As I was about to tumble into the oblivion of an orgasm provided by Nick, I placed my hands alongside his face. He opened his eyes and saw me looking at him. He stopped moving suddenly.
“I love you,” I said softly.
He looked at me for a second more then kissed me hard and drove into me as I fell apart.
Nick
When I woke up in the morning I was alone in Lyndsey’s bed. I stretched, smelling her on the pillows under my head. I breathed the coconut scent in deeply and smiled. Goddamn. I was in love. I closed my eyes and thought back to the look on her face when she told me she loved me. I was too overwhelmed with the feelings and my hard-on to say it back to her, but this morning? Oh yeah. I was going to tell that gorgeous woman I loved her all day and then I was going to show her all night. Okay, maybe I’d show her a few times today too.
The adrenaline pumped through my system. Being in love felt like a million bucks, and I was ready to share that feeling with the whole damn world. I sat up and looked at Jack who was lying at the bottom of the bed waiting for me to acknowledge him.
I reached down and patted his head. “Hey, buddy. How’s it going?” He started his usual wiggle and quickly moved up the bed until he was on top of me, licking my face. I scratched his head and gave him some loving before I asked, “So, where’s our girl, huh? Did she go somewhere already today?”
I got out of bed and Jack hopped down and looked at me as though he was waiting for something. I pulled on my boxer briefs on the floor next to the bed and made my way into the rest of the apartment. No Lyndsey in the living room. No Lyndsey in the kitchen. I glanced around the looking for clues to where she might have gone, a niggling sense of foreboding started to trickle through me. I remembered my phone was still in the pocket of my shorts, so I made my way back to the bedroom and reached down to the floor to grab it out of the pocket. That’s when I saw the note. It was sitting on the nightstand next to the bed and had Nick written in big bold letters on the front.
There wasn’t any reason I should have felt scared to read that note. Logic told me it was something like, “Went to grab eggs be right back.” But logic had left my mind as I felt an icy chill run through my veins and my heart rate kick up a notch. I sat on the edge of the bed and opened the stiff folded paper.
Nick,
I feel like I should start this off with ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m sorry for not being honest with you, I’m sorry for not being able to give you what you deserve. I’m sorry for doing things this way, and most of all I’m sorry that I’m not the kind of person you think I am. I’m not the right woman for you, Nick. I’m not a good person. Not like you.
No matter what you think happened in Afghanistan, you are a hero. You’ve been my hero ever since we met. You helped me face up to something I’d kept hidden a long time. You trusted me when I hadn’t earned it, and stuck by me when most other guys wouldn’t have.
I meant what I said last night. I love you. I think I’ll always love you. There’re only two other things I’ve ever loved in my life, one of them is gone forever, and one of them is probably sitting there drooling on you while you read this. I can’t take Jack where I’m going. Will you please do one last thing for me, even though I know I don’t deserve it? Please take care of Jack. If not for me, then for him. He’s been with me through a lot, and he’s earned everything good in life.
—Love, Lyndsey
My first instinct was to run for the door, to stop her. But, my heart told me she was long gone. My next instinct was to do damage. Whatever I could as fast as I could. I picked up the lamp sitting on the nightstand and threw it across the room.
“What the fuck!” I yelled at the top of my lungs as a desperation I hadn’t experienced in so long settled in my chest. My breathing increased and my limbs tingled with the surplus of anxiety coursing through me. I stood up and kicked the wall a couple of times with my bare foot. One of the many poor choices I was in the process of making. My fist followed soon after and the pain of putting that hole in the wall brought a moment of clarity to my fogged-over mind.
I grabbed the cell phone I’d come to get earlier, and hit speed dial number three.
“This is Scott Davis,” he answered.
I was breathing so rapidly I could barely speak. “It’s Nick.”
“Okay, Nick, try to relax. Remember, one breath in, count to three, one breath out, count to three. Can you do that for me?”
“Just come. Please.”
“Where are you? Tell me and I’ll be right there.”
* * *
By the time Scott arrived, I had destroyed the remaining lamps in the house then grabbed a large bowl of ice and plunged my foot into it. The shock of the cold helped me calm down some, but I was still seeing black spots on the edges of my vision as I sat on Lyndsey’s sofa when he came into her apartment.
“Nick,” he said when he opened the door.
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
He sat down on the armchair next to the sofa, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at me.
“Nice place. Is it yours?”
“No.”
“So, I’m guessing . . .” He looked around the room for a moment. “It’s Lyndsey’s.”
“Was,” I mumbled.
“You gonna to tell me what’s going on?”
I raised my head and met his eyes. “I thought I’d done it. I thought I’d saved her, you know. I was always here for her. I gave her space when she needed it, but I didn’t let her push me away either. I was patient, man, so patient. And she said . . . she said she loved me. If I’d just said it back maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”
“Nick, listen to me. Where is Lyndsey?” I could hear the concern under his professionally calm voice.
“She left. She left me. I don’t know where she went or why, she just left.” I reached into my pocket with my good hand and brought out the note. I shoved it at him.
He sat for a minute and read it, then folded it up and handed it back to me. “If that’s any indication, this doesn’t have anything to do with what you did or didn’t say, Nick. This is her problem. Can’t you see that?”
