So, Finn knew shit was going on. And was going to fucking kill me if Gemma ended up hurt.
And Gemma’s mom was somehow picking up on a vibe between us, and was secretly hoping we might work it out and, what, end up together?
Christ.
Who would have thought that this day would end up a bigger mess than it had started?
“Hey,” Kai called to me as I snapped the lid on some Tupperware Jules had thrown at me a few minutes before, needing to bring Benji upstairs to wash off the mud bath he had just taken. “Gemma told me to tell you that she’s sorry she couldn’t say bye. She had some things to handle.”
Shit.
She snuck out on me.
“Oh, I didn’t know she headed out.”
“Yeah, like twenty minutes ago. I got caught up with Bellamy. You don’t have to do that. I got it,” he insisted, brushing me out of the way.
Twenty minutes.
She might have already been fucking done at my house.
“Thanks for having me. It was fun.”
“Em loved the Hummer. She’s still chugging around the yard in it.”
“I’m glad she liked it. I will see you at the office.”
I kept my stride slow and casual until I hit the driveway.
Then I was running.
And maybe speeding a bit.
All in vain.
By the time I got back to my place, as expected, she was gone.
I knew there would be no sign of her at her apartment, but I couldn’t help but double-check.
I knew her phone would be off, but I called. I texted. I stressed the fuck out.
But I heard fucking nothing back.
After stressing out Sunday and all day Monday and Tuesday at work, I decided that if I didn’t get in touch with her by Wednesday afternoon, I would have no choice but to show up at her work.
But fate had other ideas.
Because, as it turned out, Gemma hadn’t been wrong to be so scared.
And the man she feared most was every bit the danger we had feared.
SIX
Gemma
I found myself constantly flip-flopping between hurt feelings and bruised pride to the knowledge that I was probably not handling the situation with the maturity I should have.
I wasn’t a teenager anymore. It wasn’t acceptable to give someone the silent treatment because they didn’t react the way you wanted them to. That wasn’t how rational, self-aware adults acted. Even if they were hurt or embarrassed.
I had totally meant to speak to him after Em’s birthday party. I figured I would tell him my plan to go back to my life, that I was clearly being paranoid if nothing bad had happened to me yet, that I wasn’t interested in playing house with someone who didn’t see any kind of possible future in it.
That was what I meant to have happen.
But then I had been cornered by my mother in the kitchen, going on and on and on about how much she liked Lincoln, about how she kept seeing him staring at me, about how much he clearly liked me.
And I had needed to tell her that he, in fact, wanted nothing to do with me. At least not in that way.
The crushing disappointment on her face had soured the rest of the party for me, leaving me exhausted from lack of sleep, with a sore head from whacking it on the door, and absolutely no motivation to try to have a reasonable conversation with Lincoln.
So I took the coward’s way out.
Then, well, as time wore on, it became more and more impossible to actually call him back or return his texts.
This embarrassment was of the personal failure sort. I couldn’t seem to even think about calling him and listening to him lecture me when I knew damn well he was right. Just the idea made my face flush, my skin feel itchy, uncomfortable.
By the time Tuesday came around, I was sick of the noise of the hotel, of constantly ordering in food because I had no place to cook, of the unsettled feeling of not being in my own life anymore.
I tried to convince myself it was for the greater good, that it would all be over soon.
As the hours wore on, though, it seemed a lot like I was simply trying to convince myself of that falsehood rather than actually buying into it.
But then something amazing happened.
Phillip got the stomach flu in the middle of the workday, leaving tons of things that needed to be handled in his office, giving me the perfect excuse to be there for a prolonged period of time without arousing any suspicion at all.
I handled a few things then, with the laser-focus I had been lacking for the weeks I was staying with Lincoln–more caught up in those fantasies than firmly rooted in reality–I whipped through the files on Phillip’s computer, printing out a few sketchy things I had come across that had nothing to do with what I was looking for, but I was inclined to think that if you were looking for dirt, you swept it all up when you came across it, not just the kind that was living in one particular corner of a room. Or in a computer, as it were.