“Ya know. Wrapped up in yourself. School. The future. We never have fun anymore.”
I’m not blind to my faults. Whenever I get lost in tasks, Paige is there to pull me out and remind me to have some fun. I’m very goal oriented, some would say oblivious to others when it comes to my own aspirations. I can be single-minded and forceful in my own opinions, but I would never even consider cheating on Gavin.
“Fun,” I repeat. The word sounds strange, not because I don’t have fun anymore, but because he’s using it as an excuse to cheat on me. “We don’t have fun.”
He shrugs, and I’m so consumed with the urge to wrap my hands around his throat, I have to turn around. With quick, clipped steps, I force myself to walk out of the storage room and back through the heavy doors. Compared to the dark, intimate lighting in the storage area, the LED bulbs are blinding. I shove my way through displays and racks of Florida Southern University gear until I reach the automatic doors.
“Piper!” Joseph comes around the corner of the checkout counter, his mouth pulled into a frown. His head swivels when he spots Gavin storming out of the storage room.
“Thanks for your help!” I wave to Joseph and barrel through the door before it’s even completely open. I try to lose myself in the afternoon crowd, but when I look back, Gavin is right behind me. He is reaching for me as if to grab me, but I don’t let him. Whirling around, eyes flashing, I spit out, “Don’t touch me!” in a voice more brittle than I’d like.
The crowd around us slows to watch, and I swear I can hear the click, click, click of a shutter as he steps forward with his hands in front of him. My teeth grind together as I shake my head. I do not want him to freaking touch me. When he steps toward me again, I step off the sidewalk, just needing to get him away from me, and a car honks. I don’t know how close I come to being hit, because almost as soon as it happens, someone is pulling me to safety.
Joseph’s warm brown eyes hold my blue ones and, for a second, I am thankful he’s there. “Are you okay?”
Then I hear Gavin’s shouts and I push away, needing the space. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
The crowd continues on its way now that the drama is dying down. Gavin tries to elbow his way through a couple burly dudes, but they’re too distracted by hitting on a couple of sorority sisters to care. I use the few seconds he’s distracted to bolt in the other direction.
Joseph jogs to keep up with me. “Are you sure you’ll be okay? I don’t know what happened between you, but you shouldn’t run off mad like this.”
The light changes and traffic starts, so I stop at a crosswalk and stab at the button. “I’m okay, I promise, but I appreciate your help back there.”
“Anytime.”
My phone buzzes against my thigh, causing me to jerk. With a self-depreciating laugh, I pull it out and find a text from Paige. I curse under my breath, remembering I forgot to update her after my class about Carly.
To think my biggest worry this morning was midterms.
I put my hand over the phone after I press the call back button. To Joseph, I say, “I owe you.”
His lips spread in a grin. “Fine by me. You can treat me to lunch tomorrow.”
Before I can say anything else, Joseph sprints back down the sidewalk, passes an open-mouthed Gavin, and disappears into the bookstore.
“Piper? PIPER!” Paige screams in my ear.
“Hey, I meant to text you back—”
Paige makes an impatient sound. “They found her.”
Shaky laughter escapes my throat. God, what a day. “Thank God, is she at the apartment?”
“No—” A sob cuts down the line, and my whole body goes still. Every cell inside me already knows what she’s about to say, but my brain refuses to acknowledge it. When she gathers herself, her voice is no more than a whisper, forcing the words into my ears and making the situation real. “I mean the police found her. S-she’s dead.”
Piper
I don’t get much sleep.
Paige, who was closer to Carly than I was, cries for hours until finally passing out from exhaustion. I don’t dare leave her side, so I spend the sleepless few hours until daybreak on a chair beside her bed in case she wakes up in hysterics. It gives me entirely too much time to think, and by seven, I’m contemplating waking her up. I don’t, and it’s another hour of having my own thoughts for company before she wakes.
“Time izit?” Paige sits up, rubbing at her bloodshot eyes.
“About eight.”
She explodes from the bed in a flurry of blankets and shedding clothes. “I’m gonna be late for class.”
“Paige.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” She shrugs into a hoodie, which muffles her voice. “I have a lecture at eight thirty!”
“Paige.”
Her head pokes out of the neck, her hair disheveled, and her face pale against the dark blue material. “We emailed our professors yesterday. We don’t have to go to class today. We’re excused.”
She frowns at me as she ties up her hair in a messy bun. “Why would you—” Then her eyes widen, and she claps a hand over her mouth. Fresh tears sheen her eyes. “Oh my God.”
Even though my legs are weak with exhaustion, I get to my feet and cross the room to pull her into a hug. “We’ll get through this.”
“How?” she whispers. “How do we get through this?”
“Together.”
Her arms come around me then and squeeze tight. “I just don’t understand.”
“I know.” I have to pause around my own tears. “I know. I don’t either.”
When her tears abate, she pulls back and wipes her face. “You look worse than I do and that’s saying something. Did you sleep at all?”
I shake my head and wince at the resulting throbbing. The headache I can’t seem to shake pulses angrily behind my eyes. “I couldn’t. I was worried about you.”
