I felt crazy standing here while she stared accusingly. “Can’t the furniture people do it if you’re having a new one delivered?” I spiraled into the panicky, unpleasant hole that consumed me when I talked to her. I wasn’t even sure how I’d gotten sucked into the conversation, since we’d driven almost an hour through a blizzard to get here because she’d had a whim and decided she wanted to ruin something important of mine. Anger blazed to life in me.
“Yeah, if I want topay. Haven’t you cost me enough money?” She jabbed me with a pointy fingernail, but Jake’s sweater stopped it from hurting me.
I stared at her, and she crossed her arms, glancing down, apparently irked she hadn’t managed to cause damage. “Give me my stuff.” I scanned the room and spotted what I thought was the paperwork on the coffee table, and the gleam of the ring sitting on top confirmed that for me. I started toward the table near the couch, and she darted in front of me.
She crowded me until I had her cloying too-sweet perfume stuffed in my nose. “You are not taking anything until you get rid of that couch.” She dragged her phone out of a pocket in her dress and snapped a picture of me.
“Why did you do that?” Shellshocked, the way I always was when she was angry, I stood there, a statue, while she took another picture.
Miranda grinned. “Proof you were here, lover boy.”
“For what? Just let me take my things.” I tried to move around her, but she stepped with me and stayed in my way.
“Where have you been?” Another picture, this time with a flash.
I blinked and held my hand up in front of me. “What do you care?”
“You fucker.” She poked at me again, and this time she did it hard enough that I grunted. “Delia didn’t go out with us last night. Were you at her place? Are you staying there? She’s been weird with me lately.”
I wanted to scream; I didn’t even know most of her friends. “All I want to do is get my shit and go.” I tried to reach around her toward the coffee table, and she shoved at me. My gut sank as she thumped me hard enough that I knew if she kept going it would hurt sooner rather than later.
“Are you fucking stoned? I said you have to—”
“I am done!” I roared. Pounding from upstairs started on the ceiling directly over our heads, and I yelled toward it, over my limit. “I’m getting this stuff and going.”
I tried again to reach around her, and she shoved me off-balance. I stumbled back and righted myself by grabbing the arm of the couch she’d apparently decided she hated as much as me, even though she’d bought it. Everything about this situation made me feel absolutely certifiable.
“I’m calling the cops and telling them you broke in here!” There it was: the threat. She’d do it, too. My stomach sank to my toes and kept right on going. I’d known, deep down, there would be no way to get out of here without some sort of bullshit.
“I have a key.”
“Exactly.” She gave me a perky grin. “You stole it and you’re stalking me.”
I took out my key ring and worked the key off, and it bounced with atwangon the floor and skidded off under the couch. She glanced after it with a frown, and while she was distracted, I snatched the papers and ring off the table and turned to escape.
Miranda followed me. “You are so useless! I want this couch gone!” She kept yelling, out into the hall and down the stairwell, calling me names, demanding I do what she wanted. On and on, an endless cacophony that only made my headache worse. I hurried.
She shadowed me outside and shoved me from behind. I wasn’t ready for her to touch me, had thought since it was cold she might retreat back inside because she was in a skimpy dress. I hit a bad step on the ice and went down on my knee, blasting it against the sidewalk. I hissed and tried to push myself up, but she shoved me again, so I stayed there and hung my head. I clutched the papers to my chest and hated how humiliating this all was.
“I will call everyone I know and tell them that you broke in if you don’t fucking do what I want!”
I glanced up and my mortification was complete. Declan and Jake climbed out of the SUV and came toward me.
Declan reached us first, and Miranda finally backed off. “Excuse me, ma’am, but what the—”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Jake demanded. He kept walking toward her.
Miranda started sobbing, full-on waterworks, and my insides disappeared, leaving me empty. I thought I might wither completely away. My parents had fallen for her crap, why wouldn’t they?
“He started it.”
Declan reached down and helped me to my feet. I was baffled at the way he checked my hands over, and winced as he brushed salt out of a scrape on my left palm that throbbed with pain.
Jake huffed. “I would believe that if I hadn’t just seen you push him from behind while he was trying to getawayfrom you. What the hell?”
“You have no idea what you’re saying. You didn’t see anything.” She waved a finger at him, the same one she normally jabbed me with.
“I made her mad,” I mumbled.
