Pieces of Eight (Mad Love Duet Book 2)

by Whitney Barbetti

  Maybe that was why I felt so heavy. I hadn’t known what it was like to carry guilt with me until now. Even more, I hadn’t known that I could without hurting myself.

  It was also the first time I carried a grief that didn’t threaten to kill me. It was heavy, yes. It was a burden. But it was something he’d given me. I didn’t mind the ache, didn’t need to drown it. Because I didn’t want to forget Six or the life he’d shown me. The life I hadn’t known was attainable until now.

  Holy shit. Goosebumps lit up my skin with the realization that I was living with the pain of his absence and not killing myself over it. Literally.

  And that gut punch realization had me putting a hand to my stomach when the flood of missing him filled all the hollowed-out parts of me. The deeper you suffered, the deeper you loved, as he’d said. And it turned out that the depth of my suffering had made way for a flood of feeling.

  I missed him so much. It was hitting me then, as I looked at my new home, the home that wouldn’t have him in it. A new beginning for me. One that didn’t include Six.

  “Are you okay?” Brooke asked.

  “What?” She’d abruptly pulled me out of thought.

  “Uhh,” she looked uneasy and I blinked as she stood and grabbed a paper towel. That’s when I felt the tears in my eyes. My hands went to my face and came away wet.

  “I’m crying,” I said. That probably sounded insane to Brooke, for me to say something that obvious out loud. I might’ve assured her of my sobriety, but clearly my sanity was another matter.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I swallowed and swiped the paper towel over my face. “Yes. I mean, it hurts. But I think it’s just hitting me right now. I have to start over, from the beginning. An end of my old life.” I thought of my parting words to Six, but this beginning wouldn’t have an end.

  “It’s not a start over.” Brooke shook her head. “It’s like yesterday was the semicolon of the sentence that is your life. There’s more to come after, though. Not an end. Not a beginning. It’s a pause, really.” She looked up at the ceiling above us. “That’s how I thought of my time living with you. A pause. With more to come.”

  “A new season,” I said, understanding.

  “Exactly. Do you need another paper towel?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I mean, it still hurts. But it’s the good kind of hurt.”

  She looked puzzled. “What kind of hurt is the good kind?”

  “Sometimes, the pain is all that’s left to assure you it was real.” And that’s what I’d take with me, into the new season of Mira.

  “What do you want to do next?”

  I flicked to the heart on her wrist. “I want a tattoo.”

  The tattoo artist had looked at me funny when I’d asked him to make the word backwards, but he’d done it by tracing over the printed word, flipped over. We’d taken care to apply it high up on my chest, right over the skin that covered my heart.

  The first time the needle bit my skin, my heart lit up like a fucking Christmas tree. It was as if I was coming alive again, as if the needle itself was a direct link to the part of me that still wanted to cause hurt, the same part of me that hurt to heal. The tattoo was as permanent as my scars, but it was more deliberate, done with love. For him; for me.

  Seventy dollars later—which was most of what I had left in my account, I had the word inked on my skin, the word I’d use to guide myself into the new season of my life. A permanent reminder to keep doing what I’d promised I’d do: fight.

  4

  Well, after my first day working with Marco, one thing was for damn sure: Brooke hadn’t been lying when she’d called him an asshole.

  Or, had she called him that? Or was that me?

  First, the dough wasn’t right. The bagels didn’t fucking float so he told me, in a condescending voice, that meant the dough wasn’t ready. Brooke gave me an apologetic smile and after Marco left, she assured me that she thought the dough was ready.

  Then the cookies I’d rolled out were too thin, which meant the undersides were crunchy and tops were too soft. Undercooked. When I’d protested that a lot of people liked the combination of undercooked center to crispy edges in their cookies, Marco had looked at me with blank eyes and said, “A lot of people die of e. coli too. Doesn’t mean that’s how we cook them.”

  “Sometimes I eat raw dough out of the tube,” I retorted. “Haven’t died yet.”

