“Could you text me again? I need to check something.” I didn’t bother to even act somewhat sorry that I was completely ignoring her. She huffed at me and narrowed her eyes at me before doing what I asked.
“You’re sitting next to me right now, asking me to text you? My room number is 213. Your room or mine tonight?”
The message popped up instantly on my phone, and I frowned, still not bothering to answer her question. I hit Bonnie’s contact again and pressed the call button, only to be once again sent to voicemail.Again and again.
“Earth to E?” She waved her hand in my face. While Tiffany was a mild irritation before, I was now wondering what wouldhappen if she somehow fell out of the shuttle bus’ emergency exit. By accident, of course.
“Listen, I can’t get a hold of Bonnie,” I told her, my voice rising. Whether it was in panic or annoyance, I wasn’t sure, but I just continued to hit the call buttonagain and again.
“Would you like me to try?” she asked. For a second, I thought what a terrible idea that was, but my fear that something catastrophic had happened outweighed my reason. I grabbed the phone she held in her outstretched hand and plugged in her number.
Ring…“Hello?” the voice that eased all of my anxiety said, and I was so fucking relieved that I couldn’t process why Tiffany’s phone rang through and mine didn’t.
“Bonnie? Baby? What’s going on? Why didn’t you answer my calls?” I all but shouted at her when I didn’t mean to. I was just soworried.
The click without a response was deafening.
What? What is happening?
“I need to go back to the airport. I need to get home.Now,” I hollered in Tiffany’s face as she looked at me, stunned.
“What’s going on, Elijah? You’re acting like a mad person. Didn’t she just answer?” She looked down at her nails like she was inspecting the polish.
“Yeah, but something’s not right. I don’t understand, and I need to get to her.”
“What you need to do is calm down. You can’t justgo back home. You have to fly a plane. You have a job to do. I’m sure whatever this is can wait.” She nodded at me as if she was bored, as if she didn’t feel all the air being sucked out of the shuttle.
“What I need to do is get to Bonnie,” I told her. I tried to getup and past her to ask the shuttle driver to take me back to the airportnow.
“Sit down, Elijah. You’re making an ass of yourself. You can’t just leave. Not in the middle of scheduled flights. Get it together.” She looked at me, a bit miffed, like she couldn’t understand why I was two seconds away from crawling out the window of a moving bus.
Rational thought started to take over, and I knew she was right. I couldn’t just leave in the middle of a flight. It didn’t work like that. And even then, I’d need to get a flight home, and that wasn’t guaranteed.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something horrible had happened—something horrible I’d done.
Chapter Four
Bonnie
Shit-faced. I was shit-faced. Not tipsy, not on my way to being drunk, not on my way to seeing colors. I was already there. I saw tipsy, waved, and put my foot to the pedal, and went right into being shit-faced. Cackling internally as I took a shot and refilled my glass so the only thing I felt was the burn of the alcohol, I continued to drink and dance around my kitchen and living room.
It wasn’t a conscious decision to end up that way, but I had lost all rational thought when my phone rang with an unknown number, and I answered it just out of habit.
“Bonnie? Baby? What’s going on? Why didn’t you answer my calls?” Elijah’s frantic voice rang loud. I hung up before he could say anything else or I was swayed by something he said. I’d been borderline obsessed with all things Elijah since he walked into my shop two years earlier, and if I had to place his voice—which still reminded me of hot chocolate, or maybe a smooth whiskey—it would be in the top five of my favorite things about him.
In my past relationships, I’d hated it when men would call mebaby. And don’t even get me started onhoney. But really, any impersonal nickname made me think they were just grouping me together with all the other women they had dated. But Elijah…He always called meBonnie Baby, and it made me flush from my head to my toes. Ilovedit.
“Bonnie Baby,” I mocked out loud while rolling my eyes and doing my best to ignore the stabbing feeling in my chest—the feeling of the hot tears starting, no matter how hard I tried to keep them at bay or drink them away. Since I couldn’t stop them, and I still felt them as they streaked down my cheeks, I decidedwhy not, and I filled my glass to the brim.
So yeah, I waved at the tipsy sign as I passed it and flew right into being downright shit-faced.
My mind was a jumbled mess as I tried to make sense and put all the pieces together, no matter how much they didn’t seem to fit. I kept trying to shove the messages and silence into edges that would snap together and create a bigger picture—one I could understand—but nothing seemed to fit.
The door to my place suddenly swung open with such force that I jumped up from the ground I had somehow ended up on.When did that happen?I grabbed the closest thing to me to use as a weapon, just in case.
“Girl…whatthe hell have I walked in on?” Ellie—my best friend, business partner, and current reason for my heart attack—asked. “Is…Is that a Nutcracker in your hand?” Her perfectly plucked eyebrow was raised in question. “Put down the Christmas decoration, Bon…I come in peace.” Her lip tilted into a half grin, and my brain finally started to rationalize that it was Ellie standing in my living room and not someone who was breaking in to murder me.
“Jesus Ellie, you gave me afright. What are you doing here?” I heard the way my words slurred together, and I waved the Nutcracker in her face.
