Things Remembered (Accidentally On Purpose Companion Novel #3)

by L. D. Davis

  Things Remembered

  An Accidentally On Purpose

  Companion Novel

  By LD Davis

  © 2016 LD Davis Media

  Cover Design by Tina Kleuker

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and situations are entirely a result of the author's over active imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased is coincidental or used fictitiously. No part of this novel may be reproduced without written permission from the author.

  Memory is a fickle thing. How do you know if what you remember is true or false? Must someone validate every thought of the past to make it real? What if our recollections differ? Then who is to say what is truth and what is fiction? What if there is no validation? What if you are haunted by memories without knowing how solid they truly are? The truth is not always what we think we know. Sometimes, the truth is not always the things we remember.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  I was not a creature of habit. I could barely remember what I did ten minutes before, let alone what I did the day before and the day before that, and the day before that. I only had a few routines and became rather cranky when I was forced to deviate from them. I wanted to stab someone in the ear hole, steal candy from babies, and punt little dogs when my few little customs were disrupted.

  Typically, only foul weather and sickness were reasons for interference. I could usually cope with that because it wasn’t like I could control the damn weather, but when it was a person that got in the way, I turned into a monster. Scratch that. I reverted to a monster.

  I had just exited the coffee shop I went to every morning when someone on the street called my name. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, pissing off some commuters in the process, and did a complete three-sixty in search of the person who had called me. I didn’t see one face I recognized, other than the same faces of strangers I saw every day on my way to work.

  “Mayson Grayne,” the masculine voice said without any doubt about who I was.

  I looked to my right just as a man stepped out of the crowd and stopped a foot away from me. He stared at me as if I had just fallen out of the sky. I stared back with an open mouth as familiarity clicked into place.

  Some people don’t age well, but some look better with age. The man that stood in front of me was an example of the latter. In most respects, he looked very much the same. His skin still looked like smooth, deep chocolate. His brown eyes seemed to carry the weight of life in them, but they were still basically the same eyes I had peered into millions of times.

  The short-trimmed beard was a new addition since he was almost always clean shaven when I used to know him. His hair was also a little different, cut neat and close to his head. He was nearly a foot taller than me. I used to have to stand on my toes just for my lips to graze his jaw.

  The biggest difference, I couldn’t help but notice, was his body. He had always been in good shape, but the body in front of me was in better than “good” shape. It was the body of a man, not of a young guy still growing into his.

  He looked at me appraisingly head to toe and then back again. “You look amazing.”

  I blinked away my astonishment as a sudden surge of anger made me squeeze my coffee cup so hard it was in danger of being crushed in my hand.

  The bitterness rolled off my tongue easily. “Not bad for a girl that you expected to be dead by now.”

  “I am very glad to see that you aren’t dead,” he said solemnly.

  “If you actually gave a damn about me not dying, you would have checked in every once in a while to confirm that I was still alive.” I began to turn away but stopped suddenly and gestured angrily at him with the hand holding my bagged pastry. “You were right about one thing, though. I didn’t need you. I didn’t need you then and I don’t need you now.”

  I turned my back to him and continued on my way to work as I felt his eyes burning into my back. I ignored the trembling of my hands and my erratic heartbeat.

  I made it to work a few minutes later than my usual, which made a world of difference. The elevators were more crowded, so it took me a few minutes longer to get to my floor with all the stops along the way.

  One of the reasons I made concerted efforts to get into my office early was so that I didn’t have to encounter the group I called The Mommies. It was a group of about six women who clustered together to discuss their dried up breast milk and clumsy toddlers and such. They loved to catch me and force cell phone pictures of their stupid kids in my face. Since I was the Personnel Manager, I very well couldn’t tell The Mommies to fuck off. Not at all. I had to indulge them and comment on how well their kids were growing and make them feel good about themselves by telling them that their ugly-as-sin children were beautiful.

  I didn’t have anything against kids, not really. My cousins’ kids were like my nieces and nephews and I loved them dearly, but I didn’t care much for other peoples’ children. I thought they were weird, that they smelled funny, and were life suckers. They sucked the life and fun out of everything around them with their sticky hands, whiny crying, and their constant need for attention. Kids weren’t for me, and The Mommies didn’t get that. They always wanted to know when I was going to settle down and have a few offspring of my own.

  I wanted to tell them that I’d settle down in my grave when I was dead, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t have gone over well. So, I smiled and did all the formalities and always just barely escaped with my life.

