Gun Shy(36)

I go into the staff bathroom, a small tiled square off the main staff room, and start to throw up as soon as the door is closed. I don’t even need to stick my finger down my throat — I’m so full of adrenaline from seeing Leo, I just open my mouth and everything comes out. It’s the kind of vomit that gets in your nose and burns behind your eyes and makes you cry with the way it chokes you.

When I’ve emptied my stomach and I stop gagging, I clean myself up, my head feeling like it might split in two. I’m so hot I think I might burst into flames. I take off my cardigan, my fingers clumsy and damp, and use it to wipe my face.

Pills. I go back out to the staff room, seeking whatever pharmaceutical bliss I can rummage up from my staff locker. I didn’t switch the overhead lights on when I first came in, and the windowless cave is dim, the only illumination coming from the slightly ajar bathroom door and the fluorescent strips that line its ceiling.

The staff room is empty. Except… it’s not.

Leo. He’s here. Somehow, the only person here with me is the one person I shouldn’t be anywhere near.

He looks at me with eyes that have seen violence since I last gazed into them. I know because I recognize the hardness inside his soul; it matches mine.

My face is a blank canvas, but inside I’m screaming.

Not with fear. With longing. I want the boy who destroyed everything to pick me up and take me into the bathroom and put his hands all over me. I want him to erase every trace of the last decade. Under my shirt, my nipples stiffen, and shame pools in my belly.

I shouldn’t want to be anywhere near this boy after what he did, but I do.

“I’m sorry,” Leo says. His voice. Oh, God. I don’t remember his voice being that fucking beautiful. It’s deep and full and if it were a food, it’d be honey. He’s not a boy anymore. He’s a man now. A stranger.

His face falls as he gestures to my stomach, concerned. “You have blood on your shirt,” he says, pointing from a safe distance. “Did you cut yourself when you fell?” He looks remorseful. Like he thinks the blood on my shirt is his fault.

My heart sinks. I shake my head tightly, tears springing to my eyes.

“Not my blood,” I say, my voice coming out like a squeak. Leo looks confused.

“The dog,” I stammer. “Rox. She — she—”

“I saw her yesterday,” Leo says, his eyes wide as he looks from my eyes to the blood on my shirt. I didn’t even realize it was there. I’d been wearing my sweater until I took it off just now.

“She’s dead,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

Leo takes a step back. Something passes over his face, a darkness, a fleeting suspicion. “How?” he asks.

I don’t know how to answer that. So I don’t. I push past him and start walking to the kitchen, as fast as I can, because I don’t have an answer for him. My shoulder burns from where I grazed his arm on the way out of the staff room. He might have ruined my life, destroyed my family, taken my future in one careless night — but Leo Bentley still makes me burn like hellfire.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN





LEO





“Bentley.”

I know that voice. Fuck.

I’m working in the garage at Dana’s, fixing up a transmission that decided to fall out of a car and onto the 95 highway a few miles up the road. It’s in pieces on the workbench in front of me, grease all over my palms and a wrench in my hand. I turn around, keeping the wrench at my side. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s just that I feel threatened by the both of them showing up like this. I shouldn’t. I’m the fuck up. I’m the killer in this town.

“Hey, Sheriff. Chris,” I greet them.

I nod politely at each of them, but my singular focus is Damon King. What I feel when I look at him can’t even be adequately conveyed. It’s somewhere between intense fear and crippling shame, an uneasiness that burns in my chest and leaves me feeling like I want to start punching myself in the head.

Damon and I spent plenty of time together, before. He’s a good guy, and that somehow makes it worse. He coached the football team before, when I was quarterback, and he’s the fucking sheriff of a shithole town that most people want to get out of, not get in to. He’s a nice guy. I would have called him a good friend, before.

Yeah. Damon and I were close before I killed his wife. And I know she’s technically not dead, but I’m pretty sure being dead would have been better than the way I left Teresa King.

And Chris. Man, we grew up together. We played football together.

“How can I help you?” I ask, not sure what to do with my hands.

Damon casually unsnaps his gun holster, the noise deafening in the quiet of the garage. Hands on his hips, he surveys the garage, taking in every little detail. I blanch for a moment when I realize there’s a photo of Cassie and I still tucked into the back of my toolbox. The lid’s open, and when I look past Damon, I can see Cassie’s smiling face in the photograph, a fragmented moment of days long past. Chase took the photo one day at the lake in the months before we found Karen. We’d spent all summer on the lake’s dirt shore, parked up in our folding picnic chairs, or when it was really hot, just sitting in the shallow waters, trying to keep cool.

“You know Jennifer Thomas?” Damon asks, coming to a stop in front of me. His smile seems genuine, friendly, even, but it’s the eyes that have me gripping the end of my wrench so tight my fingers start to go numb. His eyes look fucking crazed, and I think he knows it.