I tapped the steering wheel restlessly on my way through the city to Tessa’s place. I clenched my jaw, passing the exit I’d taken the last time I drove down this highway. The one that would lead to Carlos’ house. Well, not Carlos’ anymore. As far as I knew Salem was still living there. She’d called while I was away. So had Carlos’ parents. And the police.
But they hadn’t come by or called again since my return to the mortuary and I knew in my bones it was to do with Ruarc. He paid someone off, got my name removed from every possible list where it was written in connection to Carlos’ disappearance.
I’d been racking my brain trying to come up with a way to let his family know that he was gone and wouldn’t be coming back. They deserved to know that at least. To grieve his loss properly. I’d find a way. One that wouldn’t implicate me or Dad or even Ruarc.
I took Tessa’s exit and shook off the lingering feelings of anxiety and guilt. After work today, I’d just needed an escape. To get away somewhere, anywhere but home.
I’d spent too many nights staring out into the dark beyond my windows, praying for any sign that he might be out there, looking back at me.
Fucking ridiculous.
As I neared her place I tried to draw up some excitement, sitting straighter, turning up the radio, but nothing seemed to help.
It was true no matter what I was doing. It was like being suspended in formaldehyde like a wet specimen. No longer alive, despite outward appearances. I could speak, eat, walk around; superficially, I was all there. In reality, it was like walking through water, eating without taste, hearing as though through cotton.
Like… I was the ghost all along.
Tears slid down my face, surprising me. I sniffed, hurriedly dabbing them with my sleeve and clearing my throat.
Outside Tessa’s apartment building, I parked. A minute went by, and then five minutes, and then almost ten. My eyes glazed over, hazing my sight. I pictured it; turning around, speeding back down the highway toward home only to pass by it, go straight down toward the dead-end where the long curving driveway led to him.
Would he make good on his promise to kill me if I returned?
Did I care?
Getting sucked slowly back to reality, where I was sitting in my car and he was nowhere in sight was like jumping into a pool of ice water.
The only time I could get away from my wandering thoughts was when I was asleep. Otherwise, he didn’t leave me alone. Before I could start crying again, I got out of the car and called Tessa as I entered her building, asking her to buzz me up.
She was waiting at the door when I arrived.
“Who shat in your cereal this morning?” she asked, pausing with her hand on her hip, and the other on the door. My stomach dropped. God, was it that obvious? I tried to put on a smile, tensing like a spooked animal.
“Sorry, came straight from work,” I lied. I’d forced a bowl of leftover macaroni and cheese down my throat and showered and blow-dried my hair before coming here, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Empty-handed, too?” she lifted a brow.
I laughed, the sound real instead of forced. The normalcy of her giving me shit for not bringing a bottle of wine making me feel the most at home since I left the mansion in the trees.
“Shit, I forgot,” I said. “I’ll run out and grab something.”
“No, no, don’t worry about it. I have everything we need. Just giving you a hard time. I always bring a bottle to yours, you know,” she said, ushering me in.
We hung out in the living room, having the place to ourselves tonight.
Her roommate was a really nice girl named Grace who spent more time at her boyfriend’s place than at home. There was pizza and wine waiting on the coffee table in front of the lumpy couch in their living room.
I wasn’t hungry. My stomach rarely asked me to feed it these days and everything I put in my mouth tasted like sawdust. I tried to force down a slice though, telling myself that if I couldn’t fall back into my normal life, I’d have to take it back by force.
“So where have you been lately? Any good trips?” I asked through a mouthful of pizza. Tessa giggled, bringing her wine glass to her lips. She was home but she still had her makeup from the day on. She had ditched the leather jacket she wore like a second skin though and was in a faded, oversized t-shirt and athletic shorts.
“I should be asking you that.”
Tessa didn’t know anything that happened. As far as she was aware, I had taken a little vacation myself. My father came up with the shaky cover story that I was actually in Florida staying with some distant relatives who needed some help with a move.
I had no relatives anywhere that I knew about. Both my father’s parents and my mother’s parents were dead and outside of that, the one sister my mother had lives in South Korea. I only heard from her once every few years on Christmas.
“It was nothing special,” I said nonchalantly. “I’m really sorry I missed the signing event, though. Hope you were all right without me.”
She frowned. “We managed. “Where did you go, again?”
I paused for a beat.
“Florida.”
Her lips pursed.
“Didn’t manage to get a tan while you were there?” she asked lightly.
“Well spotted.”
I was such an idiot. Why didn’t I come up with something to tell Tess in advance? I mean, of course she was liable to ask why I virtually fell off the face of the earth. Dad’s excuse that there was spotty cell service only held up so well. That coupled with the few text messages he had sent her wouldn’t have done much to convince her of our cover story.
Tessa was smarter than that. She knew there was something going on, but she also wasn’t the sort to pry into other people’s shit on account of having so much of her own with her family.
I didn’t want to lie to her but the truth wasn’t an option, either.
Not that she’d believe it anyway.
“So?” she pressed gently. “Are you going to tell me where you really were or is it like a state secret or something?”
I emptied my lungs, allowing myself to imagine the freedom of no longer carrying this all by myself. Of telling another person. Telling my best friend.
