“I might if you weren’t here, doing the opposite of calming me with your opposite of reassuring premonitions.”
She laughed again then cut it short when she saw my face. “Okay, let’s approach this rationally since approaching it emotionally is making you an angry cat.” She tapped her chin for a few seconds, then her eyes widened. “Are you worried about Jesse actually going for Jolene?”
After deciding that Alex was serious, I gave her question some thought. I didn’t need to give it much. “No.” It was a simple, truthful answer. Jesse didn’t possess a non-loyal bone in his body.
“Are you worried about him getting drunk off his ass and jumping into bed with her in his drunken haze?”
I rolled my eyes. Jesse did drunk about as often as he did disloyalty. “No.”
“Then what are you worried about exactly?”
That was the question that sent the proverbial punch to my gut. What in the hell was I so worried about? Why had I wasted precious time fuming over some inconsequential person? The lines in my forehead felt close to becoming permanent. “I don’t know.”
Alex’s eyes met mine. “So you’re not worried about Jolene and Jesse’s future relationship. Good, we got to the bottom of that. But, and this is one big but you better pay attention to, girl, because it’s a doozy . . . but you should be worried about Jesse’s and yours. Because this little jealous, insecure thing you’re dealing with will only hurt the two of you.”
And round two of the proverbial gut punch.
I thought about what Alex had just said for so long, the doughnut in my hand came close to petrifying. She was right on every single level I’d been wrong on. How had I missed that? What had clouded me to seeing it? Was it my tendency to glom on to the bad in life? Shit, I hoped not. Or was it because I loved Jesse so much I’d become a crazed person boiled down to raw emotion and instinct? I wasn’t eager for either of those possibilities to come out on top.
“Damn. How did you get so smart?” I stood up feeling like the epiphany dump had put me in need of some fresh air.
Alex hopped down from the counter. “Making a bunch of mistakes.”
“If that’s the measure of a person’s smartness, I should be a regular Einstein and a half.”
“Okay, well I lived and I learned.”
My brows came together. “Are you implying I haven’t?”
Alex paused on her way down the hallway, probably heading for Sid’s office. “We’ll see.” She gave me a small smile before—yep—rounding into Sid’s office and closing the door.
I was going to need that fresh air for more than one reason.
Grabbing the trash with one hand, I carried the old doughnuts in my other and break-necked for the back door. It was still raining, but at least it’d slowed to a drizzle. Between the events of the past twenty-four hours, the rain, and sheer exhaustion, I couldn’t go another step. The dumpster wasn’t even ten feet away, but it might as well have been ten miles. I was spent.
Setting down the garbage bag, I leaned into the brick wall and tried to calm my mind. Confusion had set in, and it was moving fast, its contagion spreading. Even standing became too much. After dropping to the ground, I buried my head between my knees and focused on breathing. For no solid reason I could point to, my world felt like it was crumbling, piece by piece. Either I needed to get a concentrated dose of Midol injected in my ass or get a solid eight hours of sleep and wake up feeling normal. Or normal for me, at least.
“Where have you been all week?”
As yet another sign that I was a mess, I barely even flinched when that strange voice hollered at me. I rubbed my eyes before looking up. No tears, but they’d been close. It probably shouldn’t have surprised me to see the homeless woman from last week coming toward me, but it did. I’d almost convinced myself she and what she’d said had all been a hallucination.
“Girlie? Did you hear me?”
“Spring break. I was in Montana.” My voice was robotic, and my movements felt the same.
“Doing what?” The woman stopped in front of me. The expectation in her eyes told me what she was looking and hoping for. I held out the box of doughnuts. She snatched the box out of my hands, backed into the wall, and was one doughnut in before I’d worked up a reply.
“Seeing my boyfriend. Seeing his family and friends, too.” A heavy dose of home sickness stabbed at me. I loved my life in Seattle, but I never longed for it or ached for it like I did Willow Springs.
“How was it?” she asked around a jelly doughnut.
I didn’t know why I was sitting there having a semi-personal conversation with a homeless person who had scared the crap out of me, but I needed to talk to someone. Thankfully, she seemed to be firmly back in her rocker.
“Great. I had an amazing week.”
She finished the rest of the jelly doughnut before asking her next question. “Then why are you in an alley all alone looking like you’re about to start crying?”
I literally couldn’t escape perceptive people. Not even in a garbage-ridden alley on the scary side of Seattle. “I’m confused.”
“Confused about what?”
I swallowed. “So many things.”
“Things about your boyfriend?”
“Maybe . . . Yes.” I sighed and scuffed the tip of my boot against the asphalt. “I don’t know.” Those three words summed up my current state of mind. It seemed, after nineteen years of life, I didn’t know shit. I felt like I’d known some yesterday, but today was a whole other story. I didn’t know why I was so upset or why that anxiety had settled over me, and I really didn’t know why I was having a conversation with a stranger. One who ate a box of doughnuts for dinner.
“Excuse me for saying, Girlie,” she started, her eyes boring into mine, “but love doesn’t seem like it should be so confusing. It doesn’t seem like it should be so hard.”
“Why not?” I wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing; the verdict was still out.
“Because it’s love,” she said with a shrug. “It should come easy.”
I sat there a while longer, reeling over what she’d just said. Part of me knew that was true. Another part of me screamed it was a lie. Should love be easy? Or should it be hard? Should it even be either?
In twenty-four hours, my mind had become a giant mass of confusion.
THE NIGHTMARES WERE coming every night, and what was worse than their frequency was that Rowen has somehow made her way into them. That’s a world and a part of my life I didn’t want her anywhere close to. I’d protect her from it at all costs.
I’d bolted awake last night after a repeat dream. I was in the basement again, chained to the pipe, more animal than boy, but I wasn’t alone. I heard another chain clinking against a pipe across the room. When I saw her, there was no denying it was a young Rowen. She was crying, curled up into a ball, and trembling. No matter how many times I called out to her, or how loud, she didn’t hear me. She didn’t know I was chained on the opposite side of the room from her. Then the basement door opened, and I heard familiar shoes coming down the stairs. When the shoes stopped on the basement floor, they paused. When they started moving again, they weren’t coming my way. They were going toward Rowen. I fought against my restraint so savagely, the leather around my neck rubbed the skin raw. Drops of blood dotted the floor when I heard the first scream come from the other side of the room.
And then, mercifully, I was ripped awake.
THE LAST TWO weeks were long. Partly because I hadn’t seen Rowen and partly because I hadn’t slept more than a couple hours a night. What was waiting for me the moment my eyes closed and my brain drifted off made me force myself to stay awake. My first five years of life, I’d done the opposite because any dream world was an improvement.
Rowen and I’d talked every day since she left at the end of spring break, but she seemed different. A bit removed or preoccupied.