Those words coupled with that touch, and where they sat, it all had a strangely ominous feel. Billy imagined, even with the rail there, Mike grabbing him by the shirt and hurling them both over and into the ocean below. This talk, this sudden remorse, when turned at the right angle, looked very much like a man contemplating his own end. Speaking of Billy like he were now some sort of blood stained dove. Innocent once and now soiled. Is that really what Mike saw him as? Clean before stepping into this?

Carefully, he reached up to push the hand hand from his collar. "It's not as though you held a gun to my head." Though he feared he would have been shot in the back if he'd tried to leave. He still remembered the look in Mike's eyes. The exact words he'd uttered. "I chose to be there." He didn't, but this remorse from Mike after 'You're not going to run, are you, billy boy?' felt like some sort of trap that he didn't want to test.