“I’m so sorry,” my best friend called back as she came stalking back down the hall from where the bathroom was. “Jay, this is my best friend, Christina. Christina, this is Jay, the guy I met on the tour this summer.”
“How did you manage to get Lindsay on the rest of the tour?”
“I was working security. We have a little bit of sway on who is able to tag along some days. They knew I was at the end of the road with the security gig once the tour was over, so they humored me.”
“That’s really cool,” I managed to say, surprised I was able to talk without tripping all over my own tongue. I was nervous in a way I never was when meeting new people. Then again, the man my best friend had been telling me was my soulmate for two years now was standing in my apartment and was dating that very same best friend. How do things like this even happen? There was a part of me that thought for sure that Karma was having a go at me. Then again, what had I ever done to deserve this level of Karmic smack down? The answer was nothing. I’d done nothing besides make bad decisions about who to spend my time with.
“We were going to head to a restaurant for dinner. Do you want to come along?”
“Oh, um, I wish I could,” I hedged while trying to think of a good, fake reason why I couldn’t go to dinner and hoping like hell my stomach didn’t start growling mid-explanation. I hadn’t eaten in hours since I was so wrapped up in my latest painting of HIM. Jay. I had a name for my subject now. That was unreal.
“It looks like we caught her in the middle of working on a painting,” Jay mentioned.
“Oh! Can I see it?” Lindsay asked as she started heading towards the easel.
“No!” I yelled.
She rolled her eyes. “Let me guess? You’re painting your cemetery soulmate again?” She teased, and I cringed as she did since she didn’t realize the man was standing right there.
“I’ve never said he was my soulmate,” I argued with her. Luckily for me, this was an old argument we had, so it didn’t sound weird for her to hear my denial.
“No, of course you wouldn’t. I’m telling you, one day fate is going to drop that guy on your doorstep and shock the shit out of you.”
“Maybe sooner than later,” I huffed out.
“Well, it’s been like two years, so it’s about time,” Lindsay told me as she leaned in to give me a hug. I noticed Jay was just standing back taking it all in without saying a word. His eyes never left mine though, and I knew this because I continued to nervously look his way.
“Well, you guys better get going. Don’t want to be late to dinner,” I suggested as I started gently pushing Lindsay closer to the door.
“It’s not like we have a reservation somewhere, Chris.”
“Oh, well, sorry, I thought you’d be in a rush to go eat with your new man.”
Lindsay grinned and reached back to grab hold of Jay’s hand. “Well, I am excited about that because we haven’t been able to hang out for a couple days while he was adjusting to being back with his club.”
“Club?” I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.
“He’s in a motorcycle club,” Lindsay explained while damn near bouncing on her toes with excitement.
“Oh,” I managed to get out. I’d heard things about MCs. Some of it bad, some of it was kind of cool. There was a club that picked kids up who had to testify against their abusers, and they went with them to court as a show of muscle. The kids didn’t have to fear testifying that way. I always thought that was the coolest thing ever. I wondered for a minute if his club did anything like that.
“Well, next time, we’re going to really get together and hang out because I’ve missed you and I want you two to get to know one another since you’re the most important people in my life these days, aside from my parents.”
“Sure thing, Lindsay,” I told her as we hugged one more time and Jay continued to just stand there silently. It was as if he was brooding, and I wondered if he was having second thoughts about telling Lindsay what he’d discovered. Maybe he was creeped out by the painting or freaked out by the fact that Linds had called him my soulmate. I didn’t know, and I was honestly too chicken shit to find out. What I needed was for the earth to just open and swallow me whole because my life seriously could not get any stranger and more confusing. I wasn’t really sure how this could even be possible.
Once they were gone, I moved over to the easel and removed the cloth that had been covering the painting. Then I took a last, longing look at the man I had been painting for so long before I moved the painting to the closet with the rest of the projects I had done of the man formerly known as cemetery guy. Now, he was known as Jay, my best friend’s boyfriend. Soulmate or not, that last distinction would make him off limits to me forever.
Chapter 9
Painted Stranger
Jay (age 25)
Present
What the fuck was that?
I had recognized the girl right away. She had blue in her hair these days instead of pink, but the minute she opened the door to her apartment, I knew. How the fuck could this be? Not a day went by that I didn’t think about her haunted eyes or the way she had been lying cross the grass, bleeding her soul out, with no one around to help pick her up. She had haunted my dreams for two fucking years and suddenly, there she was. The elusive best friend of the woman I had reluctantly started dating.
Then there was the painting and the fact that Lindsay had obviously never seen one of her best friend’s paintings, because then she would have known I was the man she kept calling her best friend’s soul mate. I felt sick. I couldn’t even look at Lindsay right now because all that was going through my mind was her best friend looking entirely too fucking cute in those painted up jeans, worn out shirt, and hair a tangled mess on top of her head. A blue streak had flitted down across her eye and cheek as she had spoken to Lindsay. My girlfriend had been clueless to the tension in the room, where I felt it as a palpable thing. Seeing myself in that painting had thrown me. She captured something in my eyes that I had tried desperately to hide from everyone else. Pain. Unending pain.
