“Butch!” I shouted, walking to him.
He stopped and slowly turned, his grim expression unchanging.
“How did you get this note?”
He shrugged, but even that was barely perceptible.
“Girl handed it to me.”
“Okay, where did she hand it to you?” I said.
I had to deliberately tell myself to speak slowly in order to avoid him noticing how I was feeling.
“Someplace,” he said. “Just said make sure you get it. So I did.”
“Someplace is not a place in town, Butch. You ran into the girl who wrote this note. She knew you were in the Black Reapers and that I was in the Black Reapers well enough to make this request. So you must have been wearing your cut. Where did this happen?”
But again, Butch just shrugged. God, it was so frustrating.
“Running errands.”
Damnit, Butch, do you have to pretend like you’re a mute?
Without another word, Butch passed by me, walking into the headquarters and disappearing from view.
“Motherfucker,” I muttered to myself as I pulled the note back up, trying to make sense of where she would have run into him.
The hospital? I mean, last I’d seen her, she’d wanted to go to medical school, and she was wearing scrubs at the grocery store. But I hadn’t seen her... well, then again, she did say she had just moved here.
But why would Butch have gone to the hospital? Unless maybe he just went to get some routine physicals done? But that didn’t happen at hospitals.
Maybe Rose wasn’t a hospital doctor. Maybe she was just the kind of doctor you saw once a year to make sure your blood pressure hadn’t soared above the normal limits.
Or, maybe, it was something that I didn’t know about, something that I really wouldn’t want to know about, something that I would regret knowing.
But of course, that just made me want to know it more.
Fuck, why did Rose have this effect on me? It was like fast food—you knew it was bad for you, you would regret it as soon as you ate it, but the buildup to it and the process of having it were irresistible. You couldn’t say no to getting it, and in the exact moment of having it, things tasted wonderful.
At least fast food, though, digested and disappeared from your body. Rose would never leave me.
Butch being the one to deliver the letter to me had made me too curious to push her away again. Call it weakness, call it a necessity, call it whatever the fuck you wanted, I knew that if I wanted my mind settled and some measure of peace, I had to do it.
I had to meet Rose Wright in person.
But I damn well had to do it on my terms and my terms only.
I pulled out my phone. I didn’t even need to look at the sheet to know Rose’s phone number. I confirmed it before I sent a very awkward text to someone who had a similar number, but I got it right. It didn’t help that my phone suggested the phone number after I punched in the first five digits.
Her older messages popped up, the one suggesting we meet up when she arrived.Guess you won, Rose. Guess you’re getting what you wished for.
“I’ll meet up Thursday,” I wrote. “Joe’s Java. 7 p.m. You get an hour. No alcohol. Just coffee or tea.”
I stared at that message. Angry enough? Straightforward enough? Limiting enough to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid? Check, check, and check.
I hit “Send.”
Boy, I had a feeling I was going to regret this. I could see it now. Seeing her, her beautiful body... catching up on the bad times... and the good... deciding to grab a drink... getting something light... things getting a little heavier…
