Murder_ A Sinful Secrets Romance - Ella James Page 0,203

The way it doesn’t stop when your heart does. It feels illogical, the way time marches on, and you walk too, slowly, surreally, feeling like a fish on land. Even when you can’t make sense of it, eventually, you kind of have to. There’s no other way. You do—because you have to. End of story.

I wish they wrote books and made movies about this: this helpless, numb continuum. I wish I could go off the deep end. Shave my hair off. Bash someone else’s car windshield in. Refuse to leave the bed. But that’s not real life.

What is?

I don’t know.

What will I do when I get back there?

Will he be there?

Jamie told me “no.” She said Nic’s been keeping up with him through his friends. Breck’s buddies. Of which he—Nic—was apparently one.

Nic says Bear isn’t even in the South. I heard Jamie on the phone with him last night from where I stood outside her door, crying silently, about to go inside and cry in her bed. She was saying, “So he disappeared? Back to that cabin?”

Then her super ears picked up my sniffling and she got off the phone. But I know what she meant, I think. Bear had a cabin over the summer. He spent some of this past summer up here in Breckenridge. Before deciding to find me, I guess.

I look at the dashboard and I see us walking down that road. I know what I know about his real feelings for me because of how he disappeared. Jamie found me in some PTSD fugue, lying in the snow, but there was blood under my fingernails. My knuckles are still bruised and cut. My right elbow is sore and looks a little greenish. When I tried to talk to her that night—two nights ago, I think—I barely even had a voice.

I think I screamed at him.

I know I hit him.

I don’t really remember…but I have this feeling. I remember feeling…rage. I can almost kind of see his face. Wide eyes. Red eyes. I can feel the difference in our sizes. He was solid underneath my fists. He was mine.

Tears pool in my eyes and start to streak down my cheeks.

I loved him!

I wanted nothing more than him.

Barrett.

My Barrett.

Made up. Fiction. Gone.

The man I loved doesn’t exist.

He didn’t love me. He felt sorry for me.

How pathetic did he think I was? The way his guilt mixed in with empathy and sorrow. Not to mention loneliness.

I was his atonement, I think. Or rather, I wonder. I heard people talking the day after: New Year’s Day. Something about how he didn’t mean to. Didn’t mean to lose his dick inside of my vagina, I guess. Didn’t mean to lie, to go to Christmas with me, didn’t mean to tell me all about his life.

What happened between us was an accident. The second tragic accident featuring the us as co-stars.

Oh, how much I hate him.

Want to hate him.

I don’t even know I nodded off until I wake under a hotel awning dreaming something strange, in which I’m saying, “Can’t.”

BARRETT

January 5, 2016

“Hold on now.” The woman holds one finger up. “Say that again?” She’s almost smiling. It’s this weird half smile that’s not a smile. Her head is tilted sideways. I keep waiting for my heart to pound, but I’m steady as a stone as I say it again.

“I’m guilty of a hit and run. On New Year’s Eve, 2012.”

Her lips roll themselves together. I watch her grayish eyebrows tighten and her brown eyes sharpen. I can see her thinking.

“Twelve…” Her cheek indents from where her molars bite down on it, but her gaze is shrewd on mine. “I think I might remember something. Tell me more, mister…?”

“Sergeant Drake.” I blink. “Sorry. My name is Barrett Drake. Retired Army.”

I tell the woman everything I can, omitting every detail that involves my friends. Two hours later, I’m booked into the Breckenridge County Jail.

TWENTY SIX

GWENNA

January 10, 2016

Gatlinburg

I look funny in the bathroom mirror. Not sexy. Not pretty. Strange. I half-expect to see him standing just behind me. But Barrett is a ghost. He might have been made-up, for how real he turned out to be.

He isn’t here.

He hasn’t called.

He doesn’t care.

Because he never really loved me.

He used me.

He was hurt, and I was here. My heart stings to even think it. I can feel my blood thrum with the want of him. It’s like a drug. An awful drug. The kind of thing that you can never free yourself from once you’ve tasted it.

I