I turned to face him, readying to throw my arms around his neck and kiss him senseless when a voice called out from the ugly recesses of my past.
“Dillon? No way!”
Dread curdled through me, tightening around my bones until they felt crushed beneath the pressure. I froze. Actually froze in place. My limbs refused to move. My heart stopped mid-beat. My brain turned to an unusable icicle in my head. I stood there, half turned toward Vann, half sucked into the vortex of my hellish nightmare.
“Dillon!” the voice called for a second time. “No fucking way!”
I could feel Vann’s curious gaze crawl over my skin. I could hear the questions bouncing around in his head, filling the air with my worst fears. I could sense my past, that night six years ago, springing from the grave to zombie the shit out of my present life.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Not being able to respond, did not deter Justin from carrying on a conversation. He was exactly like I remembered him. Stoner meets ungodly amount of family money meets only ever interested in a good time. He was one of those people you could never be good friends with because he was all shallow end and no substance. “Do you know the bike shop guy? Are you buying this bike?” There was a pause before he tried a different tactic. “Is she buying this bike?”
“It’s a gift,” Vann answered, his voice taut, strained. “Dillon, are you okay?”
“You do know each other! How crazy is that?” Justin just kept babbling like my behavior wasn’t totally off, like I clearly didn’t want to be anywhere near here.
“How do you know her?” Vann demanded. His hand landed on my back in what was meant to be a protective gesture. I flinched at the contact and pulled away, finally breaking the paralysis that had taken over.
“Dillon and I go way back,” Justin explained. He folded his arms over his long-sleeved shirt and grinned at me. “We grew up getting in trouble together.”
God, that sounded way more salacious than it was. But then again, wasn’t that the whole point? We would party together. We would drink and experiment with drugs together. And we would apparently let each other get drugged and raped.
Those fuzzy memories tripped through my mind again. The ones I couldn’t quite grasp. The ones that whispered the awful truth but never let me examine it closely.
“Is that so?” Vann asked, reaching for me again.
I stepped away, wrapping my arms around my middle and wishing for a getaway car. I just wanted to run away. And then I wanted to crawl into a steaming hot shower and never leave.
“God, I haven’t seen you in fucking forever, DB. It’s been at least…”
“Six years.”
He grinned at me, not understanding the significance at all. “Has it really been six years? What the hell happened to you? You just…” he made an explosion sound with his mouth and gestured with both fists, “disappeared.”
Courage slithered between my breastbone and heart, forcing a path where fear and pain and my past threatened to crush and destroy. “Do you remember the last time we saw each other, Justin? Do you remember that party?”
His blank look said everything. To be fair, I didn’t think he was the guy that had drugged me. He liked to have a good time, but he also liked for it to be mutual.
“It was at your house. Right after you got home from Ibiza.”
His face lit with recognition. “I brought back the good gummies.”
I didn’t know about that. Gummies. My party had ended after a cocktail.
“You were wasted that night.” His head tipped back as he laughed at the memory. My stomach turned and my mouth watered with the nauseous threat. “Good times, good times.”
“Are you here for a reason?” Vann demanded. He was practically vibrating with fury, but all I could do was stand there and tremble.
“The taco and beer ride?” Justin turned back to me. “What happened to you, Baptiste? Nobody’s seen you in forever. Scotty heard that you died.”
“I didn’t die.” But there were nights there at the beginning that I thought I might want to. Not for any other reason than to get the disgusting feeling of a stranger’s unwanted hands all over my body out of my head.
“You should come out with us again,” he insisted. “We’re going to Bendi’s tonight. And next weekend, we’re going up to Leyla’s lodge. You should come. Remember her fucking hot tub?” He laughed at his own phrasing. “Remember the time we—”
“No.” The word was a sterling silver bullet blasted from my mouth.
Justin’s manicured eyebrows lifted. “What?”
“I don’t do that stuff anymore. I have a job.”