  “The day is still young,” he returned with eyes that told me he wanted to strangle me.

  But it didn’t bother me. If anything, I found it funny. But even I knew that laughing to his face wasn’t cool, so I waited until he left and turned to Brooke. “Wow, he’s something else.”

  “Right? And I think he’s exaggerating on the e. coli shit. He thinks being a dick is a good way to figure out who’s going to stick around for the long term. Once you’ve passed his asshole phase, he’s normal boss Marco.”

  “So I’ll know I’m in the clear when he doesn’t insult something I did?”

  “Precisely.” She handed me the cookie sheet she’d emptied. “I’m surprised you haven’t lashed out at him.”

  I was too. But a lot of that was because Marco didn’t make me lose my patience. He was smart. His training tactics could use a little finessing, but he wasn’t scaring me away. If anything was scaring me away, it was the way my arms ached three hours into rolling out dough and lifting commercial-sized cookie sheets from the ovens. I was no stranger to fitness, not with my running and the self-defense training. But baking made me realize there were muscles I wasn’t used to using.

  “So, are you in this dungeon the entire time?”

  Brooke glanced around the space that resembled more of a fancy meth lab than a dungeon, but because it was so dark and partially underground in the back of the restaurant, it felt like a dungeon. Even the door that separated us from the regular kitchen was large and industrial. I imagined Marco taking delight in locking us in here and forcing us to work until we were old and gray.

  “I usually am, unless I’m helping prep the bakery case out front.”

  I grabbed the refrigerated dough and rolled it out.

  “The trick here,” she began, stepping beside me, “is to hurry through this process. The reason your cookies spread so much and didn’t cook thoroughly is because by the time they got into the oven, they were room temperature. So, the bottoms browned quicker than the rest of the cookie could bake and the fat in them made them spread. Putting cold cookie dough in the oven keeps them from spreading too much and makes them chewy all over.”

  “See?” I told her, watching her go to work. “I don’t know shit about baking.”

  “Well, duh. No one does, until they learn. Grab that cookie sheet on the rack.”

  I placed it beside her and with the speed of a fine-tuned assembly line robot, she lined all three dozen cookies up in under a minute and put them right in the oven.

  “There.” She called me to follow her to the deep sink at the back and we washed our hands.

  “You could take a bath in here,” I remarked, leaning in until my palms were flat on the bottom, which caused my whole head to go in too.

  She pulled my arm out. “Well, I wouldn’t suggest you do that if you’d like to keep working in here.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration,” I said, and smiled—genuinely. It felt good to smile like that and it’d been so long since I had. The ache was still there, but for the moment it wasn’t taking center stage, allowing me to focus on the task at hand.

  She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “We’ve got just a couple more hours to go.”

  “Cool. More time to build my case for a hostile work environment against Marco.”

  She glanced at me like she wasn’t sure if I was joking. She had a hard time understanding sarcasm, that was for damn sure. “Joke. Ha-ha. Like I said, he doesn’t bother me. He can bark at me all he wants, but it’s not going to get under my skin.”

  �
��That’s good, because he really can be tough. But that’s what he expects from his employees too.” She handed me a paper towel to dry my hands. “So, what do you think? Think you could do this, long term?”

  I did. I wasn’t ever going to win any awards for baking, but I didn’t think I could completely fuck this up either. Plus, one of the things Six had pushed me toward had been keeping busy, and working in a bakery from two in the morning until the time most people got up, would do that. It’d be an adjustment, but the world didn’t stop turning to allow time for someone to grieve. And I didn’t want that. Being busy would keep me from slipping back to my old routine, but it would also cut down on the heartbreak, too.

  By the fourth day, I was a bit less optimistic. And by a bit, I meant a lot. As I walked to the Dry Run from Brooke’s one night, more than once I contemplated lying on a bench and sleeping until I stopped hurting.

  I hadn’t realized just how strenuous rolling out dough and lifting heavy trays constantly, all day, would be. My muscles ached from fatigue and lack of proper rest, and one of my eyes twitched like there was something permanently wrong with it.

