“Agreed,” Satan said. “Eight p.m. Tomorrow. Be here. Not a fucking minute late. If you try and walk through this door at a minute past, I beat your ass.”
“Understood.”
Satan slammed the door shut without another word. I drew in a deep breath.
I had my in to a more stable life now. No more moving from motel to motel, shit job to shit job, trying to figure out how to show my face without winding up a dead man. All I had to do was hope that Crush and Prince still felt the way I suspected they did a year ago and run with it.
And if I was wrong, it wasn’t like the alternative was any worse.
I walked off the road and back toward the motel I was staying at. Yeah, I’d walked a long fucking way, over two miles. I had a motorcycle, but for the sake of subtlety, I only rode it when needed. But I was fucking dying to look at it.
Absentmindedly, once I got back on the busy roads, I pulled out my phone. I saw I had one missed call, briefly recalling my phone buzzing in my pocket. It was a number I didn’t have saved in my phone.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a number I hadn’t saved in my mind.
Callie Miller.
My ex-wife.
* * *
Callie Miller
“And so I’m going to come down to Phoenix, OK? I just want to talk. I don’t expect anything more. I hope to see you soon, Ash.”
I hit End. The voicemail had gone through, just like all the other ones before it. Now I just had to hope that for once, Ashton—or Ash, as I called him in softer moments—would listen.
It hadn’t been that long ago when we felt like two teenagers swooning over each other in love, probably because that’s what we actually were. It wasn’t that long past when we’d gotten married and it felt like we’d have our happily ever after. And…
I still believed there was a part of that in him.
I still believed he had feelings for me, even though our marriage had started to crumble badly even before he disappeared.
I still believed we could make it work again, even considering I’d only heard from him once in the last year—a handwritten note, postmarked from Phoenix to our Las Vegas apartment, telling me that I should move on, declare him deceased, and find someone else to love.
I knew better. He was trying to give me the easy way out. He’d fallen into a harder life than he’d ever anticipated. It wasn’t that he hated me, no matter how he framed it. It was that he hated himself for putting me in such a spot and took it out on me.
But I wouldn’t give up that easily.
Hell, I still had the ring on my finger, although that was admittedly more to minimize other guys from hitting on me.
I still had his last name. I wasn’t going to go to the effort of changing it back until I was sure—and I definitely wasn’t right now.
And most of all, I still believed that even he felt the same way.
Things fell apart not because we saw the worst in each other, a side we may not have seen before. Things just fell apart because he fell into the wrong crowd and he worried what would happen to me.
Of course, that was a very polite way of putting things, judging by some of the things that had been said to me in the past. My friends had a very different—negative—opinion of him. But beneath the monster that showed in the night, I knew there was a gentleman who just needed the chance to feel there.
My phone rang again. I looked down—it was saved in my phone as “Southwest Recruiting (Xavier).” I hit answer immediately. Perhaps this was the news I needed.
“Hey, Xavier.”
“Callie, good news. We found a job opening for you, but I do need to warn you a bit about the context surrounding it.”
What could he possibly say? I’d asked him to find me good marketing jobs in the Phoenix area. I almost didn’t care what it paid as long as I could stay afloat financially.
“Oh, great! What’s the deal?”
