into. “I don’t think I’m a very good person, Cook.”
She knelt in front of me. “Of course you are. Why would you say that?”
“I think I’m being punished.”
“Punished?” My statement shocked her. “Punished for what?”
“I’ve forgotten something.”
She placed a comforting hand on my shoulder. “You mean, besides your entire life up until a month ago?”
“Yes. I mean, no. No, this is something… something much more important. I feel like I went on a long trip and I left my most precious possession behind. I abandoned it.” Tears stung the backs of my eyes, the evidence slipping past my lashes and down one cheek.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She pulled me into a hug. The soft warmth of her body was a welcome reprieve from the sandpaper world around me. “You have amnesia. Nothing you did could have caused it.” She sat me arm’s length. “You remember what the doctors said, right?”
“No. I – I have amnesia.”
After chastising me with a pursed mouth – that’d show me – she said, “You remember exactly what they said. This could have been caused by any number of things. You just have to give it time. This did not happen because of anything you did.”
She couldn’t possibly understand how wrong she was, but it wasn’t her fault. What I did was on me. I would have to figure it out and make things right. I had to.
3
You can’t make someone love you.
You can only stalk them and hope for the best.
—INTERNET MEME
The storeroom door opened and Erin stood on the other side, her aura a dark shade of red. Not that I needed to see her aura to know she was angry. It hit me like a heat wave. “You both have customers.”
“Sorry,” I said, rising unsteadily to my feet, but she was gone before I got the whole word out. I helped Cookie up, then went to the utility sink and splashed water on my face before checking my watch.
“He should be in any minute now,” Cookie said, brushing herself off.
I turned back to her. “Who?” When she offered me a sympathetic smile, I said, “Doesn’t matter, anyway. He never sits in my section. He always sits in yours. Or Francie’s.” I tamped down the jealousy that bucked inside me. I had no right to be jealous. It wasn’t as though he ever talked to me. Or looked at me. Or, hell, acknowledged my existence in any way whatsoever.
“Maybe he’s just shy,” Cookie offered. “Maybe he likes you so much he’s afraid to make the first move.”
I snorted, dismissing the notion entirely. He didn’t strike me as the shy type. “Anyway, how do you know that’s who I’m waiting on?”
“Hon¸ every female in the café is waiting for him.”
My skin flushed again. Francie was so hot for him, her adrenaline spiked tenfold every time he walked in. Her aura turned red as well. A pinkish red. And for a very different reason.
“True. But he’s so angry all the time.”
“Angry?” She tugged at the stray wisps of chestnut hair that had escaped my hairclip, placing them just so. “What makes you say that?”
“He glares at me.”
“He glares at everyone.”
That was true, too, and it made me happy inside.
“His middle name is Alexander, by the way.” She said it as though it were a test of some kind. As though she expected a reaction out of me.
And boy, did she get one. I couldn’t have fought back the telltale signs of surprise if I’d had an Uzi at my disposal. Or a rocket launcher.
Reyes Alexander Farrow. I liked it.
“How do you know his middle name?”
“I saw his driver’s license.”
Her answer caught me off guard, and I flinched. Not because she’d managed to see Reyes Farrow’s license, a fact I was a tad jealous of. I flinched because she’d just lied to me. Why would she lie about something so mundane? What did it matter how she found out Reyes’s middle name?
“Do you think it’s odd how many great-looking guys come into this place?” she asked, changing the subject as she always did when she was being less than 100 percent. Almost as though she knew I could sense her deception and thought that veering off topic would dilute it.
Either that or my guilty conscience was getting the better of me. It was wrong to spy on people, and reading their emotions was tantamount to spying. But they were just so there. People’s emotions. So in my face. It was impossible not to read them.