  “You need water and sleep,” Brooke had told me when I’d stared at her with the one normal eye I had, letting her see the constant twitching of the other.

  I’d gotten my water in, but rest was a bit more difficult. My schedule was completely thrown off and Brooke’s couch wasn’t ideal for resting my muscles. Brooke had a room upstairs that was the size of a shoebox without a closet. Not really a bedroom, but it was more than what I had. I’d buy a mattress and put it directly on the floor if I had to, but I had to get the fuck off of that couch.

  Which was why I insisted on walking to the Dry Run. My legs were sore from being on them all that morning, but the movement kept me from getting stiff. And I was hungry for more than food. I needed something besides the four walls of Brooke’s house and the four walls of the dungeon I baked in all morning. I needed color and noise and familiar faces.

  And maybe even more than those things, I had a persistent desire to walk by my former residence, the one I’d shared with Six.

  Baking kept my body busy and my mind too—for the most part. But the minutes between rolling out dough and watching it boil or bake stretched long when there was nothing to do but watch. And, invariably, my thoughts drifted to him.

  I thought about him more than just at the bakery though. Walking Griffin made me think of him constantly. Watching Brooke help her daughter with her homework at the kitchen island every night too, made me think of all the things Six had taught me. With his hands, with his words. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes tight enough, I could remember the exact feel and weight of his arms locked around me. Sometimes the fantasy was so profoundly realistic that I found myself leaning into it, only to fall.

  At night, in the hours where I fought the nap I needed before work, I stared at my phone with resentment until I remembered that he wasn’t calling me because I’d blocked him. But then, I told myself that he should find another way to get to me, to reach out. He knew I frequented the Dry Run. He knew about Brooke. If I’d been able to find her, he shouldn’t have a problem.

  But then, maybe he didn’t even know I was in the same city still. Or maybe he was still gone, in Oregon with Andra. Really, the options were endless. I made excuses for a man who, quite simply, wasn’t looking for me. And each time I started to feel like shit about that, I reminded myself that I was the one who’d forced him from my life.

  That’s how I found myself sitting on the stairs of a neighbor’s house across the street from the home I’d shared with him, staring at the FOR SALE sign with a numb kind of shock. I pretended it was the aching in my legs that had forced me to lower myself to the concrete step, but the voices were loud.

  It’s really, really over, they told me. I dug my foot into the stone, felt the unsatisfying scrape when my foot couldn’t break the concrete.

  There were no lights in the front of the house, but the back of the house, that I could see through the front windows, was lit up. The kitchen area. But I couldn’t see him anywhere. Maybe the realtor was inside, cleaning up the clutter I’d left. Maybe they were admiring the room that had been my gallery and already thinking about how to stage it to prospective buyers.

  As I had removed my things from that place, it hadn’t felt like mine. But now, on the outside looking in, it felt like a violation of sorts, to see it for sale.

  It was once mine.

  He was once mine.

  The voices grew louder, but my rage pushed them to the side and propelled me with sure steps all the way across the street until I was standing in front of the FOR SALE sign. A red-faced realtor with too much Botox around his eyes gave a plastic smile and before I could tell myself to do the sensible thing, my foot went right through the realtor’s cheery fucking face with a kick so forceful it nearly knocked me over.

  I let out an excited breath. “Fuck you, Bob Davies,” I said and looked around for witnesses.

  When I pulled my foot back out, my shoe slipped off, which only angered me more.

  “Whatever, Bob,” I said, leaning down to punch through the hole I’d made. The grass under my now shoeless was wet, soaking through my stupid socks, which only incensed me further. I grabbed the rest of the plastic sign and tore through it, removing his phone number from being visible. It wasn’t enough that I’d mangled poor old Bob’s face, I wanted him eliminated from my property.

  But it wasn’t mine, not anymore. By the time I realized that, it was a little too late to fix it.

  Bob’s face was now on the ground. I picked up the roundish piece and flung it like a Frisbee toward the neighbor’s yard.

