Fall Guy (A Youngblood Book) by Reinhardt, Liz (knowledgeable books to read TXT) 📕

is buzzing with the crowd of all these other things I see and hear.

I wind up just answering, giving this random answer that may not be totally accurate, but it's definitely totally true.

"I don't know. I like to work with my hands. Maybe stonework?"

Evan tilts her head and swishes all her hair over one shoulder, leaving the long, perfect line of her neck exposed.

"Stonework?"

She has the tiniest bit of an overbite, and it's more noticeable when she's trying not to laugh.

"You making fun of my dreams?"

I rub my thumb over the ridges of her knuckles, still being careful, but optimistic. This girl likes me. I can do this.

She squeezes my hand. "Nope. It just sounds really..."

She trails off and chews on her bottom lip, this time I'm sure to keep from laughing.

"What?" I bump my shoulder to hers gently. "Come on. I know you're laughing at me. My feelings are already hurt. You might as well tell me the joke."

"Stone work is, like, a really stereotypical mafia job." She tenses and relaxes her hand in mine, because we've come to another tipping point.

"Well, since I'm not in the mafia, I guess that little detail never occurred to me."

I drop her hand and wrap my arm around her shoulders instead, loving the way she fits nestled against my body like she was custom designed for me.

"Are you going to tell me why?"

She leads me off the curb without even checking for traffic, and we run to the nearest square, where she flops on a bench and I follow, collecting her against my side again.

"Why stonework?" I clarify.

She nods and I pull her tight to me, gather her legs over my lap and glare at the old couple who click their tongues at us as they dodder by. I lay my hands on the skin right above her knee, where they started this morning, in her grandparents' damn foyer. This time I keep them put and explain what I've never uttered out loud to anyone in my life.

"The job I do now? For my family?" She sits a little straighter, out of my hold, but I fold her back near me. She looks down at the glossy blue polish on her nails and waits. "The job I do is keeping the peace. It's lots of talking, arguing, finessing. I talk all day. I talk until I'm sick to death of the sound of my own voice. And I talk so much bullshit, I hardly ever go to bed without a couple aspirin and a shot of Jack."

She tips her dark, cat eye-sunglasses down and purses her lips. "That doesn't sound good."

I can see like an x-ray that she's biting her tongue in her mouth, not saying more about it, even though she really wants to. Instead she tumbles to the next question.

"What's the worst thing you've done?"

I take a breath so deep, it feels like it starts at the soles of my feet and just works its way up to my addled brain. My fingers drum on her tanned skin.

"Can I ask you a question about your question?"

She wiggles her toes in her sandals. "Sure." Her knees rock back and forth slowly, a totally opposite rhythm from my rapidly tapping fingers.

"Do you want to know the worst thing I've ever done from a legal standpoint? Like the worst thing I've done if all the stick-up-their-ass do-gooders had a vote? Or the thing I think is the worst, according to my conscience?"

I watch her eyes stretch wide and her mouth work into a perfect o-shape.

"Both." Her answer is greedy, but her face looks nervous, like she knows she's going to regret having asked once I tell her.

The sun is high up, but the only light hitting us is the speckled, diffused stuff breaking through the dense, dark greenery of the trees in the park. Even in the shade, the heat sticks to us, making our clothes damp with sweat. I want to ask her to leave, but there's nowhere to go right now.

The apartment I rented for myself got co-opted by some second cousin who just moved over from Hungary with a heavily pregnant wife, two little kids, no money, and less skills. He needed it more than I did, so I went back to my old set of rooms at my parents' house, and they're out of the question for me and Evan.

"Worst thing from society's viewpoint," I begin, and her attention is rapt. She even leans forward a little. "I broke a guy's femur."

She pulls her hands back and curls them into each other.

"On purpose," I add. Then I take it a step further, "And I wish...I really wish I'd broken his other femur while I was at it."

Her hands fly up to her mouth, and she gasps the question from behind her fingers. "What did he do?"

"Distributed child porn." The horror in her eyes settles my conscience, not that even Evan's disapproval would make me feel bad about what I’d done. "I found out because I do sweeps of the company computers for security breech stuff. My father brought him in for some, uh, accounting things."

Since I was mid-story about breaking a guy's fucking femur, it occurred to me that adding in the detail that my family hired the guy to cook the books probably wouldn't matter. Still.

"He was damn good at his job. Damn smart with computers. It took months before anything came up. Then I saw a bunch of it, and I swear to God right now, Evan, that asshole is lucky all I broke was his femur, because I have never felt more justified about beating the shit out of anyone before."

She takes one hand down from her mouth and puts it back in mine. "Okay. That actually makes perfect sense to me. What is your personal worst?"

I squeeze her knee and avoid her eyes for a minute, because here's another story buried in the Shut the Fuck Up, Winchester Vault.

"I shot a horse."

"You shot a horse?"