Page 29
“Sorry about that,” I drawl. Noah flips me off.
Fair enough. Deserved.
“I wasn’t cheating on you, but I was using you. I’m sorry, Noah. Jax and I’s past is complicated. I needed to forget about him, but it didn’t work. I think you should go,” she admits.
Forget me? She wanted to forget me?
Noah grunts and walks off towards her bedroom. A minute later, he comes back out dressed and leaves without saying another word.
“You wanted to forget me?” I ask the second we are alone. “Wait. You never stopped thinking about me?”
“I didn’t know where you were. I checked the news constantly. I never saw anything about you. I took it as good news, but at the same, I didn’t know if it also meant bad news. I didn’t want to think about you because you left and took me with you!” She shouts at me.
“I’ve been everywhere. I came back and built a place right outside of town.”
“You built a place. How long have you been here?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“How long?” She snaps.
“Seven months.”
Luna’s face falls, and the guilt consumes me.
“Seven months,” she whispers. “You were right here for seven months.” The words are more to herself than me, but I can feel the pain in them as if she threw them in my face. “How have you been living?”
“Not well,” I admit. “Mom helped with the house. She funded it. I haven’t been eating. Just enough to survive. For the first eight months, I slept in the car most nights. A night or two a week, we would grab a motel room. Being a fugitive is not for the weak.”
“I see you’ve lost weight. You don’t look healthy,” Luna observes. She’s right. I went from being a 6’5, two-hundred and forty-pound man to barely pushing two hundred. My muscles have diminished. I’m weaker.
Fighting Noah like that, I can already feel the strain on my body. I’m weak, tired, and hungry.
“I know, baby,” I whisper. “But I’m right here. I’m back.”
“You can’t just walk in here, beat up my boyfriend, and open your arms expecting me to run into them,” she scolds.
“He’s not your boyfriend anymore,” I snip. My anger is beginning to boil once more.
“I wanted something from you—a letter, a call, something. I waited and waited for it, Jax, but you never came through,” she says sadly.
“Do you not understand what is going on here?” I bark, and she steps backward at my outburst. “I’m a damn fugitive. Maybe one day they’ll forget about me. Maybe one day I’ll just be another story for the books, but I can’t live like they’ve forgotten.”
“I do understand, but a letter with no return address is untraceable enough.”
“I have a letter. I never sent it.”
“Can I have it?”
“Maybe if you stop acting bratty.” She huffs and walks away toward her bedroom. I follow her. When I walk in, I notice the mirror is turned around. The same mirror that I fucked her in front of that night.
“Why is it turned around?”
“Because I always saw you. He had to turn it around.”
“Does he know about me?”
“The only person who knows about you is Chase.”
