by Amelia Wilde
“Did he—” God, this is worse than I thought. “Did he rape someone on the staff?”
Missy actually looks over her shoulder toward the building this time, and I realize then that this job matters for her, and matters in a big way. If I lose my job at Ryder & Bloom, it will be bad…but there are firms all over the country looking for people with my kind of experience. The same might not be true for Missy.
When she looks back at me, I see a new caution written on her face. “I don’t know.” She ups the tempo of her words. “I don’t know for sure. It was before I started working here, and there are rumors about a girl who…” She gives me a stiff nod. “Rumors about that happening. I guess she pressed charges but he settled out of court? And she moved out of town?” She glances down at her shoes, then back up at me. “We’re never alone with him. Were you alone with him?”
“I tried not to be.” This last phrase comes out as a whisper, and I hate it.
“What did he do?”
“He—grabbed me. Groped me. I think he would have pinned me down if…” The bile rises in my throat, and I cover my mouth again, breathing in deeply through my nose. I’m not going to be sick right now, not in front of Missy, not like this. Not like this.
“If—” Curiosity burns across her face, but another flick of her eyes toward the building tells me this isn’t the time to talk about Beck’s heroics. And his subsequent abandoning of me in that building. No—maybe he was just saving himself. I don’t know anymore.
“You should go back in.”
Missy reaches out and puts a hand on my shoulder, lets it linger there for a comforting moment, then turns away.
Ten feet away, she turns back. “Text me, okay?”
“I will.”
But first, I will run.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Beckett
“Taylor! Where the fuck did you go today? Nobody walks off shift like that!”
I turn toward the sound, the room lagging behind my vision a little bit. I’m posted at a table at O’Malley’s. I don’t know which table. I wasn’t looking when I sat down. But it must be close enough to our regular table that Ward—that’s who is shouting at me right now, if my eyes aren’t fucking deceiving me—thinks I’m just here for an after-work drink.
“I left.”
What have I been drinking? Beer, and something…stronger. Something much stronger is in the glass in my hand, and it’s starting to have an effect. It’s more than starting. It’s having a fucking effect, and even I can hear that my words are muddier than they should be.
“Shit. How long have you been here? Since you left?”
Ward drops into a seat next to me, and on the opposite side Kirk Harris sits down and leans in close to me.
“By the smell of it, at least five hours.” His eyes narrow, and he scans over my face. “Jesus, Taylor. Are you okay? Did somebody die? Did you get fired?”
“One of those things.”
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense, asshole.” Kirk sits up, glancing around for a waitress. “Unless someone died. Then I shouldn’t have said you were an asshole. Even if you are an asshole.”
“Nobody died.”
“You got fired?” Now Kirk looks at me with something approaching genuine fucking concern. “You’re fucking with us.”
“I’m not.”
Ward is staring at me. “What the hell did you do to get fired? One walk-off in three years isn’t enough to get the boot.”
I don’t know if I should say anything about it. I don’t even know how to say this in a way that won’t make me look like a fucking idiot to these guys. But I’ve had enough to drink, and really, who cares what they think? Am I even going to be sitting with them after today?
“I got into it with Calley.”
“With Edison Calley?” Ward gapes at me, and I swivel my head in a slow maneuver and see that Kirk Harris is doing the same. The table is filling up with other guys, but all of them are too far away for me to see them through my drunken haze.
“Yep.” I lean back in my chair and cross my arms over my chest. “Is anybody else fucking starving?”
“I’ll buy you anything on the menu if you tell me what the hell you did to Edison Calley.”
“Get me a burger.” I’m practically shouting, but Ward leaps up like he wasn’t my boss a few hours ago and makes a beeline to the bar. He’s a company man, three years more on the job than me, but he’s not going anywhere. He’s got two kids—or is it three?—so this kind of gossip shit is damn precious to him. Plus, at a place like Cerberus, everybody’s dying to hear stories about when somebody went up in flames.
He’s back ten minutes later with not only a burger but a burger platter, which comes in the same basket as the regular burger, but the burger is nestled on enough fries to feed five people. Ward plucks one from the basket and pops it into his mouth. “Shit, that’s hot. You want ketchup?”
There’s already ketchup on the burger—if I know Ward at all, he’ll have ordered it with everything on it—but fuck it, I do. “Yeah.”
Ward doesn’t get up a second time, but he does nod at Kirk, who laughs and gets up, coming back with three plastic containers of ketchup.
I dip a fry in ketchup, then put it in my mouth. It’s hot as hell, but it cuts through a little bit of the drunken stupor. I follow it up with a second, then attack the burger like it insulted Sam.
Everybody sits around while I eat, looking at me like I’m Lockton’s biggest tourist attraction. For this five minutes of my life, they’re damn right.
When I’m down to only several handfuls of fries, I sit back and look around the table. “Calley went after my girl.”
It’s probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever said, but everybody around the table bursts into laughter.
“Are you shitting me?”
