Series: Like Us Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 241
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
I shake my head again. “Nah, I didn’t know you when we were twenty. We met in security, and I would’ve been twenty-three.”
“Yeah.” He nods, but a red tint ascends his neck. “I didn’t know you.”
“But you said Mikaela slept with a guy you didn’t like. You can’t dislike someone you don’t know.”
O’Malley stops shivering, as if blanketed with the heat of his slip. He covers a hand to his face, and I go eerily still.
“No,” I say, my heart pumping on overtime. “No.” I shake my head more fiercely. There is one single way he could’ve known about me back then, but it’s so unbelievable to me. When maybe it shouldn’t be. Still, I’m shaking my head so fucking much, I think my neck might snap. “You can’t be…you’re not…”
“Related to you?” O’Malley grits out with the tensest breath, like he’s caged this truth inside his soul for a lifetime.
Yeah.
He has.
I’m so angry, I see blood-red in front of my eyes. “There are a thousand O’Malleys in South Philly. My mom’s not a part of your family.”
She’s Bridget O’Malley, but I always assumed that her branch of the family did not touch any part of Chris’s tree. ‘Cause he would’ve said something. He would’ve, at the very least, told Triple Shield when I was sitting on a hot seat being grilled about the Donnellys’ ancestry.
“She’s basically dead to my family,” O’Malley states.
I feel sick. “I don’t believe you.”
“She has nine brothers. Blake O’Malley is one of them. My father.” He bangs a hand on the flashlight as the beam flickers. “Stay away from the Donnellys. That’s what I heard growing up. You all were like an urban legend when I was a kid.” He stares out at the field. “But nothing was worse than the cautionary tale of Bridget O’Malley. Sean Donnelly got her pregnant. At fourteen. With you.”
Yeah.
With me.
I say nothing. I can’t speak.
“Our family is religious. Sex out of wedlock is bad, but sex at fourteen? Pregnant at fourteen?”
Please stop saying fourteen.
I’m unblinking.
“Yeah, they wanted nothing to do with her. Which, looking back now, I hate them for. Because how can you throw out a child…?” His eyes redden, and he’s still avoiding my gaze. “But then, I was just a kid eating what they were feeding me, and I hated the Donnellys. I still do. I got robbed at the fucking Quickie-Mart by one of your cousins when I was fifteen.”
I try to speak again, but I literally can’t even open my mouth.
“I knew all about you.” He looks at me now. “My family kept up with news about Bridget, even though they wouldn’t contact her—it was just validation for them. That she was a lost soul. It sounded like it.”
I bet.
“You were born. She got into heroine. Then meth. She fell deeper into the fucking cesspool of the Donnelly family and there was no out. There’s never an out.” He holds my gaze. “So when I finally met you, face-to-face, at Studio 9, you weren’t an urban legend to me anymore. You had dropped out of high school. You had done meth with your parents. You’d gotten paid to fuck my girlfriend. Everything I knew about you was irredeemable to me.”
I nod a few times, my chest concaving. Like a seven-ton Mack Truck is running over me. “You know the funny thing?” I choke out. “I would’ve given anything to grow up next to you. I woulda instantly loved you.” I watch his face fall. “Now you’re just another cousin I wish were dead.”
I rotate away from him.
“Donnelly.”
I run.
“Donnelly!”
I don’t look back.
I can’t outrun him.
It’s not that he’s faster. It’s that I pull my hamstring. And I slow down and limp a little. Glaring at him as he rolls up next to me.
“A gas station should be close,” he says, like he didn’t just drop the biggest bomb on me. He keeps smacking the flashlight. Maybe as something to do ‘cause the light is working fine. “I never told anyone…you know. Not even Price.”
It’s clear he would’ve taken this to his grave if he could’ve. “Why?”
“I didn’t want to be known as your cousin. And it’d surface…a lot that I don’t like talking to anyone about.”
“Ditto,” I mutter, squinting as a tiny ember of light shines in the distance. “Land ho.”
It’s still tense.
I’m not looking at him.
He’s making brief eye contact with me. “Did you think a lot about your mom’s side of the family when you were growing up?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “I thought about how awful they were to her. How they gave up on her and left her in a piss-poor situation that they could’ve saved her from. Saved me from.” I side-eye him, then glare ahead. “But that’s about the same time I realized no one was gonna come save me.” I take a breath. “I never dreamed about the O’Malleys swooping in and taking me to a cozy bed and handing me a warm meal. ‘Cause if they were good people, I would’ve already been living with ‘em. So I thought she must’ve come from dirt. Not from your good ole O’Malley family.”