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I snapped my mouth shut.
Debbie looked uncomfortable as Erik started to usher her toward the door. “You coming to the party?”
I hadn’t really been invited, but I knew if I showed up, no one would say anything—no one except Jase, and I didn’t want to see him. I shrugged. “I’m not sure yet.”
She lingered. “Okay, well—”
“Babe, come on, I’m fucking hungry.” Erik grabbed her arm, causing the flesh under his fingers to indent. “It’s getting late.”
A low burn started in my stomach as I looked at that grip. How many times had Jeremy grabbed me like that? Too many to count. Seeing that made me feel nauseated. Made me want to think about things best left forgotten.
Debbie’s wobbly smile faltered. “Text me if you want . . . or need anything.”
Erik grumbled something under his breath, and then they were gone. And I was sitting there, with my leg propped up on the coffee table, staring at the door, but my thoughts had skipped back a couple of years.
“You know I’m fucking hungry,” Jeremy said, leaning over and grabbing my upper arm. He squeezed until I cried out. The car suddenly felt entirely too small. There wasn’t enough air. “What were you doing that took so long? Talking on the phone?”
“No!” I knew to remain still, to not pull away, because that only made him madder. “I was only talking to Cam.”
He relaxed, his fingers loosening their hold. “He’s home?”
I shook my head. “I was talking to him—”
“On the phone?” In a second, his features turned from cute to monstrous. I winced as his fingers dug in through my sweater. “I thought you weren’t on the phone?”
I shook myself out of the memory, happy to discover that all I felt was the residual anger. For the longest time, I would get sick to my stomach even thinking about him, but those days had long since passed.
Jeremy had been an abuser, but I was no longer a victim.
I was over what he’d done to me. Over. Over. Over.
Pulling my gaze away from the door, I squeezed the pillow until my arms ached. I didn’t have proof that Erik was hurting Debbie, more like a sixth sense about it, and I knew that most bruises wouldn’t be visible. Not if Erik was smart, like Jeremy had been.
I spent the rest of the evening eating out of the vending machine from down the hall and thumbing through my history text before crashing early. As I lay there, floating in the la-la land of almost sleep, I felt pretty damn lame. Here I was, a few months shy from turning nineteen, it was a Saturday night, and I was almost asleep before ten.
Lame didn’t even cover it.
Rolling onto my side, facing the wall, I drifted off to sleep wondering if Jase’s rejection would’ve hurt so badly if I hadn’t ruined my leg.
The ding from my cell phone sounded far away when it woke me some time later. I blinked my eyes open, confused. Green light from the clock on the nightstand flashed a quarter after one in the morning. The ding came again.
Smacking around until I reached my cell, I picked it up and squinted at the message. I read it once. Thought I was still dreaming. Read it twice. Thought I forgot how to read. Then I sat up, blinking the sleep from my eyes. The dark room came into focus enough for me to see that the bed on the other side of the room was empty. I looked down at the phone again.
I need to talk to u
It was from Jase.
The second text read I’m outside, and my heart sped up.
Jase was here.
Three
I had to be dreaming.
At least that was how it felt as I found my flip-flops, slipped them on, and then grabbed my key card. For a brief moment I considered ignoring his text, but my body seemed to have a mind of its own.
I was definitely going to want to karate-chop myself in the morning for this.
