“Good idea. Better to have the argument now than have to live with subway tile for the next fifty years.”
“Exactly,” Jules agreed. “You about ready? I have that meeting in an hour.”
“Yep. All set, I agreed, giving Abby a smile. “Thank you,” I told her, waving the cup, but letting my voice fall heavy.
Most people would have kept their mouth shut, let the weird feelings regarding the situation just fester, build into a small sliver of guilt that would nag them at random times. She didn’t do that. She said something. The world needed more people like that.
“Ugh,” Jules growled as soon as she got in her seat, digging a bit frantically in her purse until she produced a small green bottle of hand sanitizer. “I need enough of this to bathe in,” she declared, squirting it into her hands, then rubbing the glob all the way up her arms before working it in between her fingers and palms.”Do they make hand sanitizer for your brain?”
“What’d he do, Jules?” I asked, stomach turning over at the potentials.
“No need to put your ‘I will murder him’ voice on, Kai,” she told me, shooting me a small smirk. “He was just your garden variety sleazeball. Tried what he thought he could get away with. Made some gross comments about newlyweds breaking in their home. Nothing too crazy.”
My stomach eased up as I handed her my phone. “I got his number. And the secretary said he was a creep and manwhore. She wanted me to see if I could convince you of that before you went through with the marriage.”
“Everyone saw it but me,” Jules grumbled, looking out her side window before seeming to shake off the dark mood. “So what now?”
“Now I have the number traced. If he makes a call, it will ping on the closest cell tower. Then we can find him.”
“If he makes a call.”
“He’ll make a call.”
“But who knows when, right?”
Unfortunately, she was right. The waiting for people to surface part of the job was the longest and most frustrating. Maybe he would make a call while driving, ping off a tower towns or counties away from where he was actually setting up camp. You never really knew.
“Tell you what… we already missed check-out for today. We can hang here one more night, see if he pings, we are close, can track it down. Hopefully track him down. If not, we will head back and wait. This isn’t a matter of if, Jules, just when. We’re going to find him.”
“Okay,” she agreed, giving me a curt nod as we turned down the street toward the hotel.
“Jules?”
“Yeah?” she asked as we made it back into the room.
“You need to call your mom,” I reminded her, watching as she moved around in a sort of detached numbness.
Angry, upset, even purposeful Jules, I could handle that. This? This cold, detached, automaton? This was bothering me. Worrying me.
Because it would be too easy.
To let this part of her become all of her.
And that would be a goddamn tragedy.
Her mom and sister would be good for her, shake her up, make it hard – if not impossible – to keep up the facade. Even if she didn’t give them the real story, she would have to give them enough of it to convince them, to get their indignation up, to force them to get some anger or disappointment, or something, anything out of her.
“Oh, right,” she said, nodding, reaching for her phone, looking down at the screensaver for a long moment, face completely blank, before pressing her finger to the home button to unlock it, then scrolling through her contacts. “I’m just going to take a walk around the parking lot,” she told me, already moving toward the door, not wanting to share this part of her life with me, something I had no right to be hurt by, but found myself being nonetheless.
So I took a page from her book.
I got to work.
I was only thirty minutes into it when my cell started screaming from its place on the nightstand.
I didn’t need to look.
I knew it was Miller.
“Hey, Miller.”
“You missed a hell of a party,” she declared, voice rough like it always got when she had too much to drink. Jules’ dad had sprung for an open bar. “Lincoln tried to run game on two of Jules’ cousins. Who both had his number. And long story short, he ended up pants around his ankles tied to a tree in the woods being courted by a curious fox. While Finn cleared plates like part of the wait staff. And – miracle of all miracles, if you ask me – Sloane got Gunner to dance with her. Slow dance with her.”
“And you had too many glasses of tequila?”
“Too many glasses of tequila? I had no plans of ending up bare-ass naked on a dance floor which we both know would be of high likelihood if I had too much tequila. Smith and I had scotch. Ranger even showed up for a bit, shifting uncomfortably in his seat like the mountain man shut-in he is. He hadn’t gotten the news about the wedding being off. So what kept you? I thought you were going to try to make it.”