Play Me Real by Tracy Wolff Read Free Book Online

decide the story I’m telling is too real, too raw, too brutal for her to listen to. Because while I don’t give her the details of Dylan’s death—the catalogue of damage that to this day takes my breath away, I’m pretty sure it’s self-explanatory how I failed him. How he counted on me to take care of things, to take care of him, and I messed up.
    I really messed up.
    I trusted my father when I knew better. I believed him when he said he’d do what needed to be done—especially since the money was owed to Nico Valducci, the man my father had been in bed with for years. The man whose fingerprints are, to this day, all over the Atlantis and the Tuscany and every other project my father is involved in in this town.
    “He could have stopped it,” I whisper when it feels like I’m going to explode if I don’t say it out loud. If I don’t give voice to the deepest, darkest kernel of my shame. “To this day, my father is business associates—friends—with the man Dylan owed money to. Even if he didn’t want to pay, he could have stopped his execution with barely a word. He didn’t do that.”
    And Dylan suffered because of it. He died because my father wanted to get me away from him. He died because my father considered him expendable, a toy that had long outlived its usefulness. And because I was too lazy to follow through. I should have checked. Should have made sure my father did what he’d said he would. But there were mid-terms and papers due, parties and the girl I was fucking at the time—a girl whose name I can’t even remember now. I just remember that instead of calling Dylan, instead of checking on him, I went back to her dorm room. Fucked her. And when it was over, when I got back to my own place, it was to find a message from a hysterical Janet telling me that they’d found Dylan’s body.
    How I could have fucked up so completely—how I could have yielded control to my father like it was nothing—I still don’t understand. It’s a mistake that will haunt me the rest of my life, a mistake I’ll never in a million years forgive myself for.
    I wait for Aria’s judgment, for the disgust she must be feeling to show in her eyes. But for long seconds, she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, I’m not sure she even breathes as she stands there staring at me, huge tears glistening in her dark eyes. Turning them liquid and lovely. So, so lovely.
    Another time I might appreciate the way she looks—tousled and beautiful and just a little bit ravaged. Like she’s gone a few playful rounds with me and lost. Or won, whatever works for the metaphor.
    Except there’s nothing playful about the story I just told, nothing playful about how I’m feeling. Catharsis is supposed to make people feel better, but I’ve never felt more like shit than I do right now. Except maybe in the days—and weeks—after I got the call from Janet telling me that Dylan was dead. And that I had killed him.
    “You should probably go,” I tell her after the silence stretches between us like a jagged desert canyon. “Tell one of the guys at the valet station you need a ride home and they’ll arrange it. Or they’ll get you your car—whichever you’d prefer.”
    “What I’d prefer is for you to sit down and listen to me.” She grabs my hand, tugs me toward the couch. But I don’t move. I can’t. If I do, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I only know that it won’t be pretty.
    She catches on eventually, stops trying to pull me where I don’t want to go. And instead gets super close to me, fitting her luscious body against my own. And then her hands are on my face and she’s tilting my head until I’m looking her straight in the eye. Until every breath I take is one she exhaled first.
    There’s an odd kind of comfort in that, a rightness that I don’t have a fucking clue how to assimilate right now.
    “It’s not your fault,” she tells me, her beautiful dark eyes boring into