Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,75
Irish cream, that was it.
Fern grabbed a Tupperware container from the counter.
“You really play tennis every day?” I asked, checking out the new tennis outfit. Black and a kind of silvery gray. She was like a super-hero tennis player.
“No,” she said. And that was all.
“You just like the look?”
“Something like that.”
Yeah, she wasn’t going to tell me anything I didn’t need to know. Fair enough. But I did wonder what was in the Tupperware and what it was for.
“So? What do you need with Eric?”
“Eric’s the phone guy?”
She nodded and locked her door behind us after we stepped into the hot concrete hallway. The smell of coffee had been joined by bacon and my stomach roared.
“I’m going to have him put some tracking spyware on her phone so I know where she is.”
She glanced up at me again, every thought, every feeling on lockdown. I couldn’t tell if she was happy or sad or worried or scared. She gave away nothing. “Because she’s going to leave?”
“Apparently, that’s what she does.”
We walked down the hallway silently.
“She’s in trouble, isn’t she? Bad trouble. Jennifer, too?”
“Look, Fern, you gave her the cash. The place to stay. You fixed me up. You don’t have to care anymore if you don’t want to.”
She pushed open the door to the stairwell, and I held it open so she could go in first.
“She doesn’t want me to care,” she said quietly, but the concrete stairwell made her voice echo.
Yeah, I could get how that might be easy to believe. I mean, Joan was good, real good at the “I am an Island” act. But she was ready to get herself killed for her sister. She’d saved my miserable ass. Called my brother so he wouldn’t be scared. That woman she fucked—Sarah—the tenderness and care Joan gave her. Fuck, the way she sucked me down last night. It told a different story. About a different kind of woman.
Even the way she pushed me away when my fingers were deep inside her—coming all alone on that bed—because that was safe or some shit. Because she thought alone was better.
Yet, she wanted to go to the damn cocktail hour with a bunch of old folks she didn’t even know.
And she wanted to be a nurse. A fucking nurse!
So, yeah I wasn’t buying the idea that Joan didn’t care about anyone and didn’t want anyone to care about her.
We got to the next floor and I opened the door for her, and when she walked by I said, “Yeah, I think that’s bullshit and you know it. I think you tell yourself she doesn’t want you to care so you can feel better.”
She turned and glared at me, standing right in front of me so I had to deal with her or knock her over.
“No, she told me she didn’t want me to care. Over and over again. And I ignored her, I did. I just kept caring and I just kept trying. I got her to finish high school. To stay in community college—”
“I don’t think that’s the care she needed,” I told her. Education was nice, but Joan needed something more. Something serious to fill up the holes in her life.
“Maybe you’re right,” Fern said with a hard nod and a chin that was trembling. She sucked in a breath. Another one. “You probably are. But I’ve spent seven years trying not to care, lying in bed at night, telling myself not to imagine them dead. Or in jail. Or any horrible nightmare in between, because Joan couldn’t bother to call me to let me know they were okay. So don’t you dare tell me I don’t care.”
Well, she wasn’t on lockdown anymore. Her red hair was practically vibrating. Her hands around that Tupperware container were shaking.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I won’t. You clearly care. You’re up to your eyeballs in giving a fuck.”
I went to step around her but Fern got in my way.
“Is this a joke?”
“I ain’t laughing.”
I stepped past her and she let me. She was behind me now, walking fast to keep up with my long, limping strides.
“You care, too,” she said.
Fuck you, Fern. That’s what I wanted to say. But instead I said nothing.
Because clearly, somehow it was true.
We stopped in front of a shut door that looked exactly like every other shut door. Fern blew out a long breath and put her shoulders back. She glanced down and checked her cleavage before knocking on the door.