“Are you okay?” Lindsay asked, breaking me from my revere as we parked in front of the restaurant she had chosen. It was a Thai place, and I only went there because she enjoyed it. I hated Thai food. I didn’t answer as we both got off the bike and set our helmets down on the seat. “Listen, I know Christina can be a bit much, but honestly we don’t hang out that much anymore. I just feel bad for her because she was an orphan and then her husband killed himself.” Instead of looking as though she felt bad, Lindsay appeared irate. She waved it all off. “We don’t have to hang out with her much, okay? Just every once in a while. I’m afraid if she has no one she’ll do what everyone else in her life has done and check out, you know?” She made the motion of slitting her finger across her throat, and I was appalled that she was talking about her best friend possibly killing herself in such a callous way.
“What the fuck, Lindsay? I thought she was your best friend?”
She stiffened then. “She is. I just… Well… It can be exhausting dealing with her. She’s so angry and sad all the time.”
“Did you ever think that maybe instead of being a dick about it you could, I don’t know, try to cheer her up? Maybe even hear her out, and let her get all of her anger and sadness out to a friend? Sometimes people carry that shit with them until they can unload it, and once they do, they feel the weight of the world lifted off their shoulders.” At least, that’s how I thought it would feel to finally unload all of my own bullshit.
She looked properly chastised and then pouted, feeling sorry for herself more than for her friend. “I know, it’s just hard. Steven, her husband, he was my friend too, and I didn’t feel like I could mourn him because she had that market cornered. Not sure why she cared. He left her a note that he’d been seeing someone else for almost their whole marriage, and had a…” she choked up, and turned away from me. “He had a baby on the way with another woman. So, he took his
own life.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I suggested.
“There was more to it than that, I’m sure,” she attempted to justify. “Anyway, it was hard watching her be sad and angry about that.”
“Why do you tell her a man she met in a cemetery is her soulmate?” I asked in an attempt to change the subject a bit, because it was pissing me off that this woman thought it was too hard to watch her friend go through shit instead of helping her out.
She rolled her eyes. “At first, it was just because she was finally thinking of someone other than Steven. I figured if I encouraged it, she would see that there was more out there for her. Besides, Steven never was her soulmate. He was just someone she met when she was young, after her mom killed her dad and herself, and she clung to him. He was too nice a guy to let go of her.”
I took a step back from Lindsay, eyeing her, and not feeling good about what she was saying. “So, you keep feeding her a line of shit about how some stranger is her soulmate, and you don’t think it will fuck with her head?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “She has been obsessively painting the guy for two years. It’s more of a joke now than anything.”
“Why do you think she does it?”
“Something about his eyes,” she told me and shrugged. “I don’t know, because she never let me see any of them. She’s always going on about how she saw herself in his eyes, the pain, and anger, and…” she stopped and turned to look at me. “Can we not do this? I don’t want to sit here and analyze my friend. She’s been through some shit, and she’s a bit quirky. That’s it. Now, can we go in and eat, I’m starved!”
“Yeah,” I told her as we moved inside. I wasn’t the least bit hungry and wouldn’t be eating here. Hell, even if it was my favorite place, I think I left my appetite back in that girl’s apartment. Christina. I finally had a name for her after all this time. Only now, I knew it would be impossible to ever really get to know her. Karma was a bitter bitch. She dangled the perfect woman in front of me and then set me up so that I could never have her. Instead, I had to settle for the best friend, who I was starting to see wasn’t the greatest person in the world. She played a good game and pretended to be, but the more I was around her, the more her mask slipped.
As Lindsay ordered her food and I declined to order anything, the surprised look on Christina’s face kept coming back to me. Then the disappointment that was there and gone again, hidden away before her best friend could see it. I glanced back at Lindsay, who was prattling on about some shoes she wanted to buy and thought that there was no way she would have stayed quiet if their situations were reversed. She would have immediately claimed me as her cemetery man, soul mate that she had been painting for years. That was the difference between a good woman, a loyal friend, and one that was faking it. It was also the difference between what I wanted and what I felt I deserved.
Chapter 10
Fallout
Christina (Age 23)
Present
The mail never looked so good as when I was holding two job offers in my hands. There was one for a local gallery who needed someone to manage it full time. Benefits were included and it was only a short distance from the apartment I’d been in since I turned 18. There was a comfort in not having to leave the only home I’d known since I left the care of the State of South Carolina.
Thinking about my best friend dating the man who she had been calling my soulmate for two years made me take a serious look at the other offer that was in my hands. It wouldn’t be much of a move, not like the one to New York would have been, but it would get me a little further away, and hopefully off of my best friend’s radar for the most part. Savannah, Georgia was only a hop, skip, and jump across the state line from Charleston, but one that I knew my friend rarely took.