“Yeah. She’s not a girl.” I put both hands on the table, palms down. “I left the shift because the woman I fucking love—” Alcohol can be great for getting the truth out. “—told me that he said some creepy shit to her. She was nervous about this meeting they had this afternoon, and I couldn’t just sit down there while something happened.” I lean back again. “So I went to check things out.”
Some of the guy are nodding. “When I got up there, he had his arm around her waist, he was all up on her, he was…” My jaw tightens to the extreme just thinking about it. I don’t have to explain. Everybody around the table, Ward included, is echoing my expression. There’s no laughter now. “I went in there, and I pushed him off of her. We…” What’s the best way to— “We exchanged some words. He fired my ass. I got out of there.”
“Did you hit him?”
“He thought I was going to.”
Laughter, then silence.
Ward pipes up. “What about her?”
“Sam. Her name is Sam.”
“She doing all right?”
“I don’t know.”
Harris’ eyes go wide. “You don’t know? Where the hell is she, Taylor?"
“Gone. She wanted to be alone.”
“And you let her?”
“She’s all grown up.”
“Damn.”
“And you know what?”
Ward is the one who answers. “What?”
“That was a fucking mistake.” I stand up, pushing my chair back and almost going over with it. “I’m going to text her right now, and then one of you fine gentlemen is going to drive me back to my house.”
“I will.” Kirk stands up.
I pull my phone out of my pocket, pull up Sam’s number, and tap out something that I hope makes sense: That didn’t go how I wanted it to go. Please come over to my house as soon as you can. I miss the hell out of you. Then I shove my phone back into my pocket, turn back to the table. “That shithead won’t mess with anything of mine again,” I say, and the guys respond with a cheer.
It’s a nice feeling, right up until I get halfway to the door, and my phone buzzes in my pocket.
It’s a message from Sam.
I’m back downstate, Beck. I don’t think we should talk for a while.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Samantha
I don’t even make it back to the hotel before I’m dialing Michelle’s direct number on my cell phone. I make it down the access road, down the highway, and into downtown Lockton, but my hands are shaking too badly on the wheel to get any farther than that. With extreme care—which is hard to pull off, what with the dancing hands—I pull my car into a parallel parking spot on one of the last blocks in town with any stores along it. There’s almost nothing here anyone would want to visit on a daily basis—a photography studio only open a few days a week and an art gallery open by appointment only—and the only reason I’m lucky enough to find a spot is because there’s nobody else parked here.
I dial her number before I can think any more about it. I haven’t been able to arrange any more coherent sentences in my mind since I pulled out of the Cerberus parking lot. All the righteous anger that spilled from my mouth when Beck and I were standing in the hallway has dried up, and I feel like a complete idiot. What the hell was I thinking, going after him like that? What would have happened if he hadn’t come in at just that moment and stopped Calley?
“Michelle Ryder.”
The sound of her voice breaks something open in me, and the trembling that had been limited to my hands moves throughout my entire body. Is it the adrenaline leaving me that’s making me such a wreck? Is it the fact that I chased Beck away?
“Michelle, it’s—it’s me.”
“I know, Sam, I’ve got Caller I.D., just like everybody else in the country. What’s up?”
“I—” I suck in a deep breath, a gasp that must carry over the phone, because Michelle’s tone changes.
“Sam? Is something wrong?”
“Yes. It’s really, really wrong. Really wrong, Michelle.”
The panic spirals up into my chest, because this moment has to be one of the pivotal ones. This is the moment where Michelle will either be on my side, or else she won’t. The moment when she will fire me, or she won’t. Where she’ll accept my story, or she won’t, and I have no way of knowing the outcome of all this unless I spit out the words that are roiling in my chest, in my throat. Only now the tears are coming. I hate them. I hate the fact that Edison Calley is making me cry. But maybe it’s not Edison Calley. Maybe it’s what happened with Beck. Either way, I’m a sobbing mess when I tell Michelle what happened.
“This came out of nowhere? Was there more? Did anything happen in other meetings?” Her questions are clipped, rapid-fire, and there’s an undertone of rage in her voice, but I don’t know if it’s directed at me or Calley.
“No, there was—when I first met him, I got this creepy vibe, I know that sounds stupid, but—” I tell her everything, about the way the handshake lingered when we first met, the comment about personal attention, everything. As I’m telling it, I wonder if it escalated too quickly to seem realistic, but there were other moments, too—other smaller, lingering gazes, other veiled comments. But the ones I tell her about, those were the ones that stood out. And I tell Michelle the whole story.
When I’m finished, I feel like I might be sick to my stomach. I might have to open the car door and throw up on the sidewalk, which honestly wouldn’t be the most embarrassing thing to ever happen to me in Lockton. You don’t spend your high school years in a town without getting pulled over downtown for a broken taillight in front of the cafe where you work, or getting your period at some kind of inconvenient time like at the beach on the busiest day of the summer. Still, my face is hot and red, and it seems like the silence on the line is dragging out longer and longer and longer.
