I didn’t reply. She was probably tearing me to shreds inside. I deserved it. While Allie may have been understanding at just about everything, she had limits too. This was for sure one of those things.

“What happened next?” she asked in a hollow voice.

“I worked for him, and he took a real liking to me. In terms of the money, I found out your dad had been fired from his boilermaker job months prior. He’d been using the money to float you guys while he applied for jobs. He hoped to find one so he could pay Boss back in increments, but it never happened. Jobs got harder to come by.”

Allie fell apart.

She wept for a while, crying out to her dad through every breath. She wished he was here. She wished she’d known all along what had happened. She wished for so many things, and I could do nothing but watch her wish for all the things that would never come true.

Then she finally calmed down and stared despondently at me.  “You never cared about me, did you?” she let out quietly. “It was never real.”

I shook my head slowly. “Not from the start. But I did fall in love with you, Allie. I remember when it happened too. I’d been doing some business with Boss and I’d been out all day and night. I was tired and fucking hungry. I got back to the apartment and I found you asleep in my bed. You’d waited eight hours for me even when I told you I’d be gone for only three of them. After feeling like I was just a fucking puppet, you turned to me and you stared at me with these tender eyes, like what you saw was worth something to you. I never felt worth anything to anybody. You told me to shower while you fixed me up something to eat, and then you just wrapped your arms around me all night, stroking my hair. Things changed after that night. I don’t know why, really. It just did.”

If she was relieved by that answer, she didn’t show it. She just continued to stare at me, searching for answers in my expressionless face.

“Did you ever cheat on me?” she questioned.

I nodded. “At the start.”

“Even after you took my virginity?”

I nodded and swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you let me go then? Why… Why didn’t you just toss me aside when you got your answers?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?!” she abruptly yelled, standing up from the bed. She paced the bedroom, breathing hard as she ran both hands through her hair. “How do you not know, Ryker? How?!”

“I was a selfish asshole,” I replied quickly. “It could have been a number of reasons!”

“You had so many times to just leave me! You should have just left me, goddammit!”

Yeah, she was right. I should have, but I couldn’t.

“Why keep me around?” she went on. “I don’t understand! Why have me there at the risk of feeling something for me?”

“I wanted to have somebody like you waiting for me,” I tried to explain, sifting through memories of why I did some things. “I liked feeling needed. I liked that you depended on me! I… I was a drugged up fuck head that wanted to save you!”

“What did you try to feel needed for?”

“I don’t know… The fucking baby I came across once, I guess? You spent days following that story, remember? You cried hearing about it. It was me that found her, practically shoved under a fucking bed to rot!”

“You?!” She looked horrified. “You… You found that baby?”

“Ricardo wanted to fucking leave her behind!”

Her thoughts raced inside her head, and her breathing picked up as she said, “But they… they found her parents murdered, Ryker! Did you do that?”

“No, no, it wasn’t us. It was some other small time drug dealer. Not us.”

“And what does that have to do with me?”

“After that, I guess… I don’t know, I guess I needed to feel needed so I could protect somebody else! And by protecting somebody else, I felt comforted.” I was letting it all out, venting my frustrations and all the things I couldn’t tell anybody. I wasn’t sure I was making any sense. The words fell from my lips without thought. “You needed someone when you lost your father, and I guess I needed someone when I realized just how far fucked my life had become being forced to do shit I didn’t want to do. And you’d just be there… I’d come home and there you were, ready to love me. I couldn’t… I couldn’t walk away from that. And then… then I just started loving you back. And that’s when I stopped messing around. I never touched a girl after that because the only girl that got to me was you.”

I finally looked up after all I’d said, and I found her standing frozen in the centre of the room. She was hardly breathing, though her lips were parted and her face was pale. She was stunned.

“I couldn’t tell you the truth,” I added quietly. “You wouldn’t have wanted me then. If you knew why I chased after you in the beginning, you’d never have wanted me. I couldn’t handle that. Every day I knew I owed you an explanation. I watched your mourn your father for a completely wrong reason, and I couldn’t clear it up to you. I couldn’t tell you he never took his life away. It would have made you a target to the gang if you started saying something, and I didn’t want anything to happen to you.”

I felt so vulnerable then. All control had left me revealing myself to her. It was scary but liberating all at once.

Slowly, she walked toward me, and I saw her hand reach out first before I felt it running through my hair. My insides crumbled as I grabbed her around the waist and pressed my face into her stomach. I held her tight and panted against her, letting out all the trapped oxygen I’d held waiting for her reaction. I held her, wishing that things hadn’t fucked up the way they did. Wishing… Wishing like she had and knowing it was never going to come true.

“I understand,” she whispered, choking back on a sob. “I understand, Ryker. You were never bad. The bad just found its way into you.”

I shut my eyes at her words.

Just words, Ryker. They aren’t true. They won’t erase six years of evil doings.

“Thank you for telling me everything I needed to know,” she continued. “I always thought you had sought the gang out. I never knew they forced you in. I never knew that you were so innocent.”