Free Rock My Heart (Luminescent Juliet #4) by Jean Haus Page B

table only to tap
on the wood with his index fingers. “Trust me, my psychologist has brainwashed
that into me. But I don’t want to remember only the bad. I don’t want my past
to simply be belts and knuckles and the bottom of a boot.”
    My eyes grow large as he continues, “There were
other things.” Tap. Tap. Tap. Like a slow drum roll on the table. “A bicycle
next to the Christmas tree when I was ten. A bicycle he couldn’t afford.
Fishing from the river docks during the summer. Teaching me things like how to
change the oil in a car. I’m not going to brush all the good away. I’m not
going to ignore the shit life he has lived. I can’t”—his voice becomes hoarse
as he stops tapping and glances down—“I don’t want the sum of me condensed to a
mother who abandoned me and a father who beat me .”
    At first, I assume this is about people pitying him.
As I slowly take in his intense expression and clenched jaw, I realize he
wants, maybe needs, to have a parental bond. Turning his father into solely a
villain negates that connection. And perhaps having—even if imagining—the bond
allows him to deal with his past.
    “Yet you want to move out,” I add, truly trying to
understand the connection to his father.
    “Most of the time I can’t stand the mean, old
bastard, and he can’t stand me, but more than that, I have to get out the
cycle. When I’m there, I’m too close to my fifteen-year-old self. But for the
six weeks during the tour, the first time I was gone for more than a few nights
here and there, I felt like a different person. Calmer and freer somehow.
Perhaps from the never ending worry of what’s going to happen next. So I’m
hoping moving out will bring that sense of calmness and freedom back.”
    Surprised at his awareness of the cycle he’s caught
in, I stare at him in contemplation until I blurt my next thought out. “Will
you go back to visit him?”
    He shakes his head. “I don’t know…” He looks at the
parking lot. “Damn, why am I telling you this shit? Some of it I don’t even
tell my shrink. It’s like you ask , and my mouth spouts
shit. Are you Jedi shrinking me for practice?”
    A loud laugh bursts from me.
    He cocks an eyebrow.
    I reign in my iconic chuckle. “I’m not shrinking
you. But it’s kind of the same for me.”
    His eyebrow remains up.
    I straighten my collar, feeling a bit anxious being
so honest. “I can’t keep up my pleasantly polite, even keeled front around you.
I’m either angry and blurt stuff out or curious and blurt stuff out or
strangely honest and blurt out the truth.” Sighing at my own lack of control, I
reach for another fry.
    “Pleasantly polite?”
    “Nice ring to it, eh?” I pop the fry in my mouth.
    He lets out a grunt. “More like boringly stuck up.”
    I throw the next fry at him. He flicks it away
before it beams him in the eye. “That’s not true.”
    “Maybe not,” he concedes, prying the lid from his
coffee. “But I recall hearing that you bitched out Riley once. So you’re not
always Ms. Pleasantly Polite.”
    “That was pre-meditated. She was hurting Romeo with
her indecisiveness.”
    “And you needed to be the one to set her straight?”
    My look at him is sharp. “I didn’t like seeing him
hurting.”
    His gaze over a gulp of coffee is wry.
    “I wanted her to get back with him. Romeo and I are just friends. Very good friends.”
    “You dated.”
    “So what?”
    “People are going to assume.”
    “Don’t care. I don’t have many friends like him, so
people can think whatever they want.”
    “You know, you’re like a walking dichotomy.”
    My brows rise.
    “You want people to think you’re perfect, yet you
don’t care what they think.”
    Suppose it seems that way. I take a sip of water,
collecting my thoughts. “I don’t care. I keep up the perfect image for me.”
    “Why?”
    “So… so I keep going.”
    His fingers drum a slow steady beat on the rough
wood of the bench as he leans back,