There was nothing for it. She was going to have to talk to him.
The trouble was, she had no idea what to say.
Thanks for the great sex last night. Sorry I tried to make you feel like shit about yourself after.
Yeah, no.
It would have been clean, at least, if You’re a good person had been the last thing she ever said to him. Frankly, she hadn’t even planned on admitting that much. After last night, she wasn’t supposed to say anything to Clark ever again. She’d hoped （mostly hoped） to find him gone this morning when she returned to the castle.
But of course, there he was in the entranceway, all handsome and stoic and wounded, and as she watched him leave, Riley couldn’t help herself.
To be fair, it wasn’t supposed to matter what she said at that point—he’d openly admitted nothing that came out of her mouth could make him stay.
What she’d said hadn’t even been a compliment, not really. She’d just stated a fact. It didn’t make up for the way she’d broken the sacred code of postcoital interaction, not even close.
That hadn’t been her aim. Riley just wanted—needed, for some reason—Clark to know. He’d gone his whole life thus far believing he had to be useful in order to be wanted. What if no one else ever thought to correct him? The idea made her irrationally angry . . . even if she was the asshole who’d tried to use his misconception against him.
God, no wonder Clark had nothing to say to her. Everything he’d shared—no, everything she’d barged in and yanked out of him—Riley had thrown back in his face at the coldest opportunity possible. He’d been open with her, more vulnerable than he had to be, trusting her, even though she’d never been brave enough to do the same.
The least she could do was try to even the score between them a little. Riley couldn’t change the way Clark’s dad treated him or what had happened with his brother, but he didn’t have to feel like he was the only one at this table who had been measured by their kin and found wanting.
She gathered her resolve. “Do you want to know the worst thing about me?”
“Excuse me?”
“You can say no,” she rushed to assure him. She wasn’t trying to trauma dump or whatever the kids called it these days. “I just thought you might feel a little better if you had some leverage on me, you know, after I . . . you know.”
His mouth twisted like he’d bitten into a lemon.
Riley was sure he thought the offer was silly, or worse, insulting.
“Sorry, never mind. I don’t know why I—”
“Go on, then.” He motioned with two fingers for her to proceed.
Oh.
“Okay, so . . .” She realized she didn’t have a lead-in. No disrespect to Clark’s trauma confessions, but they had come with those handy visual aids.
“Um, my dad left, when I was nine—This part is backstory, for context,” Riley clarified, intimidated by Clark’s perfectly stoic expression. “Anyway. So, yeah. As it turns out, my mom had kept the whole curse-breaking thing a secret from him and he didn’t find out until after Gran died when she left me a bunch of her practitioner materials.”
She could still remember her dad sorting through the carefully wrapped contents of a cardboard box that had come back from West Virginia after the funeral. The way his face had gone white and then red.
“He, um . . . didn’t like it. He said Gran was unnatural, and my mom and I were tainted by association.”
Riley wished Ceilidh would bring her water. For some reason her throat hurt, though she was barely speaking above a whisper.
“There was a lot of screaming and big sweeping hand gestures after that. And then . . . that was it. He just stopped loving us. At least, that’s what he said. For context.”
“That’s enough.” Clark’s expression was complicated, restrained, but what killed Riley was how gentle he’d made his voice. “You don’t have to keep going for my sake.”
“I think I do.” It felt good—scary but good—to air out the place inside of her that had been shut up dead for so long.
Had Clark experienced a fraction of the same relief with her? She hoped so.
“The worst thing about me”—Riley took a deep breath— “is I didn’t have to make the choice. My mom made it for me. And I love her for that. So much. But . . .”
Jordan Rhodes might not have chosen to pursue the “family talent.” She might have left Appalachia and her mother behind to make her own path. But no one, including—perhaps especially—a husband, had ever stood a chance of shaming her for where she came from.
Late that same night, after they’d cleaned up the dishes and lay together in Riley’s twin bed, she’d explained as best she could that Daddy’s anger hadn’t been about them, not really. Had promised that even though it was just the two of them now, they’d be okay.
Riley had believed her.
“But . . .” Clark prompted when she’d sat silently for too long.
“I can’t help but think sometimes that if he’d asked me . . .” Riley fiddled with the stitching along the edge of her napkin. “As much as I love my gran, love curse breaking . . . I think I would have given them both up.”
Her cheeks heated in shame from the traitorous thoughts. “If it meant I could have had a dad, that my mom wouldn’t have had to do everything on her own.”
Clark clenched his fists suddenly, the movement made more prominent by the way the iron chain jerked between them in response.
Riley raised her gaze. Was he okay?
Slowly, he relaxed both hands until his palms rested flat on the table.
“It’s not wrong,” he said, his voice tight, “for a child to want to be loved and accepted by their parent.” Clark shook his head a little. “You can see it clear as day when it’s someone else’s family instead of your own.”
In the low yellow light of the bar, his troubled eyes looked more green than gray.
“Your father failed you. And he failed your mother. Not the other way around.”
Riley swallowed. Nodded. It was how she felt about his father. His brother, in a different way.
In fact, as she sat there, the mirror image of his pain and hers cracked her open a little down her sternum, until it felt like her guts might spill out onto the table.
“By turning curse breaking into a career, you’re defending your mum and your gran. Their choices. Their power.” Clark stared at her intently, in that way he did sometimes that made her feel like a butterfly pinned for his inspection. “You’ve been defending them your whole life.”
“Yes,” she said, holding his gaze even though it felt intense, too raw.
When Ceilidh rushed over to drop two plates in front of them, they both jumped a little in their chairs.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said, grabbing their drinks from an equally frazzled-looking colleague and placing those down too, fast enough that some liquid sloshed over the sides. “I just realized, I think I mixed up the tickets for tables seven and eight.”
She shot concerned glances at a pair of couples near the front. “Do you guys need anything else?”
Clark peered first at his burger and then at Riley’s salad. “Didn’t you say no on—”