Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,230

took two more bites as he tugged off his shoes.

Two seconds after he laid down, he thought about her texts and calls. Two seconds after that, he was asleep.

Are you really not going to text me back?

Taylor was in her room. It was Friday night.

There had been a time in her life that she wouldn’t have been caught dead spending Friday night alone. But as she thought about the places she used to go, she realized none of them even sounded appealing. In fact, what she really wanted to do was to go over to Greg’s and check on him.

Wanting to make sure everything’s okay.

She had heard of girls that got ghosted by guys, just blocked on everything and ignored. Even from guys they had been going with, dating, in a relationship with. Taylor considered that, but she knew even if Greg wanted to ghost her, he couldn’t.

Are you still thinking about tomorrow night? Let me know.

If he would just text back. Why was that so hard?

The worst part was, this wasn’t like Greg at all.

No. Something had happened. Something. And tomorrow whether he liked it or not, she was going to figure out just what that something was.

Chapter 32

When Taylor woke up at almost nine on Saturday, she had to search for her phone because the last thing she remembered she’d gone to sleep with it in her hand. Locating it behind her pillow, she sat up and checked through it, though her eyes were still blurry from sleep.

Still nothing.

Her heart fell.

Okay. This was now officially serious.

“Greg, come on. Where are you?” she asked as she frantically typed and sent a barrage of messages.

Hey. You okay?

What’s going on? Are you sick?

Are you getting any of these?

Where are you?!!!!

Dropping her phone into her lap, she decided, if he didn’t answer with something in the next five minutes, she was going to call Wes. That’s just all there was to it. Something was really, seriously wrong, and she needed to know he was all right.

The thought of calling Nelson drifted through her followed immediately by the memory of him with Paige at the student union. Grrr… The two of them could be so maddening sometimes. Worse, it always led her to do stupid things like whatever she’d done to make Greg so mad he was ignoring her now.

Instantly that felt bad. Really, really bad.

Greg ignoring her? Had that ever happened before?

She couldn’t remember a time though there had been plenty of times when she was dating others that it had been weeks or more between the times they had really talked or hung out together. But he’d never been mad at her long, and he’d definitely never been upset enough not to take her calls or reply to her texts.

At that moment the phone in her hand rang, and she flipped it over. One second and the breath returned to her lungs. She beeped it on. “Hey. I was getting worried.”

He’d been awake for nearly an hour, had seen all of her texts and missed calls. The problem was, Greg didn’t know what to say to her or how to say it anymore. That was a big reason he had put off replying. The memory of her sitting on those steps was never far away. He felt like every syllable gave him away or would if he let it, and it was getting more and more impossible to hide the truth under all the lies he’d been telling himself his whole life. “Hey. Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Are you okay?” she asked, and the soft note of concern in her voice panged across his heart like the twang of a plucked guitar string.

“Yeah.” Sitting down on his unmade bed with the heap of dirty dishes next to him on the desk, he hunched forward and ran his hand over the back of his head. He was tired to be sure but how much of that was from the hospital and how much was from his heart no longer beating, he wasn’t sure. He should have called way before now. He should have. But hearing her voice now, he knew why he hadn’t.

“You sure?” she asked, and more worry tinged the words as if they were being dipped into a slow moving stream of concern one by one.

Greg dragged in a long breath and let it out silently. He had to get it together here. He had to or he was going to lose her completely. Somehow, he had to find a way