Her face softens. “Why don’t you go take a shower, and then it’ll be my turn to take care of you. Maybe take a nap after?”
“A nap sounds like heaven, but we promised we’d go talk to the police today. They want to take our statement.”
She shoves me in the direction of the bathroom. “Fine, take a shower, and I’ll grab some coffee. Lots of coffee.”
Twenty minutes later, she cracks open the door and thrusts a hand holding a cup through. The scent emanating from it is enough to make me groan aloud. “Thank you.”
Paige peeks her head in. “Thank you. You’re a good person, you know that?”
“I’ll remind you of this conversation the next time I forget to do laundry or wash the dishes.”
She opens her mouth to speak, and then her eyes widen. I know without asking that whatever she had been about to say was about Carly. Even gone, her presence is still all over our apartment.
“I ordered a cab,” she says instead. “They should be here in about twenty minutes.”
I nod and she closes the door. When I hear her footsteps recede down the hall, I lean my forehead against the wood. I give myself a few minutes to surrender to my own tears.
The bus stop just outside our apartment is full of students and every single one of them glance over at Paige and I as we cross the sidewalk to the waiting cab. The news spread much faster than I thought it would, which is silly. I should have known something like this would reach every inch of campus.
“Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department, right?” the driver asks as we get in and buckle our seat belts.
“Yes, thanks,” Paige answers. She leans against the seat and closes her eyes.
I pull out my phone, hoping to lose myself in the mindless, banal updates on my social media. Then the page loads, and all I see are pictures of Carly’s face and posts from all of her other friends mourning her death.
I don’t want to know the details.
I don’t want the last memory I have of Carly to be tainted with the bloody residue of her death, but social media has no conscience, and it only takes one swipe for me to
see the gruesome reports of the last minutes of her life.
My eyes scan the words before I can tear myself away.
Carly was raped repeatedly, sodomized, brutally beaten, and finally strangled. Her naked body was dumped like garbage in a wooded area not far from the venue where the party had been held. A place where we’d all gone for various get-togethers and parties. Her face was nearly unrecognizable and her hair had been hacked off.
A strangled sound escapes my throat, and Paige sits up in her seat. “Are you okay?” she asks.
I toss my phone into my purse, willing the images away. “I’m sorry.” I clear my throat, hoping I sound more convincing. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
She takes my hand in hers. “It’ll be okay.”
“Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the strong one.”
Her hand squeezes mine. “You can’t be strong all the time. You have to break a little.”
“I’ll break after we find out who did this to Carly.”
The ride to the police station is a short one. The receptionist takes our names and information, and we sit in a cramped little room until an officer with graying hair leads us to a freezing conference room with a battered table in the center and chipped filing cabinets lining the walls. We take a pair of seats and the officer, who introduces himself as Detective Manning, sits across from us.
He slaps a legal pad down on the table and uncaps a pen. “I’m sorry for the loss of your friend. I’ll do what I can to be as brief as possible.”
Paige smiles, but it’s a ghost of her normal cheerful expression. “Thank you.”
“How about we start with the last time you saw Carly?” he asks, pen poised over the legal pad.
“Um, Friday,” Paige answers but then looks to me for confirmation.
I nod. “She’d just gotten off work—she was a receptionist at a doctor’s office—and she was going out to a friend’s birthday party.”
He asks for the name of the doctor’s office and scribbles it across the notepad. “Did you hear from her the rest of the night? Maybe a text letting you know when she was coming home?”
“Around ten or ten thirty,” I glance to Paige for confirmation and it’s her turn to nod. “She texted me to let me know she was going to be late. The party ran long.”
“Do you have the exact time?” Manning asks.
I fumble with my purse and pull out my phone. Carly’s face greets me as I open our last conversation. The reality that I’ll never see her again hits me right in the gut, stealing the breath straight from my lungs. It takes a moment for me to remember what I am looking for. Blinking back tears, I tap our last message and provide him with the time stamp.
Manning jots it down on his legal pad, his brows furrowed. “And did she mention meeting someone there? A man she was going home with, maybe?”
Paige shakes her head and looks down at the table. “She didn’t say. We didn’t hear from her after that.”
“If she were to meet someone, would she leave with them without telling you?” Manning asks.
“That was what we thought happened at first, but she would have let us know the day after. It’s how we knew something was wrong.” Realizing how it sounds, I add, “She wasn’t . . . promiscuous or anything. She didn’t go home with every guy she met.”
“I understand.”
Paige taps her thumb against the wood tabletop. “I don’t even think she’d have gone home with anyone. We had important classes this week. It wasn’t like her to be reckless and put her personal life ahead of school, not even for a cute guy.”
Manning’s impassive face softens. “Whatever happened, this was not her fault, and we’re going to do whatever we can to find the person responsible.”
“Thank you,” Paige says.
He nods. “Now, was she involved with anyone? Did either of you notice anyone paying her a lot of attention that made her uncomfortable? An ex-boyfriend maybe?”
Paige and I share a glance. “She wasn’t seeing anyone new that I know of,” Paige tells him.
