“Yes.”
“Talk,” he bites out, and I lean toward him with my hand out to touch him, but he sits back out of my reach. My hand balls into a fist that I drop to my side. “Tell me,” he demands.
My heart pounds painfully against my ribcage and I study him, trying to find the words to make this better, the words to make him understand. “I’m sick.”
“Yeah, I got that when I saw the fucking pharmacy in your makeup bag and did some research.”
“My kidneys.”
“I got that, too. What I want to fucking know is why the fuck you didn’t tell me about this before.” He shakes the pills again, the sound causing me to flinch.
“I was going to.”
“Yeah, when?”
“I…” I shake my head, running my hand agitatedly through my hair. “When the time was right.” I finally get out, and the energy beating against my skin goes scary.
“When the fuck would the time be right?” he roars, standing from the chair, and I get up on my knees in the bed.
“Please calm down,” I whisper, and his eyes cut into mine, making me feel hollow.
“Calm down. You want me to calm down? Jesus, what the fuck, Kim?”
“Let me explain,” I beg as tears burn up the back of my throat, making it hard to breathe.
“I don’t want to fucking hear it,” he roars, then his arm goes back and he throws the bottle of pills across the room, where it hits the wall with a loud thud, causing the cap to come off and pills to scatter like the pieces of my painfully beating heart across the floor. “You should have fucking talked to me.” He shakes his head right before he’s gone, storming through the bedroom door, and leaving me kneeling in the middle of his big bed, clutching the sheet to my chest as I breathe heavily.
Falling with my ass to my calves, my eyes close. I knew this was going to happen. I could have prevented it from happening, but I didn’t, and now I’m left exactly how I knew I would be.
Shattered.
Feeling tears pool in my eyes, I shake my head. I can’t cry, not yet. I need to get out of here before I have my breakdown. Falling to my side, I keep the sheet around me as I move and swing my legs over the side of the bed to put my feet to the floor. The moment I stand, my legs shake along with the rest of me.
“Keep it together, Kimberly,” I whisper to myself as I go to my bag across the room on the floor, pick it up, and carry it to the bed. Hurrying, I throw on the first pieces of clothes I come across, a pair of loose sweats and a T-shirt from my college days. Dressed, I move around the room, picking up Sage’s clothes from the last couple of days, which I take and put in the hamper. Then I find my nightie from last night, take it to the bathroom, and toss it in the trash under the sink.
Staring at my open makeup bag that I didn’t get a chance to close up last night before Sage came in, my throat burns. My pills are all out of it and lining the counter like he had inspected each of them before he confronted me. I put everything back in the bag as I swallow over the knot forming in my throat, and I carry it to the bed to dump it in with my other stuff.
I spend the next ten minutes on my hands and knees picking up the pills that scattered across the wood floors, and once I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten all of them, I slip on my shoes, put my stuff on the floor, and strip the bed, folding the thick white duvet before taking the sheets to the laundry hamper in the closet.
Done, I give the room a once-over before I leave with my bag over my shoulder. I don’t know if Sage left or not, but I’m not going to stick around to find out. Grabbing my keys off the island in the kitchen, I pull off his house key and drop it to the countertop, feeling that knot in my throat expand and tighten. I know I’m going to break at any second, and that pushes me to not walk but to run toward the door and out of the fairy tale house, where I had fallen in love with its owner.
Chapter 13
Kim
LISTENING TO THE phone ring and Sage’s voice mail message click on, I close my eyes and pull the phone away from my ear.
“Honey,” Mom calls, and I hang up, drop the phone to my lap, and look at her.
“Yeah?”
“You okay?” she asks, stepping into my room—or what used to be my room. My first year away at college, she’d kept the space exactly as I left it. My second year, she added a treadmill to the corner of the room. And by the time I graduated college, she’d added boxes, a sewing table, and a work desk.