by LJ Evans
Blake’s name finally caught up with me as the introductions continued.
“Abbott. You related to that Matt guy Cam used to hang out with? The one I sold the ranch to?” I asked as I pulled you back into my arms and held you up against my body. But, I could feel your tension and your desire to bolt.
“That would be my kid brother.”
I nodded in acknowledgement. You turned away from me towards the guys. “Locke, come with me to get a drink?”
You pulled away, and I rumbled a protest that just made everyone raise their eyebrows like I was still that shit-for-brains seventeen-year-old kid they used to know, so I had to let you go. You, Keith, and Locke took off in search of the champagne. I was already following you with my eyes. Watching as you weaved through the crowd in that sexy dress. Watching as men watched you.
I looked down at Cam for just a moment. I wanted to make my excuses and leave. Go get you. Blake’s hand was still wrapped possessively around her, but he didn’t need to be possessive. All I felt was sadness. For her. For me. For the fact that I’d held onto a memory for so agonizingly long.
“I’m truly sorry about Jake. What happened?”
“Not the time,” Blake said with a tone in his voice that left no question that he wasn’t going to let me upset her. And, he was probably a little taller than me, and just as built as me, but I knew that I’d easily kick his ass if I wanted to. After all, I still don’t fight fair, and this guy was all manners and honor. I’m not that guy. I fight to win. At any cost. But, he didn’t need to worry. I didn’t want his prize. I only wanted you. I was still watching you as you got a drink and swallowed it in one gulp before turning to talk to Keith.
Cam just shook her head at him. “It’s okay,” and then to me, “Jake had a kidney transplant and it didn’t take.”
For just an instant, I saw that flash of haunted pain in her eyes again, but then she looked at Blake and peace settled over her. She seemed calmer than she ever had when I knew her. All I could do was thank a God that I didn’t believe in that I hadn’t found out about Jake because if I had, I would have gone to her. And I certainly didn’t want to be the man standing next to her. I didn’t want to be anything but yours.
I just nodded at her. Not sure what to say about Jake’s death. But, really, my eyes were on you. Your smile. Your hand touching Locke’s.
Cam noticed, and she smirked a knowing smirk. “You better go get her before you explode.”
It made me grin. That she remembered how short my patience was. And when I looked up from her to you, you were watching me, were watching my grin. I turned it on wider, trying to charm you over the distance, but you didn’t return it. Not even with your sassy one.
“It was good to see you. Congratulations,” I said referring to the baby. “Take care of her, piss-ant.” I said to Blake, and she had to hold him back like she held Jake the last time I’d seen them together.
When I reached your side, I took the second glass of champagne out of your hand, ignored your murmured protest, and dragged you out onto the dance floor. The band played a slow, sexy song. And I began to like Derek Waters because that song, it was you. No, it was you and I; damaged humanity put back together.
I looked down at your little frame pulled up tight against mine and felt relief again. Relief that you were there, fitting into me like the piece of me that had been missing my whole life. And I was amazed all over again at how beautiful you were.
“Bella,” I said full of emotion that I was fighting to control and so I captured your lips instead.
You pulled your lips from mine, searching the crowd for someone, and when you found her, you got that little crease in the middle of your eyebrows that made me lean down and kiss it.
“I look like her.” There was pain in your voice. I cursed myself. I cursed Cam. No one should make you hurt.
“No,” I said fiercely.
“I do.” You got quiet and then you looked up at me with eyes full of hurt. “Is that why you’re with me?”
“No.”
“How can you say that? I’m like a replica doll. A mini-me of her.”
“You aren’t anything like her!” And I realize now that you thought I meant that she was more than you. That somehow you couldn’t meet up to her standards, but my God, how do I convince you that it was absolutely the other way? After that first night at the gallery, you’d been anything but her. You have every little piece of my heart engraved in your soul. You are the only one that I could ever love. She was the fun house reflection of you, not the other way around.
“You… Oh my God… I think I’m gonna be sick.” You took off towards the hallway trying to find a restroom. I followed on your heels. You slammed the door in my face.
“Bella!” I said quietly to the door trying not to draw eyes. Trying not to be the dickhead that everyone in that other room already thought I was.
I could hear the water running. Could imagine you splashing water on your face which would ruin the make-up you’d carefully applied, but would show you off in your natural shine instead. The way I loved you most. Like when you woke up in the morning with that lazy, sexy look in your eyes and put your hair in a messy bun while you wore my t-shirt.
I leaned against the wall, arms crossed, waiting for you. Because I needed you. I needed you to understand that you were my only happily ever after. That I needed you for any kind of ever after.
There were no Disney movies in my real world as a kid. The only time I saw a fucking Disney movie was at school. The teacher had just finished reading Barrie’s Peter Pan to us and put in the animated movie as a reward. That scene where Tinker Bell is captured by Captain Hook, well, I can see now that that’s you. This tiny, amazing creature stuck in a cage by the man the crocodile wants to eat. That everyone fears except Peter himself. I’m not Peter in this scenario. I’m Hook.
