wonder if, with each step forward, we aren’t really taking ten back.  And that is because I still haven’t let her in completely.

Tell her about your family!  My mind has been screaming the same thing over and over to me since that morning in the kitchen.  And for the first time in years, I’m considering opening up the hell I grew up in and letting her see all of my broken soul.  I’ve battled back and forth with whether just telling her could dampen some of the innocence she still has.

I let myself remember the night before and the nightmare that gave me the push I needed in the right direction.  The direction that will take me away from her.

Once again, I was stuck back in the blast zone, pulling what should have been Morris—but it was Emmy.  I was able to crawl back from that nightmare only to have a new one take its place.  One that put Emmy in the reach of my family.  In the dream, I saw her look at me with so much anger and pain because I had ruined her life.  I can’t even remember the words she was screaming—all I knew was that I had done that to her.  And before I was able to pull myself out of the dream, I saw Emmy, my angel, dying at her own hands because she couldn’t take the darkness in my soul.

“What’s on your mind?” Emmy asks as she plops down on the couch with Cat in her arms.  She lazily strokes her fur and waits for me to answer.

Her stunning smile makes my chest hurt.  I give her a glance before looking back down at my iPad.  I’m trying desperately to forget the images that were just in my mind.  Trying to harden my heart over what I know will be the final blow to her love.

“There’s some stuff going on back home that we need to get back for, Em.”

“What kind of stuff?” she inquires.  She didn’t shoot it down, so that’s a plus.

“Asher.  He’s been investigating the man who held the strings in Coop’s murder.  Without letting any of us in.  He’s in deep, babe.  Deep enough that we need to decide how this plays out and quick.”

“Holy shit,” she whispers.

“Yeah, that about sums it up.  They called a meeting and I need to be there.  I would really like you to come back with me.  You need to come home and let your friends love you.”

“Let my friends love me?” she questions sarcastically.

“Yeah, Em.”

“And what about you?”

“I can’t give you that, Em.  I’m not even sure I know how.”

“You really, truly believe that, huh?”  She laughs and lets Cat jump from her lap.  Even the cat gives me a look of disgust.

“It isn’t that I believe it without proof.  It’s all I’ve known, Em.  The only thing that I know of love is that it isn’t real.”

She throws her head back and laughs.  “It isn’t real?”

I nod, and she gives me a cold smile.

“So Axel and Izzy?  Greg and Melissa?  I suppose Beck doesn’t love Dee? You’re right.  They must really hate each other.”  When her eyes go cold, I feel my own narrow in return.  “All of these people around you give you proof that love is real and you still sit there believing that bullshit you’ve convinced yourself of.  You’re the one who helped each and every one of them get together you still sit there refusing to believe in it.  Refusing to believe in me…in us.”

“Emer—”

“No.  I don’t want to hear it, Maddox.  You want to go home—fine.  I don’t have a home there anymore, so if you’re going to make me come with you, then it looks like you have a roommate until I can see about renting my apartment back.”  She stands and starts to storm from the room.

“Emersyn Rose, sit your fucking ass down now.”

Her back gets stiff, but shockingly, she turns and marches back to the couch.  Throwing herself down with a huff, she folds her arms under her perfect tits and waits to see what my next move is.

“You want to know why I keep you locked out?  You want me to give you a little bit of the depressing life of Maddox Locke?”

Her eyes flash, but I press on.  If she’s determined to know it all, then I’ll give it to her.

“I was born into old money.  My mother fucked the pool boy, and nine months later, the child she called her demon seed baby was born.  The evil mistake of her sins born to do nothing but destroy everything.  I have never, not once in thirty-six years, had a nice comment from my mother.  My earliest memory is of her telling me not to play with my brother because my black soul will taint him.  Yeah, my own mother said I would taint him.  The one time Mason fell off his bike, on his own accord, I spend a week not able to sit because she beat me.  She blamed me for his accident just because I was near him.  I’ll spare you the rest of the details, but they aren’t pretty, and it’s been one big ‘fuck you’ after another until the last day I saw her.”