“Did we move on, though?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Was he insinuating that I was still hung up on him? If so, I could get over his huge ego and his huge everything else real quick.
Or at least, that’s what I would tell him.
He sighed and pulled at his neck while looking at my ceiling. “I don’t want to fight with you. I’m tired. You’re tired. You probably haven’t had a good shower since you’ve been in jail, and we need to make a plan for Izzy.”
“Great. Good. Go do that. I’ll be here.”
“No.” He shook his head slowly. “You won’t be, sweetheart. You can’t stay in this room. You shouldn’t have been staying here in the first place.”
“It’s the best place for me to be.”
“The street isn’t patrolled enough, your locks on this level aren’t great, and the lobby man is letting strange men walk in with you. Not to mention that staircase is so dark a man could kill you in it without security cameras picking up on it. We’ll have to change that.”
“I’m fine.” Scratching my temple as I thought over his assessment and backed up toward my bathroom, I realized I should probably just give in and go home.
Yet, whatever little food I had in my stomach curdled in disgust at the thought.
“I’ll agree to you staying in this hotel because you’re right that anything else would cause attention, but I’ll be talking to them about changing your accommodations and room number. You’ll be moving to my level,” Dante concluded.
“Your level? What are you talking about?” I was too tired to figure all this out. “You can’t force me back to our hometown, Dante.”
“I literally can and I will. I’ve done a lot more to people I don’t care about. For you, I’d drag your ass across the ocean in a heartbeat if I thought it was necessary. I’ll help you pack and move up to the twentieth floor where I’ll stay too. Your choice.”
On top the small table in the room, I’d propped a clock against the wall. It had little birds on it that chirped every hour. It was a stupid reminder of home that I couldn’t leave behind. We let the seconds tick loudly by, and a bird chirped.
“Six o’clock,” Dante announced, not looking at the clock at all. “The robin says time for me to go home so you can all do your homework. That’s what your mom would have said. Today, it’s time for you to make a decision.”
“Mom always listened to that clock, didn’t she?” I tried not to smile at how well he remembered our childhood.
He nodded. “What’s it going to be, Lamb? You coming with me or am I dragging you home?”
I took a breath and hoped I was doing what was right for my mental sanity. “If I go to your stupid floor, I’m doing what I want when I’m there. I’m doing Eat Pray Love type stuff here. This is my way of finding myself. I need this, Dante. I don’t have anything else.”
“You need to stay safe first. I’ll allow for anything around that.”
“I don’t need you to take care of me.” I ran a finger over the clock and tried not to look at him.
“Oh, believe me, I know. You’ve made that very clear over the years.”
“Are you mad at me? After all you and Izzy did?” My gaze snapped to him then.
“I’m not taking the blame for what Izzy did. Maybe we should have disclosed our operation to you and maybe I would have, had we been closer. But we weren’t. And yeah, I’m not happy about it. Haven’t been for years. I don’t really care one way or the other at this point, though.”
Even though he suddenly sounded defeated, like we couldn’t argue because it made no sense to do so, the words sliced through me. My heart wanted him to care, and maybe that was because I’d been so lost within my depression for so long.
Not that he knew. And not that I could blame him for getting over me. I’d wanted him to.
I sighed and told myself I had to be strong. I just had to accept what we were. And that was nothing.
“Well, I think it’s better we don’t bring it up, then,” I told him. Because I couldn’t tell him I did him a favor by not writing him back. That my life got so dark and twisted in college that he wouldn’t have wanted to be around me.
“Just pack up so we can go, okay?” he grumbled.
“Fine.” I matched his tone. “Remember what I said. I don’t want a keeper while I’m here.”