“Am I really thinking of running away from my best friend?” Glancing around my apartment, at the memories laid out before me, I knew it was more than that. I had often spent nights lying awake in the bed I had once shared with my husband, wondering if he had ever brought his other woman back to our apartment. Had he ruined the only safe place I had, tainted it with her presence? I didn’t know, and it had always bothered me. Maybe the move could be a fresh start for me too. Something to cleanse my past from me.
My mind made up, I pulled out my cell phone and called the number on the business card that had been enclosed with my recruitment letter. I was taking that job in Savannah and starting fresh with my life.
Two days later I received a text from Lindsay while I was packing.
Lindsay: We didn’t really get a chance to talk the other day. Can you meet for lunch?
Christina: When and where?
Lindsay: Millers All Day around 11, sound good?
Christina: Sure. See you there.
I glanced around at all the boxes and knew I needed a break. It had been heartbreaking knowing that as I moved, I would finally have to box up what was left of Steven’s life and get rid of it. I didn’t want it to all follow me around, along with the constant questions and unhappy memories they left me with. I pulled the hoodie he was so fond of wearing up to my nose one more time. The scent of him was long gone now, but I still closed my eyes and remembered back to when he wore this as we held hands while walking out of school. He had taken me to the beach and put it on me when I got chilled. There were so many memories wrapped up in it, and then there was the three-month period where it had gone missing.
It had been one of my favorite things to wear when he was busy at work. It always reminded me that he’d be home soon. It took three months of me badgering him about it before he finally brought it home to me, and he had not seemed as happy about ‘finding it’ as I had. Now, knowing what I did, it made me wonder if the other woman had tried to claim it the same way I had. “Ugh!” I yelled out as I threw the damned thing into a box marked for the dump. “This is exactly why everything has to go,” I said to the offending garment. “I can’t take tainted memories with me.”
I put the rest of the clothing in a box that I had kept out for various reasons over the last few years. Then I got my ass up and went to get ready for a lunch date with my friend. The distance that had grown between us since losing Steven made me wonder if I hadn’t lost her then too. Maybe for different reasons, but I still felt as though she was already gone from my life in a strange sort of way. That probably made me a bad friend, but it didn’t mean I had control over being able to shake the feeling or not.
I didn’t feel like such a bad friend when the first words out of Lindsay’s mouth at the restaurant were, “Wow, you like you were run over by a truck or something. What gives?”
“It’s nice to see you too, Lindsay,” I offered sarcastically as I took my seat.
“I’m just worried about you.”
“It’s fine. I’ve been packing.”
“Packing?”
“Yeah, I got a job offer,” I told her.
“The one in New York?”
“No. I’ll be headed to Savannah.”
“Oh, why are you moving then? It’s not that far.”
“I need a new start,” I told her and then turned my attention to the waiter who had made his way over to us. After placing my order, she was just staring at me.
“What are you doing with all of Steven’s things?”
“Throwing them out,” I told her. Lindsay’s eyes widened in surprise.
“You’re throwing it all away? How could you do that? I mean, how can you bring yourself to do that after hanging onto it all this time?”
I shrugged. “It’s not healthy. What’s the point in hanging on to anything of his when he let me go long before he took himself out of the equation?”
“Do you want me to come pick it up and take it the dump for you?”
“No. I hired someone to do it,” I told her.
“Oh, so you’re finally using that insurance money, huh?”
“I haven’t touched a dime of it. I got my second installment for th
e art I sold while in New York.”
“Huh,” she kind of huffed out. “Was that a lot?”
“It was enough,” I told her, not really wanting to share.
“We were apart too long,” she finally mentioned before grabbing hold of my hand. “I know you feel it too. It’s like there’s a rift between us, and I know part of that is my fault because I didn’t just let you grieve in your own time. I’m sorry about that, Christina. I really am.” She smiled brightly at me then. “I might screw it all up sometimes, but I’m here whenever you need me.”
The waiter interrupted as he sat my drink and baked goodie on the table in front of me. Once I took a bite of heaven, I glanced back up at Lindsay.
“If you need help moving your stuff, I’m sure Jay and his brother wouldn’t mind lending a hand.”
“That’s okay,” I assured her. “I already hired movers to get it done this week so that I can get into my new apartment.” I had no choice but to hire because I already knew that I couldn’t count on anyone in this life to help me out. My family was gone.
After lunch with Lindsay, I went back to my apartment to finish packing everything up. When I finally got to the paintings I had been doing of Jay, I hesitated. There was a small part of me that kept chanting about throwing them away with Steven’s stuff. Obviously, if the man was with my best friend, I could never be with him. There was no hope for anything further there. For a brief moment, I thought about giving them all to Lindsay, but I quickly disregarded that because she would pitch a fit if she found out that her boyfriend and my cemetery guy were one and the same. Instead of doing the smart thing and throwing them out with Steven’s remaining things, I packed them up and they moved with me to Savannah.
The Killing Ride Page 7