Except I couldn’t. Well, I couldn’t tell her all of it. There were certain parts, certain lines, she wouldn’t be able to cross and come back from. She’d want to kill Ruarc, to call the police… to do the right thing. But… I didn’t think I wanted those things, too, and she wouldn’t understand that. No one would.
“I don’t know how to start.”
“If it’s too much, you definitely don’t have to say anything. I mean, like, if you’re not ready to talk about it or if you just think I should shut up and mind my own business, I totally get it.”
She reached over, giving my knee a squeeze. “I can just tell it’s eating at you and you know I’m here if you need me, right? You can tell me anything.”
A sad smile pulled at my lips. Maybe not anything, but at least something.
“I know.” I drew in a steadying breath, pulling apart everything that’d happened and separating it into piles in my mind. The safe-to-tell pile and the absolutely-fucking-not pile.
“You have to let me finish talking before you say anything,” I warned preemptively and Tessa’s eyes bugged out of her head, adjusting herself in her seat, getting ready for me to spill the tea. She had absolutely no idea the bomb I was about to drop on her.
Tessa mimed sealing her lips and throwing away the key.
I took another deep breath, this one shuddering from my lips slowly.
Maybe the way I could finally let this go was by first letting it out.
“Do you remember when I told you I had a weird feeling whenever I was in my cabin? Like I was being watched?”
I paused for her to nod yes.
“Well, I was.”
My voice shook.
I paused, clearing my throat, and looking down. My tears flowed so easily these days, they were pouring down my face in no time.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Tessa said, scrambling to hand me some napkins. I blotted them on my face, smelling vaguely of pizza crust.
“Is that why you had to leave? Did something happen to you? Or were you just afraid of this mystery stalker?”
I tried to say something, but my tears had other plans, choking my throat and suspending all other body functions so I could weep. I blubbered pathetically over the man who kicked me out of his life. Over everything gained, and lost.
“No. No.” I tried to compose myself, taking a pitiful sip of my wine. “I wasn’t afraid of him. Not really.” I felt the truth of that statement rattle in my bones. Because knowing he was out there hadn’t frightened me. Not really. It excited me. It made me feel alive.
“Him?”
I nodded, unable to say his name aloud and knowing I probably shouldn’t anyway.
“He took me, Tess. My dad got himself into trouble with some dangerous people and this guy, he took me.”
Her face paled. “You were kidnapped?”
She stared at me, incredulous, skeptical. I would be, too. My father hadn’t reported me missing. There were no manhunts. Nothing on the news. I was just gone and my dad covered for my absence. And now I was back, here on the couch across from my best friend drinking wine like it never happened.
It was like something out of a movie.
“Sort of,” I replied, chewing the inside of my cheek. “The man, he kept me to leverage my Dad, and then, eventually, he let me go.”
“Oh my god,” she scooched forward, drawing me in for a hug that almost had me breaking in her arms. She rubbed my back and I could feel her heart pounding against my chest, fast while mine felt like it chugged through mud.
“What was your dad into?” she asked gently.
I barked a short laugh.
Where the hell did I start?
The explanation rested firmly in the absolutely-fucking-not pile, so I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter now. It’s over.”
She pushed my unruly hair back from my face. “Did this man hurt you?”
I clenched my jaw. The blush that spread up my neck and over my cheeks was hot, forcing me to avert my eyes.
“Oh god, babe,” Tessa said, imagining the worst.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said, my voice watery. “Well, I guess it was. But it also wasn’t. I thought he was a monster, but I was wrong. He’s…” I choked. “I… oh fuck, Tess, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Tessa’s brows cinched, her gaze jerking between my teary eyes, trying to understand. But how could she? How could anyone?
“Oh fuck,” Tessa said on an exhale. “You fell for your fucking stalker?”
I sobbed hard, my stomach twisting with guilt and shame.
She drew me back in, holding me tight, hushing me with long strokes against my hair.
“Just say it,” I sobbed into her hair. “Just tell me I’m fucking crazy.”
“The whole bloody story sounds crazy, babe.”
I sniffed, prying myself away from her to drown my pitiful sorrow in more wine.
“There’s something wrong with me.”
She shook her head, taking my empty wine glass from me to fill it back up to the fucking rim. “No. Not crazy. Human. And as insane as the story sounds, I know you wouldn’t lie to me, but damn, girl, that shit sounds like something my boss could’ve written, you know?”
I laughed, but it sounded hollow even to my own ears. I searched for judgment in Tessa’s eyes but found none and felt strangely unburdened. Some of the weight lifted from my chest. Telling her about him made it feel more real. Joined together the part of my life that felt like a dream with my stark reality.
“So,” Tessa said, eyeing me deviously over her wine glass.
“So?”
“Tell me about him.”
And I did. I told her more than I planned to. The push and pull. The dirty, rotten, bad, and the good that was so good it made me shudder at the memories alone.
Only the most intimate moments I kept to myself, holding them close to my chest, keeping them just for me.
I wound up spending the night, with too much wine in my system to stand up straight let alone drive.
In the morning, Tessa pumped me full of ibuprofen and coffee and lent me some clean sweats before sending me on my way. The last thing she said to me as I left her apartment rang in my ears all the way home.
“I know you said it couldn’t work out between you and your mystery guy, but stories like yours deserve a better ending.”
