She hung her head, and her shoulders moved in what I could only assume was a deep sigh. I tilted my head as I watched her lean her body weight against the door, and then she shoved her key into it to lock it.
I officially hated that car.
I wanted to approach her and see if she even knew that she had been followed. But then, an interesting sight caught my eye. A set of headlights that came at me from my left turned my head, and its light span barely missed me in the shadows of the alleyway across the street from Jasmine’s parking lot. I watchedthat motherfucking black car with blacked out windows cruise right on past again, like it was patrolling the outside of her apartment building.
And there was that fucking logo again. Emblazoned right on the side. The same logo as the car that chased that terrified woman straight to us.
Except instead of it being a massive logo emblazoned on the side of the car, it was a smaller logo emblazoned onto the gas cap.
I’d never whipped my phone out and taken pictures so quickly in all my fucking life. Fuck that cloned phone. We needed to protect this woman with all we fucking had.
She needed to be with us.
10
JASMINE
Friday night had been spent face-down on my couch, fully intending to clean my apartment and instead choosing to ignore it until future-me had the energy to deal with it. But when I woke up Saturday with my stomach growling loud enough to file a complaint and realized my pantry looked like a war zone that had already been looted, I figured what the hell.
Might as well feed myself and pretend I have my life together.
So that was how I found myself standing in the chip aisle with a caramel cold brew sweating in my hand while I stared at two different bags like they were going to make a decision for me.
One was on sale.
The other was buy-one-get-one.
I flipped them over. Checked the ounces. Did the math in my head because I refused to be the kind of person who didn’t do the math.
I had money.
Plenty of it, technically.
That didn’t mean I was going to waste it.
“You’re ridiculous,” I muttered to myself, grabbing both and tossing them into the cart anyway.
Because if I was going to spiral over sodium and artificial flavoring, I might as well do it prepared.
I shrugged as the voice in my head won out over everything else. I could afford a few of my favorite groceries. It didn’t have to be all rice and beans for days. I made good money.
That didn’t mean I wasn’t staring down a mountain of debt.
Student loans didn’t disappear just because your paycheck looked decent on paper. Neither did the credit card I’d leaned on when things got tight a few years ago.
I was just so ready to be free of it.
It won’t happen today, I told myself. Let yourself live a little.
I picked up the two bags of and then I walked over to the pretzels. I wasn’t able to get my father to talk too much about my mother growing up. The topic always made him mad. Or sad. I hated seeing my father that way, so I learned not to ask. But I figured out a few things, whenever he was in a mood to regale me with stories growing up.
One of those stories was how when they were dating, she got choked up on a honey mustard pretzel and it scared the living daylights out of Dad.
But it didn’t stop her from eating her favorite snack.
“I would have loved to have met you, Mom,” I whispered as I picked up a bag of honey mustard pretzels.
I heard someone clear their throat to the left of me, and I didn’t think anything of it at first. Until they coughed.
