“A what?”
“A job.”
He looked around at the bike shop, trying to figure out how I fit. “Here?”
“Er, no.” I let my answer hang in the air for a few minutes while Justin tried to process everything. “At a restaurant called Bianca.”
“Oh.” Justin squinted at me and dropped his voice. “Wait a job? Are you like… poor now or something?”
I rolled my eyes. Some of the crippling fear receded in light of this guy’s lunacy. “No, dummy, I’m not poor. I just… I needed purpose. I didn’t want to waste my entire life at Leyla’s lodge. I went back to school and got my culinary arts degree. I just took over as the executive chef.”
He ran a hand through his floppy dishwater blonde hair. “That’s cool.” The interest in catching up with me had already diminished. I was a different girl than the one he knew six years ago. “Oh. Sweet.”
Said in the flattest voice ever.
“I want to go.” I heard the words as they left my mouth, but even I was surprised I’d said them.
Justin looked at me funny. “What?”
I realized he thought I meant to Leyla’s. Turning to Vann so there was no confusion this time, I held back tears and whispered. “I want to go home.”
Vann took a step closer to me and grabbed my biceps with supportive hands. “Are you okay?”
I ripped my body away from his touch, not able to disconnect his comfort with my unwanted past. Wrapping my arms tighter around my waist, I shook my head and hiccupped a choked sob. “No. I need to go.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Justin asked Vann.
Tears blurred my vision so I couldn’t read the look Vann gave Justin. “How about you back off and let me take care of her?”
“Dude, something’s got her fucked up.”
“Yeah, dude,” Vann snarled. “I’m starting to think that fucked up something is you. So back up.”
Justin finally stepped out of the way, arms raised in surrender. “It’s not me. I haven’t even seen her in forever.”
A guttural cry escaped the prison of my chest and I nearly collapsed right there in front of Vann’s shop and the crowd of cyclists gathering near the curb. Vann reached for me out of instinct, but drew his hand up short when he saw me flinch again.
“Fuck,” he muttered to himself. “Let me… put this inside. Do you want to walk with me?” He grabbed the pretty blue bicycle that he’d surprised me with by the handlebars. I cried harder, realizing I had just totally screwed up our night.
Maybe our entire relationship.
Justin’s face was all over my mind now and with it, memory after bad memory of all the terrible mistakes I’d made. But most prominently the horrific mistake that wasn’t mine to claim, but mine to bear. Forever and ever.
Vann managed to get the bike inside his shop and lock the door while I huddled near him without touching him. He kept shooting furtive glances my way. Every single time those stormy gray eyes filled with concern it made me cry harder.
Hadn’t I been praising my breakthrough with this man not minutes ago? And now I was trapped in my nightmare, a mental loop of the events of that night spinning around in my head without stopping.
Somehow, I ended up in Vann’s Jeep. And somehow he drove me home while I curled into the fetal position in his passenger seat.
He kept saying, “It’s going to be okay, Dillon. I’ve got you.” Over and over those words were like a blanket on my ice-cold skin.
I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.
He parked at my apartment building in a visitor’s spot and turned off the car. I had expected him to drop me off at the front and drive off into the sunset, anxious to get away from the psycho in the middle of a nervous breakdown.
“I’m going to walk you upstairs,” he told me firmly. “I don’t think you can do it on your own.”
I nodded numbly, not knowing what else to do. I was afraid he was right. I was also afraid of what my doorman, Teddy, would say if I stumbled through the front door looking like this.
