Gorgeous Misery (Creeping Beautiful)

“She’s the one who brought me in. Don’t you get it? Adam called her looking for me. And she knew this was where it was gonna end up. She has suspicions about Nick’s death too. She’s far more connected than I am. She knew I’d find him. She’s not a little girl anymore, Harrison. She can handle the truth.”

“And she knows things. That’s why you want her here.”

“I want her here because something about all of this is off, OK? And yeah, I’m paranoid and suspicious, but that’s not what this is. Can’t you feel it?”

Harrison lets out a long breath, then runs his fingers through his thick silver mane of hair when he looks back towards the house. “Yeah. I feel it. And that’s why I think we should leave and never come back.”

“That’s not gonna happen.”

Harrison laughs. “Well, if this was some kind of plot, they got you, right? Dangle a mystery and a Company PSYOPS agent in front of Merrick Case and he jumps like a fucking frog.”

“Are you gonna go get her or not?”

“Hey, it’s your dime, I guess. I’ll go wherever, but whether or not she gets on the plane with me, that’s not my call. And I’m not gonna talk her into it.”

“Trust me, Harrison. You won’t need to.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - NICK

Everything about last Christmas was spontaneous.

Well, maybe not everything. I planned our holiday. But after Christmas was over, so were my plans. A couple days. That’s about all I get with grown-up Wendy.

Here’s something no one but me knows about Wendy Gale—she’s really shy and she hates to be the center of attention. I love that about her. But there’s a problem with us. An unavoidable, elephant-in-the-room problem with us.

She doesn’t trust herself to be alone with me for too long. Not even after the wedding.

And it’s funny, ya know? Because I’m sure if I were to ask any of the people she works with, like Adam, if they would describe Wendy Gale as someone who second-guesses herself constantly, they would say no fuckin’ way. Wendy is the girl you go to when you need something done properly. And not the same way, for instance, that Indie might do something ‘properly’. Wendy handles shit delicately. She always has. But ever since her seventeenth birthday she has been fragile. She has been straddling the edge. Always on the cusp of something. And not in a good way.

I am desperate to change this.

That’s why I agreed to the wedding. It really was her idea, not mine. And I figured it took a lot for her to make marriage the proof she was looking for and even more to actually follow through with the ceremony once we got to Branson. I thought it was a good sign.

I might still think that if Merc hadn’t gotten inside her head.

Now I have to evaluate things again. I need to tread carefully. Every move from this point on needs to be executed perfectly. There is no room for a mistake.

And now I have wild cards.

Not Merc. I can handle him. I know what that guy holds close.

But Harrison. Yeah. I definitely underestimated Harrison.

And Indie. No. There was no contingency plan for an encounter with Indie Anna Accorsi. I was counting on Nathan St. James to play her part and now he’s suddenly unavailable.

What’s that about?

I don’t know her well, but my one conversation with Indie pretty much gave me the highlights. Indie is a car crash. She’s a bull in a china shop. She’s a get-it-done kind of girl too, but in a let’s-blow-it-all-up kind of way. She is not subtle. And maybe that’s not fair because I don’t know her the way I do Wendy. But Wendy is so, so, so fuckin’ different in the way she handles things.

When Indie walks into a room, she brings a Metallica soundtrack with her. It’s very much a Kill ’Em All kind of beat going on. She is powerful, distinct, and unmistakable.

Wendy is a Brahms’s Lullaby. She slips into your life with soft silence. She’s in the background. Elevator Muzak. You don’t notice her until it’s too late.

And you’d think that this would make her arrogant. That she’d have an ego a mile high. And sure, she comes off that way at times. If she feels cornered, she’s not above making boastful threats. It’s not her skills that she second-guesses, anyway.

It’s everything else.

Her hair, her make-up—if she wears it—her clothes, the tone of her voice, the way she walks, how she dances—she won’t dance, ever—all that shit that teenage girls worry about when they’re thirteen. But here’s the difference: those teenage girls figure it out. And by the time they’re twenty-four, they have some kind of system going. They have a hairstyle, they know what kind of clothes look good on them, they have perfected the art of eyeliner and understand lipstick.