Were we wrong? Look at yourself. Spending all night on the couch with a gun because you saw someone taking shelter in your shed during a storm. Because you’re convinced that a guy you left twelve years ago still cares enough to want you back.
Pathetic.
No, I’m not deluded enough to think Aaron wants me back. He wants to punish me. I humiliated him, stole from him, and he’s killed people for a hell of a lot less.
I have reason to fear, and I need to stifle that voice that says I’m being silly and weak.
I remember those early days with Aaron, when he was still playing savior. Okay, so he wasn’t eighteen, as he’d claimed online. Wasn’t in college, as he’d also claimed. And his money sure as hell didn’t come from rich parents. But he was handsome and charming, and he owned his own business... if one called drug-dealing a business, which he certainly did, and I did, too, in those early days.
I remember late nights at the kitchen table, helping him with his accounting books—I was always good at math. If I made a mistake, even one I caught myself, I’d fall over myself apologizing, and he’d rub my back and tell me I was doing great.
I’m not your mother, baby girl. I think you’re brilliant. Brilliant, gorgeous, and tough as nails.
All the right things to say, at least for a little while. He used to laugh about my mother, ask what she did for a living. High-powered defense attorney, right? Or former military? Maybe a CEO? Some profession that had turned her into such a battle ax. That made me laugh. My mother was what they’d called, at that time, a homemaker. Gave up her career for her family. Whatever that career had been. I didn’t know, but she’d never let me forget that she’d given it up, and for what? A daughter like me? Spoiled and silly and stupid?
But I proved her wrong in the end, didn’t I? I did something that made my mother long for that spoiled, silly, stupid girl. I helped kill a girl. That was the story anyway.
I banish the voices that tell me I’m being ridiculous, sitting with this gun on my lap, jittery from mainlining caffeine all night. There’d been a time, maybe five years ago, with a little extra cash in the bank, that I’d invested in something that would have horrified my mother. I’d gone to therapy.
I’d only been able to afford a few sessions, but I’d found gold there in the kindness of a stranger who, yes, was being paid to be kind, but sometimes, that is still a nugget of gold, sparkling in the dirt.
You know that it was in Aaron’s best interests to make you feel small and insignificant. To convince you that you couldn’t survive without him. Is it possible your mother did the same? That she needed you to need her? That they both taught you not to trust your own instincts, because it benefited them?
Who did it hurt for me to sit here with a gun on my lap? To stay up all night? I was self-employed as a graphic designer—I didn’t have a job to get to in the morning. How much worse would it be if I listened to that mocking voice, went to bed and woke up to one of Aaron’s goons looming over my bed after I already realized someone was in my shed?
Soon I make breakfast, keeping the gun within reach. It takes another cup of coffee before I work up the nerve to go into the screened back porch and look out. I can see the white shed through the rain, which has let up a little. As I watch, the shed door opens. I snatch up the gun so fast I fumble and drop to one knee catching it.
The shed door stays open, as if someone is looking out, and I bend the other knee until I’m low enough not to be spotted. A head appears. Then a figure holding a partial sheet of plywood up as a makeshift umbrella. For a moment, I have to blink, certain I’m seeing wrong. Knowing Aaron’s taste in evil goons, I’m expecting a hulking behemoth, and with that in mind, this figure looks like a child.
It’s not a child, though. It’s a woman. A young woman, slightly built, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, her feet bare.
The young woman slips out and behind the shed, only to return a few moments later. A bathroom break. In moments, she’s back in the shed.
Once that shed door is closed, I rise and head inside to think about what I saw.
I’ve been working for a couple of hours when the phone rings.
“Hey,” Liam says when I answer. “Just checking to see how you’re holding up. Storm hitting hard there?”
I answer in kind, playing the role of girlfriend, even with no one around to observe the performance. That’s what men like Liam expect. He’s not some lowlife drug dealer. He’s a lawyer, damn it. A respected and respectable member of the community. If he’s inclined to treat me like a real girlfriend, then I’d damn well better appreciate that and respond accordingly.
The worst of it is that Liam isn’t just expecting me to play a role. He really does consider me his girlfriend. He takes me to work functions, sends me flowers, acts as if it’s a normal relationship. That’s how he sucked me in at first. Compared to what I was used to, it seemed normal. He seemed normal.
“How about I come by after work?” he says. “Bring dinner. We can hang out, watch a movie, weather the storm together.”
It sounds like a suggestion rather than a demand. I know better, but as long as he’s phrasing it as optional...
“Another time?” I say. “It sounds awesome, but I had a rough night, and I’m running on half power today. I expect to be hanging out with my laptop into the wee hours.”
“Then we’ll just make it dinner.”
Dinner and sex, he means. Also, a movie and sleepover, if he decides that’s what he wants. Normally, I’d give in. This isn’t worth the fight. But if he comes over, he could see the girl in the shed, and he’s not going to just ignore her. He might invite her in for dinner because it would amuse him.
“I wish I could,” I say, managing something akin to genuine regret. “But I’m really feeling off. I don’t think I could stomach dinner.”
“It’s ten in the morning. You can’t possibly know how you’ll feel by dinnertime.”
“I just—”