“I’ll do it quietly,” he hisses. “I’ll do it safely. He has no active warrants, so I can’t arrest him. But I can move him along, and then I can keep watch over your house tonight to make sure he stays gone. You just have to?—”
“I said no!” I stumble back a step and swallow the nauseaburning my throat. I blink the tears from my eyes, and lick my impossibly dry lips, then I turn away from Detective James and stumble to a stop again when, across the room, Dean is exactly where I left him. But now, my phone is in his palm, and his eyes are on the screen.
This may be the first time since we met that he’snotlooked at me.
I force my feet to move, one in front of the other, and though I revisit my earliest thoughts about this man—he’slarge, he’s determined, and he’s a fighter—I shake my head.
I don’t believe it.
“Dean?” I slow four feet away and draw a shuddering breath. “W-what are you?—”
He offers my phone, his eyes impossibly sad as they come up and stop on mine. “I’m sorry for looking.” His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “You asked me to hold on to this earlier, so when it vibrated in my pocket, I took it out without really thinking.”
I attempt to regulate my breath. To calm my wildly beating heart. To remain upright, when my entire system wishes desperately to drop.
Accepting my phone, I turn it over and search the still locked screen. Sitting front and center, an email waits with the subject line:Here’s that info you asked for.And right below that, a snippet of the email I’ve already seen:Assault and battery. Assault with a deadly weapon…
I tremble all over and will the tears to stop coming.
Say it’s not true. Tell me this is all a load of shit!
Instead, he digs his hands into his pockets and stares at the floor. “Guess I should get out of your way, then.”
“What?” My voice crackles and breaks on that single word. “What are you?—”
“I won’t say anything to Mel and Nick,” he rasps, backing up a step. “I don’t wanna draw attention to me leaving. I dunno…” He sighs. “Maybe later, or when she texts you tomorrow, you could tell her congratulations on her beautiful wedding. Give her a hug or something.” Stopping his retreat, he comes forward again and ducks in to press a feather-soft kiss to my cheek. “Be good, okay? Get a cab home tonight. Don’t drive.”
“Why won’t you tell me it’s untrue?” I stare at him through blurry eyes, my breath hitching on a sob. “I told Carter he was wrong. I said… I trust you, Dean. So nowyoutell me the email is bullshit, then we can get back to dancing.”
“I can’t.” He offers me the world’s fakest smile, his shoulders bowing forward in defeat. “It’s true. It happened. I already told you a lot of it, but the fact you went searching doesn’t really feel like trust.”
I choke on a noisy, heart-aching sob. “Dean?—”
“Don’t date him though, okay?” His glances over my head, his eyes narrowing to dangerous slits. “I know his type. I know it all too well.” Reaching across with his left hand, his sore side, he thumbs fat tears from my cheek. “Maybe I’ll catch you sometime.”
Releasing me, he turns on his heels and cuts quietly through the dancing crowd, exiting through the server entrance. The door swings shut at his back, the world continues without him, and then Carter presses his fingertips to my neck, startling me around and dragging a furious snarl from deep in my chest.
“Anna…” Just as Dean did, he attempts to swipe my cheek.
Unlikewith Dean, I slap his hand away and create the exact scene I was trying to avoid all along. “Don’t. Touch. Me.” I scourthe room and find eyes—Elena’s—and then further—Nick’s. But Mel remains blissfully oblivious, sipping from a champagne glass and happily chattering with Camila.
Nick’s jaw clicks. His eyes narrow. His entire torso swells and grows, adrenaline leading him toward a fight I won’t allow him to participate in tonight.
Instead, I drop my chin in a kind of acknowledgment, a silentI’m okay,then I turn on my heels and find a different exit. Somewhere to hide, so Mel doesn’t have to worry. Somewhere to cry, because dammit, December twenty-fourth didn’t have to do me dirty like this again. And somewhere to grieve, because my Christmas curse remains in full effect.
December fucking sucks.
EIGHTEEN
DEAN
Isettle back in the front seat of my truck, a Dodge D series that came off the production line in nineteen-sixty-nine.
The year our vehicles were manufactured is as far as the similarities go, though. Because while Anna’s Road Runner is a beloved classic, hand-restored by her and her father and, ironically, easily able to fetch two or three hundred thousand dollars at auction—the man who scraped every penny together to keep his daughter fed, was sitting on an automotive goldmine—my truck would struggle to sell for around nine grand.
Anna’s Road Runner boasts a flawless paint job, while mine comes with its original rusty red, cracked headlights, an engine that putts more than it purrs, and a bench seat covered in cracked leather, so a man climbing in wearing a pair of shorts can expect to lose a bit of his skin in the process.
Baby, It’s Cold Outsideplays through my crappy, tinny speakers, while my wipers wage war against softly falling snow and the glare of the sun flirting on the horizon.
