Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,94
nothing to be gleaned. And that was the point, wasn’t it.
She had not been who he had thought she was, and that truth had come out as soon as he had met her parents and her brother. After that, there was no more pretending, no way of making the disjointed reality fit with his grief-relief fantasy.
And speaking of fantasies? She had no idea why she had convinced herself he was her shadow lover. In that regard, she supposed she had done a bit of the same to him. Not that the implications were in any way comparable. Besides, she had probably made all that up. Seduced by the sex, her brain had created a connection between him and her dreams.
After all, she’d had the best sex of her life with him—so she’d put it in the only context that had fit. Her shadow mate.
Man, it would be so much easier if she could just hate him, she thought as she looked away from herself.
As she reemerged with her toothbrush and her toothpaste—because she didn’t want to linger in front of the mirror even long enough to use them—her keen vampire ears picked up on an argument across the hall. And then there were the two TVs on either side of her with their sound turned up high.
So it was business as usual in the rooming house.
Taking out her old phone, she triggered the screen and stared at the notifications. There was one from her brother. A random meme. It was funny. Another from her dad, reminding her to take it slow. Two from cousins who had heard about what was going on and had ascribed Therese’s radio silence to worry over her parents. Which had been partially true—
The argument across the hall transitioned up a level, the voices, a man’s and a woman’s, increasing in volume, rising to the level of yelling. As Therese went over and grabbed a change of clothes from the duffel bag that served as her bureau, she knew that the banging and the crashing were going to start next. That was the way things seemed to go, no matter whether it was a couple, a set of roommates, or an entire floor. A lot of it was the drinking and the drugs, the desperation of so many shattered lives being burned off in any direction that was presented.
In that regard, she was no different from the others. In spite of everything, she was utterly depressed at the idea of never seeing Trez again—
As the smell of burning food reached her nose, she told herself to get with the program. She didn’t belong here—and she didn’t belong in Caldwell, either.
So screw just packing up for an over-day. She needed to get all her stuff and move the hell out. Right now.
* * *
Trez’s head blew up about two hours before shAdoWs’s closing.
Which, considering the stress he was under and his history of migraines, was pretty much inevitable.
Unable to stay up in his office alone, because all he’d done was mentally beat the crap out of himself, he’d gone down to the dance floor and stuck to the periphery, watching the humans grind on each other, and wishing… well, wishing all kinds of shit that wasn’t going to happen. He’d also been thinking about Therese. He couldn’t get her out of his mind, it seemed, although he was going to have to get over that. She didn’t want to ever see him again, and he did not blame her.
Standing in the lasers, squinting in the darkness, he hadn’t envied the lost souls before him. So many of the men and women were regulars who routinely got drunk and drugged up and made bad choices, and you didn’t do that if you had your shit together. You did that because you were running from something even as you stayed in one place, the toxic swill trapped inside your skin too much for you to handle, the outlet and distraction of the clubbing a Band-Aid made out of arsenic.
But at least they were getting a break from their problems, he supposed.
It was just as this thought was occurring to him that he abruptly noticed that the lasers had changed from piercing purple beams to multicolored sparkles. As he wondered who had ordered the new light show, and what kind of equipment must have been brought in without his approval, he realized that he was only seeing the fireworks in his right eye.