But, even Hook deserves an ever after. So, I stood there. Waiting for my fairy. I think you thought I was gone. I think you thought I wouldn’t wait for you. Now, maybe I think you thought I’d be chasing Cam. I’m not sure how you can love me, how you can feel everything we feel when we are holding each other, and think that I would be following her anywhere, but especially not when you were hurting.
When you opened the bathroom door, you looked at me with disbelief in your eyes. “Bella,” I said and reached for you, but you pulled out of my grasp.
“I’m just the version of her that you can be with, right? You couldn’t have her and so you think you can have me instead? Is that why you buy me things? So I’ll stay? The way she wouldn’t?”
You tore me to shreds.
“No!”
But you didn’t believe me. You’d already convinced yourself that you weren’t what I was looking for. That I wanted something that I never knew was wrong for me until I’d found you.
“I’m going back to the house,” you said.
“Fine.”
I made to follow you, but you put your hand up. “No. Stay. I want to go by myself.”
I grunted a protest but you just pushed past it.
“I need some time to process all this.”
It took me a second to realize you were serious and to fight my instincts to run after you. In the end, I couldn’t fight it. Instead, I followed you. At the door, you’d already asked for your car to be brought up by the valet. I gave them my tag as well, but yours came first.
“I want you to stay,” you said as I opened the door of the Bug and helped you slide into the piece of shit.
“I’m coming home.”
“Please don’t.”
I could see that that was what you wanted, but I couldn’t let you go. Not like that. Not when you didn’t understand, and so I didn’t respect your wishes then. And I’m glad I didn’t. Thank God I didn’t know how to give you your space.
You took off in that Bug, and I waited for what felt like an eternity for the Porsche to show up. I flung the tip at the valet even though he didn’t want it and jumped into
the car. I tore off out the gates and down the windy road that had led up to the mansion.
The smoke was what I saw first. But, I didn’t panic then. I didn’t panic till I saw the lime green piece of garbage up against the guardrail.
I slammed the car to a halt and was out and ripping open the door of the Bug before I could completely process what had happened. My heart was pounding so loud that all other sounds were eliminated from the world. I couldn’t hear the hiss from the car’s engine. I couldn’t hear the stupid car radio that I knew was on because you always had it on.
But you weren’t there.
The car wasn’t wrecked. It had broken down. I shut the engine off, and stood, looking around.
“Bella!” I hollered out your name.
No answer.
I walked over to the rail. “PJ!” I yelled.
I turned back to the road.
I hadn’t been long enough behind you for you to have called someone to come get you. You would still have been waiting. You hadn’t walked back towards the mansion, I would have seen you that way too. I walked down the road in the opposite direction. “Bella!”
My heart started to pound in a different way. I was jogging back towards my car so that I could track you down when Locke and Keith drove up. Locke was out of his Mercedes in an instant fearing the same thing I had when I’d first seen the worthless Bug.
“PJ!” he cried out.
“She’s not fucking here,” I told him.
Locke and Keith started calling your name just as I had.
I grabbed my phone from the car and hit your number. Your phone rang except I could hear it. Fucking Bon Jovi. Locke turned and went to the rear of the car where the engine was still smoking, bent over, and picked your phone up from the ground. The face shattered.
You weren’t here and you wouldn’t have gone anywhere without your phone.
I could feel the dread welling up inside me. The fear. Blinding fear. I dialed 911 on my phone.
I explained what happened. You could tell the lady was doubtful. I tried to explain about the stalker. She was just trying to calm me down. I hung up.
“Seth!” Locke yelled when he realized I’d hung up.
I grabbed my wallet from the center console where I usually stashed it and flung the contents on the top of the Porsche’s roof as I tried to find the business card. I finally landed on it. Officer Tate.
She answered.
“She’s fucking gone,” I yelled into the phone.
Silence.
“PJ. She’s been taken by that fucker,” I tried to breathe. Tried for a calm that I wasn’t feeling.
“Mr. Carmen?” The officer finally got a clue who I was.
“Seth. Yes. She’s fucking gone.”
“Maybe you need to back up and explain why you think she isn’t just out getting groceries.”
I didn’t have the patience for this. I was going to put a hole through something. I slammed my hand on the roof. Keith came up and took the phone from my hand.
I paced with my hands on the back of my neck as Keith tried to tell the officer what we’d found. When he hung up, he was quiet.
“What did she say?” Locke was the one to shout it out first.
“They’re sending a patrol car to us. She said maybe PJ was picked up by a good Samaritan who brought her down the hill.”
“She wouldn’t have left her phone or that damn piece of shit,” I hissed.
Locke nodded.
“Officer Tate is heading to Michael’s house to see if he’s there.”
I headed for my car.
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t just stand here. I’m going to see if I can find her down the road.”
“Seth!”
But, I was in the car and shifting like crazy down the hill without responding.
The hill ended and turned into a suburbia before ending at the freeway. You weren’t there. You weren’t anywhere. I didn’t know what the fuck to do. My phone rang, and I didn’t look, I just answered it.
“Bella?”
“It’s Liv.”
