I almost believed it, except she wasn’t looking me in the eye.
“Bullshit. It was more, and you know it.”
She shook her head, opened her mouth — to retaliate, I was sure — and was interrupted by Yoda announcing “A text message, you have.” Fucking Cody.
“You’d better get that,” she said, backing away and holding her hand up in the sign for ‘live long and prosper’.
“Wrong fandom,” I said, fishing my cell from my pocket. Reading the text quickly, I looked up and, with a resigned sigh, once again started chasing my fake girlfriend.
Darcy
What happened to us?Nope, nuh-uh. I was not getting into that particular discussion. As I marched away from the dangerous conversation, I felt pursued to the point that I wanted to shuck my shoes and run. Not just home, but out of the city. Out of Swenton. Maybe do a Forrest Gump and just keep running. It wasn’t all about the walking, talking hazardous working condition who would no doubt be breathing down my neck again any moment. It was the ghosts of the past. Parts I never looked at too closely for fear the memory would destroy me as surely as the experience did. A single word, spoken by many strange mouths with no empathy. No compassion.
Murderer.
Shit. My heel hit a crack in the sidewalk, and then I was falling. The pavement paradoxically flying up to meet me, while the event happened at a slow zoom. Allowing me to see the gray speckle in the cement. The sun-bleached pink of an old piece of gum, shaped by the tread of someone’s shoe. Small glints of refracted light that hinted at tiny shards of glass in the cracks of the sidewalk where brooms had been unable to completely sweep them away. I braced myself for the impact, only to lose my breath as a strong arm wrapped around my stomach, saving my bones at the expense of my internal organs. Dinner threatened to make an appearance, and I swallowed hard as I was set firmly back on my feet.
“Are you all right?”
Breathe, I reminded myself. Ignoring Kane’s query in favor of convincing autonomic function to reestablish itself in my body.
It’s easy. You do it every day. In and out.
Even with the coaching, it took a minute or two before the lung inflation felt natural.
“Darcy, look at me. Are you all right?”
Kane pushed his face into my field of vision, and this close I could see the tiniest sprinkle of freckles over his left brow. His long, thick lashes lowered and raised over those brown eyes that I had spent hours looking into, both familiar and foreign. A prickled rasp accompanied a hard scrub over his mouth and beard as he looked left and right before refocusing on me. Perhaps he had hoped someone else was available for assistance. He never had been good at dealing with tough emotions.
“Darcy —”
“I’m fine,” I said, straightening with an effort I tried to hide. Tonight had been an attempt to prove my past was behind me. A light distraction to prove the girl I once was had grown into the strong, resilient woman I had always wanted to be.
Instead, I was as raw as the day I left Fankirth High. Getting home, getting away from Kane Bryson was essential, before I did something stupid. Like cry in front of him. Or kiss him.
It may not have been a healthy coping mechanism, but sex had a way of quieting the mind. The combination of false intimacy and physical exertion enough to plaster over emotional fault lines until the sun rose the next day. Then it was time to let go and move forward. Always forward.
“I need a drink,” I muttered, noting we were roughly one block from my apartment by the real estate office across the street.
“Look, I just got a text from Cody. He invited us to a bar not far from here. Evie is going to be there, and she’d like to see you. Will you come? You don’t look like you should be alone right now.”
He was right. Was he manipulating the situation? Absolutely, but he was right. I felt wrung out, and a part of me knew that if I went home alone now, I would fall to pieces in a way I couldn’t afford to if I was going to follow through with this assignment.
With a deep breath, I imagined pulling on a suit of armor. No cracks. Emotion shoved down into my belly and frozen over. I was the ice queen from the fairytales my dad read to me when I was a girl. Immovable and indestructible.
“Where are we going?”
Kane did a double-take. Clearly, compliance had been the last thing he expected. “I, ah… the Sports Bar? It’s just around the corner from your place. Do you know it?”
I nodded. Of course I knew it, it was the same place Allie and I had met up for lunch.
“Yeah, well, apparently his team is meeting up there. Evie, too.”
“You said that already.”
“Oh, yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck in a way I remembered from before. Before we grew up. Before life happened. He was nervous, and the fact that tick was still a part of who he was gave me the last piece of confidence I needed to take control again.
“Let’s go.”
