Never Yours Again novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Two Hundred Dollars

Ellis's POV

The guards let Rhett go at the loading dock, because there was nobody left to ask them not to.

They stood at the door with their arms folded and let us have the alley.

It was narrow and wet, with a dumpster and a single caged bulb over the steel door.

The first spit of rain came down on my sleeve.

Rhett's tie was undone.

He leaned on the brick with both hands behind him, breathing hard.

For a moment he looked fifteen again, waiting in a school doorway to be told he was in trouble.

"You did this," he said.

"No."

"You gave her the chat. I saw your name on the thread. You had that voice note for four days and you sat on it."

"I gave her what she asked for."

"You gave her my life."

"I gave her your words," I said. "You supplied the rest."

He laughed, and it cracked.

"Seventeen years, Ellis. I let you into my house. I let you sit at my mother's table. Where do you get off?"

"You didn't let me. My father lost everything, and your mother paid my fees."

"That's not why."

"It is. She wanted a boy around you who stayed out of trouble."

"I was the paid friend, Rhett."

I said it without anger.

"I've been grateful for seventeen years, and I never knew how to stop. You never once asked what I wanted."

"What did you want?"

"I wanted to say something on the balcony."

The rain thickened.

Rhett stared at me.

"That's what this is," he said slowly. "A girl. You're doing all this for a girl who thanked the wrong man."

"No. She's the reason I stopped. I should have stopped years before her."

I looked at the man I'd known since I was fifteen.

"I owe her more than a sentence," I said. "I let her go through five years of you."

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