  I looked at the damage I’d caused. The rest of the sign was in pieces sharp enough to pierce skin, so I placed them in a neat pile beside the frame and then, because the rectangle was still too suggestive about this house being for sale, I picked up the metal frame and bent it until it was unrecognizable.

  I fully knew my crazy then. I didn’t own this house; Six did. But it’d once been mine, and this stupid motherfucker’s face was as much an invasion as someone breaking into the house. I looked up at the house, committing it to memory as I fucked up the frame.

  It was dark; I could hardly make out the inside of the house. But there was absolutely no denying that the dark shape in the bedroom window upstairs was Six.

  Warmth flooded me in an instant. It climbed from my toes to my eyes, causing me to blink rapidly in tune to the pace of my heartbeats.

  The figure didn’t move, just stood there like one of those metal human-shaped targets at a shooting range. But I knew his shadow better than I knew my own. And I knew that if I kept standing outside, he’d come out or I’d be able to make out his eyes. Both were equally terrifying prospects.

  So, when the figure shifted, I took off in a sprint, the metal frame still in my arms as I ran through the neighborhood like a fucking lunatic. I couldn’t hear anything through the whoosh of air past my ears and the persistent thunder of my own heartbeat. Had he been able to see me? If not, had he still known it was me?

  These were questions I wouldn’t ever have an answer to, however.

  When I was a few blocks from the Dry Run, I finally slowed down. My lungs were producing fire in my throat and I found myself bent over, hands on my knees, as I tried to breathe clean, cold air. I dropped the stupid metal frame and kicked it away. I couldn’t believe I’d carried it all this way. It wasn’t like Six wouldn’t get a replacement with that cheery bastard’s face. Especially since I’d destroyed it.

  Because it was so fucking hysterical in hindsight, a laugh bloomed from my belly and up my throat. I couldn’t believe I’d just torn apart that sign, caveman style, in the front yard where anyone could see. And someone had seen: Six.

  When the laughing subsided, I finally sucked in a breath. It’d been a week since I’d seen him. And though I hadn’t been able to look into his eyes—safer that way—just the fact that I’d been
mere feet from him had wrapped my skin much like the serpent had. But he hadn’t run to me, arms open, accepting me back into his life. And, even if he did, the inevitable would happen. I’d leave him or worse—he’d leave me. Because what we’d had, that mad, wild love, wasn’t something sustainable, not when I couldn’t carry his grief along with mine. The valley grief had carved was too close to the other side, nearly a through-and-through.

  I wrapped my arms around my middle and in the darkness across the street from the Dry Run, I rocked myself side to side. I’d been so close to him. Almost breathing the same air. Holy shit. I expected grief to bottom out, but it didn’t. I ached more having seen his figure, but the ache was bearable. This was the first time in my life that an ending didn’t ruin me, send me into a spiral of chaos and self-destruction. And if I did go back to him, that self-destruction was inevitable for us both.

  When I reached the gate to the backyard, Jacob was standing by the building, hands in his pockets and not smoking, even as he talked to a couple kids I didn’t recognize who were dragging their butts along the rim of the metal trash can.

  Jacob’s eyes widened when he saw me, and I mentally calculated the last time I’d seen him. It’d probably been at least six months. The time before I was pregnant.

  “Mira,” he said, coming to me with arms wide open.

  I side-stepped his arm and tried not to feel guilt for the way his face fell momentarily. I didn’t hug anyone. Except Six. And now, I wouldn’t again. Because I’d memorized the way being hugged by Six felt and didn’t want that tainted with another man’s—a lesser man’s—touch.

  “Hey,” I told him and ducked inside immediately. He followed me all the way to the little kitchenette and I poured an obscene amount of sugar into a waiting cup while the coffee brewed. “How are things?”

  “Busy. Good.” He’d shaved the pathetic excuse for a beard, I noticed. But he still wore oversized clothes, held on with a belt cinched on its last hole. “You?”