  After getting stuck with The Mommies, I was nearly twenty minutes later than my usual time by the time I made it to my office. When I finally settled down in my chair and turned on the small radio, I realized that I had missed my favorite segment of the morning radio show I listened to every morning. Not that I would have heard a damn thing they said with his voice still echoing in my head.

  When I took my first sip of coffee, I was extremely dissatisfied to find it lukewarm at best, instead of the steamy hot temperature I enjoyed. I couldn’t reheat it because it just didn’t taste the same afterward, and I couldn’t eat my pastry because the pastry and the coffee went hand in hand.

  I was ready to flip my desk over and trash my office. That damn man threw off my whole day. It was scarcely eight-thirty in the morning and my entire day was alrea
dy misaligned. Nothing would go right for the rest of the day. Life was going to be that much harder because I couldn’t enjoy a few minutes with my coffee and chocolate croissant.

  Most people that had a rough day got over it with a drink or a chat with a loved one, or just slept it off. It meant something entirely different for me. Even after years of being clean, my first inclination when my day was shoddy was to get high. Yes, I realize how ridiculous it may seem to you that a lukewarm coffee and an unappetizing donut could cause such strife, but it wasn’t so much about me being a picky eater as it was about control. Having a modicum of control over something that may seem so insignificant to you was a huge deal for me. Look at how fast my morning spun out of control, how quickly my personal time was taken away from me.

  Regardless of how disgruntled I was, however, I had to swallow it down and pretend that all was well in my world. There were meetings to attend, decisions to be made, paperwork to be done, and a plethora of people depending on me. I had to smile and pretend that everything was all right, even though I felt a loss of control inside.

  I made it through most of my day without snapping, but that man kept bobbing around my mind like a man-buoy.

  There were many holes and fog in my memory from years of doing drugs. Over the years, I had managed to nudge him from my everyday thoughts until he was almost as good as those missing and abridged memories. However, he’d played a part in one of the memories I could not eradicate.

  The dead girl. Lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling with sightless eyes. As paramedics repeatedly ask me questions, I only see the dead girl and the young man weeping over her body. He looks up at me then. He meets my eyes just before I am carried away.

  They were his eyes, the eyes of the man I saw on the street outside the coffee shop.

  The eyes of one Grant Alexander.

  Chapter Two

  “Excuse me. Pardon me. Watch your toes. Excuse me.”

  I awkwardly scooted past the four people occupying the flimsy folding chairs to my own crappy chair. I sat down and handed one of two cups to the man next to me who had most likely reserved my seat with only a discouraging glare from his cold brown eyes.

  “You’re late,” he whispered after taking a satisfying sip of the flavored iced tea I handed him.

  I scowled. Of course, I was late! My whole grind had been thrown off for the day.

  “What did I miss?” I whispered.

  “Larry’s knackered, but he claims he’s been sober for thirteen days now.”

  “Whatever he’s been for thirteen days, it sure hasn’t been sober.” I shook my head. “Did Judy stand up and insist that her cat has healing powers again?”

  He nodded. “Larry wants to test out the kitty-healing theory.”

  “Maybe Judy’s pussy will heal Larry and solve both their problems.”

  “Then where will we get our entertainment?”

  With feigned eagerness, I wagged my brows. “We can always buy drugs and get high. I’ll share my needles with you,” I whisper-sang.

  He stared at me coldly as he spoke dryly. “That sounds like a very fine idea. We can slip into violent psychopathic fugues together and attack the people we love.”

  “Like rabid Rottweilers,” I whispered gleefully. “Even though you’re an infected penis head, you totally get me.”

  “Frenemies forever,” he said, tapping his cup to mine.

  From the time I entered into recovery more than eleven years ago, I had attended various meetings and programs for addicts. I hated them. I hated the idea of people standing around sharing that they were a bigger loser than the person who shared before them. Who originally thought it would be a good idea for people to air their personal problems in such a fashion?

  My psychiatrist told me that group meetings helped others to know that they weren’t alone. That was a load of malarkey. How did one broken person help another broken person? In my humble opinion, the only satisfaction a person could get out of the meetings was the knowledge that someone else sucked at living worse than they did.

  If it were possible to avoid the meetings entirely, I would have, but I couldn’t. When I was a teenager, it was because a court of law told me I had to go. Then the meetings were deemed necessary as part of my compliance to receive my meager inheritance in my early twenties. After a slip up a couple years ago, however, Sterling Corporation also insisted upon it.

  No one knew about that slip-up, save for my bosses and one other person, the man that had been sitting beside me every Tuesday night for almost two years.

  I had a laundry list of reasons why I hated Kyle Sterling. For starters, he ruined my whole life. Okay, so, maybe not my whole life.

