Flawed (Ethan Frost 4)

“No, not Ethan. I swear she hasn’t contacted either one of us.” There’s a pause, and my sister’s already concerned voice grows even more worried. “Are you going to tell me what happened? What did you two fight about that was so bad it sent her running with nothing but the clothes on her back? Tori isn’t normally a runner. She’s more a—”

“Fighter. Yeah, I know.” God do I know. I’ve spent the last year on the receiving end of all that fight. Which is just one of the many reasons I’m so fucking worried about her right now. It isn’t like her to just walk away, to disappear when she feels she or someone she cares about has been wronged.

And where would she go anyway? The Tesla has only so many miles before it runs out of charge. And while there are charging stations she could go to, how can she find them when she doesn’t even have a cellphone to look them up?

“It was nothing,” I finally say when the silence has stretched on too long between us. “We didn’t fight about anything. Not really.”

“Not really?” Chloe repeats. I don’t know if it’s her bff sixth sense or her sister sixth sense that is going off, but it’s pretty obvious that she’s not buying what I’m selling. Not for a second.

Not that I blame her. I was there. I know that I was only trying to help Tori, not hurt her, and still I can’t help but doubt myself. Still I can’t hel

p replaying the conversation in my head over and over as I try to figure out where it all went wrong. Why it all went wrong.

Not that it really matters if she isn’t around to hash it out with.

The thought pisses me off all over again and I walk outside to the driveway and look down at the street below. Where are you, Tori? Why the hell did you run away instead of staying here and fighting with me? Why the hell did you take the coward’s way out?

When I say as much to my sister, she just snorts out a laugh. “You obviously don’t know Tori very well. She didn’t leave because she’s a coward, she left because if she stuck around when she was that pissed off, she would have eviscerated you. You should probably count yourself lucky you still have all your body parts. When threatened, she tends to shoot from the hip and ask questions later.”

Don’t I know it. I still have the marks on my ass from a year’s worth of fights to prove it.

“I just want to know that she’s okay,” I say almost desperately. “It’s been eight hours and no one has seen her. How the hell is that possible?” I’ve got my bots crawling through the ’Net, searching for any tweet, Snapchat, Instagram photo with her in it. Her face is pretty famous right now and if she’s out in the world, I expect someone to notice her—and to throw her face up on their social media. The fact that no one has in eight hours tells me she’s holed up somewhere.

But where? It’s the million-dollar question right now, and not knowing the answer to it is making me absolutely insane.

She was obviously upset when she left here. What if she got into an accident? What if she’s lying in some emergency room right now, and they don’t know to call me instead of her family? What if—

I cut off the thought, try to tamp down the crazy before it takes all control. But at the same time, with these new thoughts in my head, I’m suddenly itching to get off the phone with Chloe so I can check auto accidents in the area. Make sure Tori hasn’t wrapped Ethan’s very expensive toy around a telephone pole somewhere.

Just the thought has my hands shaking as I make some frantic, half-cocked excuse to hang up with Chloe. I make her promise to call if Tori contacts her, then open up my computer and start to search.

Half an hour later I’m reasonably convinced that Tori hasn’t been in an accident. But the knowledge doesn’t put my mind at ease half as much as I’d hoped it would. Where is she? Where the fuck is she?

How could she just run away like that in the middle of a fight? I was only trying to help, only trying to make things easier for her, and her response is to fucking disappear like this? Never again, man. Never again. When I get my hands on her, she’s going to be damn lucky I don’t turn her over my knee for all the worry she’s caused me.

She’d probably claw my eyes out if I so much as tried, but I find myself looking forward to the fight. Looking forward to having her back in my arms where she belongs.

Rubbing a hand over my face, I wander back into the house and consider pouring myself a drink. But I want to be sober when she shows up—sober enough to get to the bottom of this mess and sober enough to drive to go pick her up, if that’s what she needs from me.

So in the end I just pace the house, our fight playing over and over in my head like a playlist gone wrong.

Each time I do, it gets harder to hold my head up. Harder to tell myself that this isn’t my fault, that she’s the one who went off half-cocked. She did, absolutely, but when I hear myself telling her that she’s a mess, when I remember the look on her face when I listed all the ways her life is currently fucked up, it makes me furious with myself. More, it pisses me off.

I’ve never been one to kick someone when they’re down, especially not someone I care about the way I care about Tori. So what the fuck was I doing when I said those things to her? What the fuck was I thinking?

It’s pretty clear that I wasn’t thinking. I was reacting, lashing out at her because I didn’t want to acknowledge that she had a point. That I should have talked to her before leaking that story about Parsons.

But goddamnit! What was I supposed to do? What the fuck was I supposed to do? I’ve already screwed up once in my life with a woman I cared about, totally missing it when my parents sold Chloe out and sent her into a downward spiral that nearly destroyed her. That did, for a long time, destroy any chance I had at a relationship with her.

I couldn’t just sit by and watch the same thing happen to Tori. Couldn’t sit on my ass while some bastard destroyed her for his own fucking entertainment. Not when I could see her light getting dimmed a little more with each day that passed, with each online comment she read that called her a gold digger or a slut or a fame whore.

She didn’t deserve that—no woman deserves it—and especially not when that fuckwit got away scot-free, his career and his life enhanced by the same thing that destroyed hers.

No way. No fucking way.

Should I have talked to her first? Yeah, absolutely. I’m willing to acknowledge that now. But I was only trying to help, only trying to do what I thought was best. The last thing I wanted to do was make her feel like I thought she was incompetent, though. I just wish—

The phone rings, interrupts my circular thoughts. I make a dive for it, answer on the second ring. Then hold my breath as Ethan’s voice comes over the line.