Mess To Be Made

56

            My mind had barely been able to keep up with the conversation playing out before me. Too overwhelmed to comprehend exactly what was being said. Now, I was hanging onto every word, trying to understand exactly what I was hearing.

"We just wanted to talk to her." Joby rolled his eyes, catching on the lines of Coke still untouched on the coffee table.

"You wanted to scare her." Tyler's teeth clashed against each other, his consonants ripping through the taut air around us.

"She was more than fine." Joby threw his hands up, his eyes moving from the Coke back to me, a smirk threading across his lips. "He's just pissed because she left his ass."

"Is that why," I whispered quietly, a stark contrast to Tyler's harsh voice only seconds before. Still, everyone seemed to hear it as four pairs of eyes focused on me. "Is that why you pushed me away for so long. Is that why you..."

Never let me fully in.

Always held a little back.

It made sense. It finally made sense. Why he kept me at a safe distance. Why he always seemed so afraid to let anyone, even me, into his mind—his life.

I always thought it was because he had been hurt. And maybe I could help mend that broken part of him. The way he had mended me.

How he held me when I witnessed my mom fucking another man. How he picked me up late at night without hesitation after Landon tried to fuck me. How he pushed me to be a better student, a better person, to forge a better future for myself. How his narrowed gaze always saw through my placid smirks.

How he punched Spencer in the face.

How he pushed my buttons until I was at the edge of my rope, only to be waiting to catch me when my grip finally gave out.

This whole time I wanted him to let me in, the same way I had let him in. So I could help him, the same way he helped me. So we could work through whatever caused him so much pain to put up such a fortified wall.

Turns out, that wall wasn't built to protect himself. It was to protect me.

And I was fucking sick of him trying to protect me.

"Tell me everything," I ground out, my hands fisting at my sides. "Right now."

Tyler's gaze was trained on me, the dark brown softening the longer we stared at one another. In a small voice, sounding almost foreign, he answered, "Joby wanted me to sell—to take my mom's place. He threatened me and when that didn't work, he threatened Hannah. I still refused so he followed through on one of his many threats—he set my mom up. He had someone tip off the cops when she had heroin in her trunk and Percs in her glove box. She was so pissed, she told the cops where Joby's warehouse was."

"Ten grand," Joby sneered. "Ten fucking grand worth of product they took."

"He's right," Tyler whispered, his hazel eyes distant, focused on a spot on the wall before lowering to ground. "That was where I fucked up. If I hadn't stopped selling for him, he wouldn't have set my mom up. And if he didn't set her up, she would've never told the cops about his stash. She would've never owed him the ten grand he lost. We wouldn't owe him."

"You don't owe him anything," I heard myself say, a protectiveness in it that growled from deep within my diaphragm.

"Allie." His voice was clipped as he cracked his knuckles. "With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. He's a drug dealer. He lost money and someone has to pay. And my mom's not really in a position to be able to pay him back herself."