  After I’d gone into recovery all those years ago, I needed a focus. Somehow, during my foggy drug years, I’d managed to complete several college credits. My therapists, my family, and I had all thought that going back to school would help keep me anchored. So, I fully immersed myself in my studies, and with the use of the CLEPs—in addition to attending a few classes—I’d been able to get a degree in business administration in a little over two years. Wanting to carry myself just a little further, I had begun taking classes to also get a second degree in public relations.

  I’d had been very proud of myself. I had accomplished something for the first time in my life that didn’t hurt me or others. My family had been proud of me, too. My cousin Emmy was so proud and so confident in me that she pulled a few strings to get me an interview at Sterling Corporation, where she’d been working since she was a college student. I’d been considered for a couple positions—one of them, in particular, was pretty ambitious for a recent grad, but hey, it was go big or go home. That motto worked when I was doing drugs anyway.

  The position required an extremely motivated individual, preferably with a background in real estate and/or acquisitions. A few years of experience was also required, but Emmy had said that there were plenty of people within Sterling Corp that got positions they didn’t necessarily deserve, including the man who would be my boss.

  “Kyle got his position because he was born a Sterling, not because of his qualifications,” Emmy had said. “But he happens to be very good at his job. You can be very good at yours, too.”

  I didn’t have the qualifications, nor did I have the Sterling name behind me, but I did have the Grayne name. Emmy wasn’t the child of a chief officer of the company, but she had been a star in her own right, an administrative beast, and an exemplary employee. With nepotism at its best and my excellent gift for bullshittery, the hiring manager had ended up offering me the position.

  Unfortunately, I’d never received the chance to excel or fail. Keith, the hiring manager, had called me just as I had walked into the building for my first day of work and asked me to meet him in his office. When I’d arrived, Kyle Sterling was already there, standing off to the side with his arms crossed, his eyes narrowed, and his mouth set in an ugly scowl.

  “Mayson, have a seat,” Keith had said. He’d tried to smile, but with so much tension around his mouth, it didn’t look like a smile at all. His fingers had nervously adjusted and readjusted items on his desk.

  I hadn’t wanted to sit down, but I’d done so without remark. Keith had cleared his throat and glanced at Kyle. I’d glanced at Kyle, too, but not with anxiety like the middle-aged man behind the desk. I’d looked at him with curiosity. He’d clearly been one of those men that contorted his very fine-looking face into one that would make most fear him, but I’d had no fear. I’d seen and dealt with worse guys than some stuffy suit with a pretty face.

  “Mayson, I have some bad news and I have some good news,” Keith had stated, trying again to smile. “Unfortunately, we have to rescind our last offer of employment. However,” he’d added quickly when I frowned, “I can offer you a position in our human resource department. The pay is…well, significantly lower, but there are many benefits and room for advancement.”

  I wouldn’t have minded if I had never been g
iven the job to begin with. It had truly been a long shot, but I had been given the job. I was disappointed, but not angry or hurt; however, I’d wanted to know why they had taken it away. I would have understood if the position was going to someone more qualified, but I’d wanted to hear Keith say that since he’d given me the job to begin with.

  “Why, may I ask, have you made this decision?” I’d asked politely, as I folded my hands tightly in my lap.

  Keith had opened his mouth to respond, but Kyle Sterling answered before he could, and with much less grace.

  “You are not only inexperienced, but you are also incompetent,” he’d said sharply from the sidelines.

  I had taken a quick breath before turning my head to look at him.

  “Inexperienced, yes, most definitely,” I’d said with an edge in my voice. “However, there is no way for you to measure my competency as you have yet to see my performance in any capacity.”

  “Your employment history is sketchy at best.” He’d picked up a file off Keith’s desk, opened it, and then proceeded to read to me my life’s history. “Mayson Mariah Grayne. Your first arrest was at the age of fourteen for drug possession and trespassing. You were arrested seven more times over a five-year period for drug possession, theft, lewd conduct, public drunkenness, assault on a police officer, driving under the influence, and assault and battery.” The file had been dropped back onto the desk as he’d stared at me. “Your rap sheet is so long that I don’t have enough time in my day to read it all. Do you dispute any of it?”

  I’d glared at him. Keith had had every right to that report since my employment status with the company had been his decision, but I’d known for a fact that the information Kyle had read was never meant for his eyes.

  I’d wanted to punch the smug, nasty look off his face, but since I’d still had an opportunity for employment on the table, I reluctantly kept my hands to myself.

  “Do you dispute it?” Kyle had asked again.