I shook my head, not wanting to accept it. “No. It’s me, I fucking failed again. I didn’t save her, and now she’s gone.”
“Hey. Look at me,” Scott demanded.
I gazed into his face. He looked sorry, but also determined.
“She’s got things she’s dealing with, Nick. Things that seem to have nothing to do with you. It wasn’t up to you to fix her or rescue her or anything else. You fell in love with her, and once that happened the only ‘job’ you had was to do that—love her . . .” He paused, seeming to consider what he’d say next.
“I’m going to short-circuit the therapy process here because I think you need to get this and you’re in a situation where your time’s run out. You can go around saving every woman you meet for the next fifty years and it’s not going to change what happened to Aubra. It also won’t fix you, Nick. Saving them won’t save you. You latched onto Lyndsey like she was the lifeboat that was going to take you away from the Titanic. It was a good thing to come out of hiding, but not this way. The only person you can save is yourself. It’s time for you to do that.”
I put my head down in my hands and winced as my bashed-up fist throbbed. I could hear him stand up and move toward the door. “You’re not going to hurt yourself—at least not any more than you already have—and you’re not going to hurt anyone else, so I’m leaving now. And Nick? Come back to me when you’re ready to save the right person.” Then he opened up the door and walked out, leaving me with a dog, a trashed apartment, and the ghost of the woman I loved.
Chapter 13
Lyndsey
The dark sedan had been following me for about twenty miles, and as much as I wanted to believe I could ditch it when I got to the town of Volcano, I wasn’t sure. I thanked heaven I’d had enough sense not to visit the playground one last time like I’d wanted to. It was
a weekday and she almost certainly would have been there playing before going to preschool. If it really was Chris behind me in that car I would have led him right to the one thing he couldn’t know about.
When I’d stopped off to say goodbye to Leesa and Raoul they’d told me that I could stay at their cabin outside of Volcano as long as I needed, but at this point I was thinking if I could hide there for a night I’d be lucky.
My mind drifted back to my discussion with Raoul when I left. “I wish you’d tell me what’s going on,” he’d said.
“I wish I could too. Can you trust me that I’m okay and I really need to do this on my own?”
He’d rubbed his chin, then looked at me from under his brows. “I love you, you know that, right?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak for fear I’d break down.
“I’m going to keep doing the chemo, but you know that’ll only postpone the inevitable. You’d better get back here before it’s too late. I really don’t want this to be the last time I see you, girl.”
I bit down on my lip, then threw my arms around his neck, feeling how much thinner he already was since the last time I’d hugged him. “I swear to you that I’ll be back. You’ll see me again, I promise.” I pulled back and smoothed out his T-shirt as if it were a lawyer’s one-hundred-dollar dress shirt.
“Okay. Don’t get yourself upset. Just go take care of it and get back here.”
Leesa had handed me an enormous basket of food that she’d seemingly produced out of thin air, and I’d taken it and the keys to their cabin and driven away from their house near Keaukaha beach before the sun was even fully up.
Now, after driving for nearly 40 minutes I was getting near Volcano, where you turned off to get to the cabin, and that damned car was still following me. I looked at the GPS to see what was ahead. Just a few miles away was a State Patrol office, so I sped up and headed for it.
* * *
Ten minutes later I’d managed to ditch the car at the State Patrol parking lot, and I was feeling somewhat better. I still didn’t want to take any chances, so I went to the first auto repair shop I saw and parked. After looking around carefully and not seeing anything to worry about, I got out and walked in to the tiny front office.
The room was hot and reeked of motor oil. The guy sitting at the desk had hands covered in grease and was wearing a filthy wifebeater with a short-sleeved button-up over it that said Laukapu Auto Repair on the pocket. He looked up and smiled, revealing a mouth with more than a few teeth missing.
“Help you?” he said.
“Um, yeah. I’ve got my car outside, and I think it needs an oil change, and maybe a frontend alignment. Can you do that?”
“Sure. Yep. Not today though, we’re all booked up. You want to bring it back first thing in the morning?”
I heard the clanging of metal hitting metal in the garage behind the office, and a guy shouted, “Luis! You wanna grab this for me?”
Thinking that if there were more than one employee here I had a better chance of getting what I wanted, I forged on.
“Actually, I wondered if you all might be able to do me a favor? I’m headed to my mom and dad’s cabin and, um . . . God, this is so embarrassing.”
I smiled and batted my lashes as best as I could. The guy just stared at me dumbfounded.
“Okay, so like, I got in a big fight with my boyfriend, and I don’t want him to come up here and try to bother me. I need a little time to think things through, you know? So, I was hoping I could leave the car here overnight and one of your guys could give me a ride to the cabin? That way my boyfriend won’t see my car parked up there and bother me.”
The guy scratched his head for a minute and then said, “Yeah, I guess we could do that, as long as it isn’t too far away. What’s the road?”
I reeled off the address for him and he nodded. “Just a sec.” He walked through the door to the garage. “Hey! Dave! You got an errand to run.”