“Me either. Her last relationship was last year, and there hasn’t really been anyone since. She was more interested in playing the field and her work.”
“Around when was this?”
I rub at my temples and squeeze my eyes shut. “June, I think.”
“We can get you her laptop, if that helps. I mean, if her parents say it’s okay. I’m not really sure how this works. We just want to help find who did this to her.”
He questions us for another half hour, and we tell him everything we remember about Friday, her friends, and her habits, but to me, none of it points to who killed her. For all I know, she went to her friend’s birthday party and was abducted the moment she left. Based on what he told us, no one at the party saw her leave with anyone, though one person did see her walking out to her car.
It’s like whomever attacked her is a ghost.
“How are you holding up?”
Joseph pulls me into the dark recesses of a near empty coffee shop and guides me to a table in a corner. I let him because I don’t have any energy to protest.
“I’m exhausted.” I don’t go into more detail, but I am running on three hours of sleep. Paige was a wreck after we got back from the police station, and I spent the whole night sitting next to her and making sure that she was okay.
“You wait here.” Joseph plants me in a seat. “I’ll go get us a coffee and something to eat.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
He just smiles. “You look like you’re about to pass out. I’ll get you a Panini to go with the coffee.”
Overcome with gratitude, I smile. “Thanks.”
I shed my purse and hang it on the back of my chair. My eyes feel like they’re made of paper, and I could use about a ten-year nap, but when I tried to lie down, sleep wouldn’t come. Every time I closed my eyes, I would end up replaying the last time I saw Carly.
The sad thing, one of many, is that I can’t remember what we talked about or if she knew how much I cared about her. Tears fill my eyes, and I blink them away before Joseph comes back. Inhaling slow and steady, I try to focus on something else, anything else, to distract me. When Paige is able to make it through the day without bursting into tears, I’ll allow myself the reprieve of dealing with my own emotions, but until then, she needs me to be the strong one.
When I look up again, I find the doorway full of students coming in from classes, their eyes all on me—each expression full of pity, sadness, and uneasiness.
Disgusted and unable to watch them while they watch me, I keep my eyes on the table until Joseph returns.
“Sorry. They took forever.” He sets two plates with steaming sandwiches and two paper cups full of coffee on the table. He pushes mine in my direction.
“No, that’s okay. Thank you.” I sip the coffee but barely taste it. “I hope you don’t mind if I’m not too chatty today.”
He waves my concerns away. “I’d be more worried if you were. I just wanted to make sure you were okay after what happened with Carly and then that shit between you and Gavin the other day.”
For a second, I don’t remember what he’s talking about. Then it’s all there again.
At my crestfallen look, he winces. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bring it up—”
I take another sip of my coffee before I respond. “I completely forgot. Shit, what a couple of days.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like hell. You need to take care of yourself.”
“I haven’t been getting much sleep,” I admit, sliding the sandwich he got me closer and picking up half. “It’s been hard on Paige.”
“Do the police have any updates?”
“Not many. They aren’t even sure if it’s related to the disappearance of the other girl.” I say, forcing myself to take a bite. I can’t remember the last time I ate anything.
“They’ll come up with something soon. They’ll find the guy.”
“I hope so.�
��
We both eat and chat some more, the topic turning from Carly to other, easier, subjects. He tells me a funny story about work that I manage to laugh at, and I tell him about what happened with Gavin.
Joseph frowns. “What a dick!”
I wipe my mouth with a napkin. “Tell me about it.”
“I hope you don’t think what he did is a reflection of you.”
“Right now, Gavin is the least of my worries.”
Piper
The ripple of awareness slithers across my skin, and I shiver at its unwelcome caress. I steel myself with a sip of God-only-knows what cheap brand of beer they have on tap. It leaves a bitter taste on my tongue . . . or maybe that’s just regret. Regret for coming out tonight. Regret for the sudden and absolute mess I’ve made of my life. Regret that, in spite of it all, I can’t seem to muster up the energy to care enough to claw my way out.
The shadows shift to my right, and when I glance over, my ex-boyfriend Gavin rests his elbows on the deck railing next to me. I drown the resulting spark of attraction that ignites with another long gulp from my pint glass.
Gavin. Another regret.
I shouldn’t have come out tonight, but I needed the change of scenery so desperately. In the three weeks since Carly’s murder, I haven’t been able to focus. The fear on campus has abated. The prevailing opinion seems to be that she was killed by a drifter. Someone passing through. Since the body of the senior was never recovered, they don’t think it is the same person and everyone has returned to normal.
Everyone except Paige and me, who are reminded every day that evil touched our lives when we pass her still-empty room. We haven’t had the heart to rent it out again. Maybe in a few weeks when we aren’t so raw. I turn to Gavin and look up into his familiar face. The pain from his betrayal is muted with the warmth of the alcohol in my belly and the sharp ache of Carly’s loss. His actions seem so very trivial in comparison.
“I’m surprised to see you here.” His voice is smooth and low enough that I automatically want to lean closer to hear, to bathe in the comfort his closeness has always given me.
First to Fight Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 57