“Have they…” I actually had to hold back the tears that were ready to spew down my face at her voice tight with emotion and I couldn’t complete my thought. Guilt. Anger. Fear. They all raged through me in equal measures.
“They’re taking her to the hospital.”
Relief coursed through me at first. They’d found you. Then a whole new dread rolled over me. The fucking hospital. Images flooded my head. Images of me carrying my mom’s slack body down three flights of stairs. Images of a smashed bottle. The smell of Jack Daniels and the pain that flashed down my side as my skin was slashed. The feel of me slamming my drunk father into the brick wall and hearing his head crack.
“Where?”
She told me and I took off. I don’t know if I hung up or said goodbye. I didn’t care. I don’t remember driving. I don’t remember parking. Locke said I parked the car outside the ER doors with the keys still in it and that Keith moved it for me when they showed up minutes after me.
Officer Tate was already there. She told me they had taken you in to do a CT scan and MRI. You weren’t conscious.
I was choked with fear and memories.
“What?” I couldn’t even complete it. I couldn’t even ask.
She took pity on me. “Someone called it in. A woman, zip tied, opened a trunk, and rolled herself out of the car in front of them on Sunset.”
You’d fucking jumped out of a moving car.
I slammed my hand into the wall, and even Tate jumped. But she waved off the nurse that looked over. She put a hand on my arm, and even though I wanted to shrug her off, I didn’t. She was a cop.
“Let’s sit down.”
“Did you catch the shithead?”
She shook her head, and I wanted to slam my fist into something again, but I just pinched my palm so that the pain would help me focus. That old habit from my youth had come back to me so naturally these days.
“We have a make and model, but there were no plates. If it was Michael, it wasn’t the car that’s registered to him.”
“What do you mean, if?”
She didn’t need to respond. Proof. Goddamn proof. At least with my shit-for-brains father there had been plenty of proof. But he’d still been released from prison six years in to his fifteen-year sentence.
Life wasn’t fuckin’ fair. Did I really need to be reminded of that yet again?
Locke and Keith walked in. Locke put a hand on my shoulder, said something. I just shook him off, leaned against the wall, and stared down the corridor, waiting for the doctor to come back. To tell me you were going to be okay. You had to be okay.
Keith tried to hand me a coffee. I just glared at him. He just shrugged and sat down next to Locke. Locke had his head buried in his hands. It looked like he was shaking. Crying. I don’t know.
The doors swung open and a man in scrubs walked out. “Patterson’s family?”
And for a whole two seconds I couldn’t figure out who he was talking about even though I know your real name. Because you are my Bella. Or PJ. Never Patterson. Patterson was the name he had used.
Locke stood behind me. One of us must have nodded but none of us spoke.
“She’s going to be okay,” he started.
The words flooded through me so fast and so hard that it felt like a rush of alcohol to my brain.
“She’s lucky. Concussion. Some scrapes and a gash on her head that might need some cosmetic surgery, but nothing serious. She has some broken bones in her left hand. They’ll need to cast it. For now, we’ve given her some pain meds. We’ll want to keep her at least overnight.”
“Is she awake?” Locke asked.
He nodded. “Come on, I’ll take you back.”
More relief rushed through me. You were awake. We followed the doctor to a room they’d rolled you into. You looked so tiny in the hospital bed, swathed in bandages. Your left hand was covered in them, laying on top
of the blankets, and there was another bandage covering your forehead.
You looked at me with blurry eyes. I don’t remember moving. I just remember that I was holding you against me as best as I could while you cried. From shock and fear and relief. I was surprised as hell to find tears fall from my own face mixing with yours. I can’t remember a time I cried in my life. Not one. Like I told you in the last letter. I’ve never cried. Not over my mom. Not over Cam. Never.
You looked up and touched my wet face with your good hand and I saw fear and pain and sadness in your anime eyes. I kissed your lips gently. Tasting your tears and fear and the cleaner they’d used to clean your beautiful face. Your face that would now have a scar. I wanted to kick something. You didn’t need any visible scars. You already had too many hidden inside.
“Bella,” I choked out, trying to tell you how fucking glad I was to see you. How fucking scared I’d been.
Locke approached the other side of your bed. I forgot he was there. I just glared at him as he wrapped you in his own arms, and you cried more.
“Shhh,” he soothed. “It’s gonna be okay, kid.”
“Jus?” You finally spoke. And I hated even then that it was your brother’s name and not mine because I’m a messed-up asshole.
“He’s on his way,” Locke said.
And you started to cry again, closing your eyes as you tried to stop the onslaught of tears. Eventually, you calmed down some. I hadn’t ever let your hand go, your good one. And I kissed the palm and watched your face even though your beautiful eyes were still firmly shut.
“Did someone find the Caterpillar?” you asked through those closed eyes.
“Yes,” I spit out. Because, even though it had been found there was no way I was letting you get back in that piece of garbage even if I had to push it off a cliff myself.
Officer Tate approached the bed.
“PJ?” You finally opened your eyes for her, but you just nodded.
“I know you may not be up for it, but we need to get a general idea of what happened. We need to know how much evidence we need to collect…” She paused, and I immediately understood.