Thirty minutes later Dave the mechanic had told me all about his three kids, two who played baseball and one who was still in diapers. His old rusted-out pickup bounced over the narrow dirt road to the cabin, Luke Bryan crackling from the worn radio. The cab smelled like the grease that smeared up from his hands onto his arms, and the fabric on the ceiling was torn and brushed against my head every time we hit a big bump, making me think a bug was landing in my hair every few minutes. As he dropped me off at the cabin I reminded him again about my “boyfriend” who might come looking for me.
“Ah, no problem. A nice girl like you shouldn’t have to put up with some asshole boyfriend bothering you when you don’t want him to. And we’re all assholes, you know that, right?”
I laughed.
“You don’t believe me? Just ask my old lady, she’ll tell you. You be careful up here by yourself, and we’ll call you in the morning when the car’s ready and I’ll come back and get you.”
“Thanks a lot, Dave. See you tomorrow.”
The truck bounced off down the dirt road and I walked inside the cabin, locked the door, and set my bags down. Now I needed to make arrangements, lots of them, because I didn’t think it was going to be safe for me here more than one night. I’d bought myself some time. The question was: would it be enough?
Nick
After Scott left, I sat and stared at the floor for a long, long time. My head was swimming, my skin itched, and my foot hurt like a motherfucker. Eventually the adrenaline rush subsided and I stumbled to the bedroom and fell asleep. While I was asleep, I dreamed about her. Her beautiful big brown eyes looking up at me as I drove into her. Her cool, soft hands on my back, nails lightly raking down my sides. When I was on the verge of coming, it felt so real I could have sworn I was inside of her, sheathed in her warm snugness. I woke with my hand around my dick and a severe ache in my balls. I limped to the shower and finished off the job, realizing that I had some decisions to make and they weren’t going to get made if I was jacking off in Lyndsey’s shower all day.
* * *
Two hours later, I stood outside the Natural Sciences building on campus, waiting for Gabe to emerge from his Anatomy class. When he finally did saunter out, it was with a girl under one arm and a skateboard under the other.
“Dude!” he shouted as he saw me. “What the hell happened to your foot?” He looked down at my taped and wrapped toes sticking out of a pair of Teva sandals.
I smiled briefly at the girl he was towing along. “Little mishap. Hey, can I talk to you about something?” I asked, trying to indicate with my eyes that he needed to ditch the redhead.
“Yeah, sure. Hey, baby, I’ll catch up with you at the party tonight, okay?”
She sighed and put on a pout. “You promise?” I could not figure out how he stood these girls.
“Scout’s honor, babe.” He leaned down and gave her a peck on the lips. She smirked at me and shimmied away in her tiny shorts and halter-top.
“She knows you got kicked out of boy scouts, right?”
“Shut up,” he answered. “What’s going on, and what did happen to your foot?”
I gestured for him to sit down on a nearby bench. “I’m pretty sure I broke a couple of toes. I, uh, sort of lost it. Again. I mean it’s been a while, but yeah. I lost it like I used to.”
“Shit.” He looked down at the ground for a moment. “How’d it happen?”
I ran my hand through my hair and leaned my head back against the bench. “It’s Lyndsey. She left this morning.” I pulled the note from my pocket and gave it to him.
“What the hell?” he said after reading it and handing it back to me. “Do you know what any of that even means?”
“No. I just know that I’m in love with her, and she fucking bolted.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find her, and make sure she’s alright, because I do love her. Then I’m finally going to save myself, because Scott’s right. No one else can.”
* * *
My next
stop was The Grill. Leesa was there, commanding the kitchen as usual, and Raoul had taken up a place at one of the tables near the bar. He’d hired another bartender and the new guy was working while Raoul held court. Regulars came through, one after another, stopping to chat, some of them sitting with him for a bit, and others just giving him a pat on the back and a warm wish.
When there was an opening, I dove in and took a chair at his table.
“Ah, it’s one of the Amigos.” He gave me a quick smile.
I shook his hand. “It’s good to see you, Raoul, you’re feeling okay today?”
“Yeah, I felt like crap yesterday, but I’m doing pretty well right now.”
“Good to hear, man.”
“I imagine I know why you’re here. She didn’t tell you where she was going, did she?” he asked.
“Shit. She did come to you. I knew it.” My heart raced at the possibility that I might be on my way to find her before the end of the day.
“Yeah, she came to me—at the crack of dawn this morning at the house. What the hell did you do to her?”
I put up my hands palms out, indicating I was blameless. “Nothing, man, I swear.” I took out her note and showed it to him. After he’d scanned it I asked, “You believe me now?”
“Yeah. We had a hard time with the idea you were involved. That wife of mine’s got a sixth sense about these things, and she said it wasn’t you, but Lyndsey wouldn’t tell us anything, and we had no other ideas.”
“Did she ever tell you about her last boyfriend? Chris? The football player?”
He shook his head. “Naw. She never talked about her past at all, just the few basics. Albuquerque, mom who’s dead, dad who took off, that’s about it.”
“Well, I probably shouldn’t be the one to tell you this, but dammit I think you deserve to know, and I’ve got to find her, Raoul.”
He nodded, his lips clamped tightly together.
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