“Are you—did we get disconnected?” My voice sounds so small, so pathetic, that it brings a fresh wave of sickness to my gut. I reach for the door handle and push it open, then step out onto the curb. The air here, unlike near Cerberus, is clean and fresh, the scent of the lake carrying over the shops. It’s so damn perfect here. How could anything so ugly happen in a town like this?
“No, I’m still here.” She must be thinking of how to fire me. She must be thinking of what to say to let me down gently, or maybe not gently at all. She’s probably thinking of how much money I’ve just lost the firm, not only for this project, but for the other plants Calley owns, as well. Production facilities all over the country. That’s what she said to me when she gave me this assignment. It was a chance for Ryder & Bloom to really get on the map.
“What should I do, Michelle?” I can’t wait any longer to ask the question. I can’t bear to be in suspense another minute.
“I’m—wow.” She takes in a breath so deep I can hear it on the other end of the line. “I think you’d better come back down. It’s a four-hour drive, right?”
Four hours, and I have to go pack my bags at the hotel. I’ve got most of my essentials in the car with me already—my laptop, my purse, my phone—but most of the clothes I brought with me are still at the Holiday Inn Express, where I’ve hardly been staying since connecting back up with Beck.
There are a few things at Beck’s place.
Nothing I can’t just replace when I get back downstate.
Except…
No. I can’t go back there.
“I’ll get packed up and head out right away.”
“Great. We’ll see you back here. And Sam?”
“Yeah?” I wonder if she’s going to give me any other information that could possibly calm my nerves on the long drive back.
“Drive safely.”
“Will do.”
Michelle disconnects the call, and my stomach does a slow turn. This is just the beginning of the shitstorm. I can feel it in my gut. I’m not looking forward to getting back and witnessing the aftermath, but the longer I wait, the longer I’ll have to feel like this. If I could just know, I’d feel better.
I hope I’ll feel better.
I climb back into the car. It’s seven minutes to the Holiday Inn Express, five for me to shove my clothes into the bags I brought, another two minutes to scan the room, and then I’m checked out, back in the car, back on the highway, the music turned up loud.
I force myself not to look in the rearview mirror.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Beckett
The light comes through my bedroom window and punches me straight in the eyes, cutting through my eyelids.
“Fuck.”
What time is it?
I reach across the bed for Sam, and then I remember.
Then I remember.
She’s not here. She left yesterday. She’s already back downstate, back to her real life, back to the life that doesn’t include me and never will.
And me?
I’m in my bed at God knows what fucking hour, jobless and gutted and with a shiny new hangover to tie it all together into a bow.
I swallow the dryness in my throat and immediately regret it, because the act of swallowing makes me want to heave up the many gallons of beer and other alcohol I consumed yesterday afternoon and last night.
If I’m going to go that low, I’m not going to throw up in the damn bed.
I sit up too fast and have to start over, and in that single moment, I’m glad Sam’s not here. But only that moment, because when I start the second attempt at getting up, I wish she was here more than anything. Even though I look the shittiest I’ve ever looked in my life.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and put my feet onto the carpet. It’s six steps, max, from here to the bathroom, but it’s going to be a near—
Nope. I don’t have the luxury of walking slowly over there, because seconds after I sit up, my stomach revolts. I avoid cleaning the carpet, but I don’t avoid the splitting headache that comes with bolting across the room and emptying my stomach into the toilet like a man who can really hold his alcohol.
I flush. Most nights, I fucking can. Last night, I didn’t stop after the bar. Harris dropped me off h
ere, and I dug through the shit on the top shelf of my pantry, which was definitely not top-shelf stuff, mixed myself murder in a glass, and downed it in front of the TV.
I don’t remember coming up here.
Brushing my teeth is another exercise in torture, but I’m not going to lie around in bed like some kind of shattered soul for the rest of the day.
Even if my heart is in ruins. Fucking ruins.
I turn on the shower, as hot as I can get it, and step in, letting the water run over me. Every muscle is sore, a dull ache like I just got the job at Cerberus and it’s my first damn day on the plant floor.
What a fucking disaster.
What the hell was I thinking, walking away from her like that?
What the hell was I thinking, getting close to her again like that? Sam is the last person I should be screwing around with if I’m not—
If I’m not absolutely sure?
What else is there to be sure about, other than the way her body feels when it’s pressed against mine, every muscle relaxed in the confidence that nothing’s going to happen to her when I’m around? The way she always looks like a fucking princess, even when she’s just rolled out of bed? The way I’ll never get enough of her, even if I spent ten lifetimes doing nothing but being by her side?
I shut the water off with a snap. At least I don’t smell like the fucking bar anymore.
Back in my room, I pull out the first things that come to hand from the dresser. Jeans and a t-shirt, like I’ve worn every day for the past forever. Sam was the only one who made me want to go out and buy a damn tuxedo, even if we were just going to the Mexican restaurant across town.
I grit my teeth. It’s better for us both this way. It’s better that I’m not a pair of cement shoes dragging her life down to the very bottom of the lake. It’s better that, downstate, she’ll be able to forget what happened with me and what happened with Calley and leave it all behind her, back in the past where it belongs.