Bad Things (Tristan & Danika #1)(101)

“Join the club,” I growled, because I was as disgusted with myself as anyone.

“I’m going to need some insurance from you that your behavior will change. My lawyers can get your sentence down to probation, they’ve assured me, but you will be attending anger management. You doing coke?”

I glared at him. “Excuse me?”

“Were you on something tonight?”

That was the sad part. I’d done coke before, and it hadn’t made me act half as crazy as my jealousy had. I knew he was onto something, with the anger management. “Nada. Fine, I’ll do anger management.”

“I’ll be happy to put you up in a rehab facility for substance abuse, if that is an issue, as well.”

“It’s not,” I bit out, done with the conversation.

“Okay, then. I’ve posted your bail, as well, so you are free to go right after we discuss one more thing.”

I glanced around, as though it was a prank. I knew for a fact that you couldn’t do that to a guy, and then just walk out of jail that night. “Are you shitting me?”

“Not at all. I’ll add it to your tab. I just wanted to talk to you about your magic tricks. Danika has told me about your sleight of hand. I’m asking unofficially, you understand, because I have my old act under contract for two more years. But when his contract is up, he’s out. He just doesn’t have his heart in it anymore. Sometime between now and then, I’d like to see some of your tricks. We are looking for something different, so keep that in mind as you prepare.”

I nodded, totally stunned that, after all the time I’d spent at that, having nothing happen, now something huge was happening, and it was all because of Danika.

“Okay, that is all,” he said, rising from his chair. “I’ll send someone in to take your cuffs off and get you out of here.”

I smiled at him, a purely ornery smile, because, in a purely ornery mood, I’d stolen one of the cops handcuff keys.

I unlocked myself with a few swift, quiet motions. This was the cheapest kind of trick, the kind where you weren’t even doing a trick, you were just performing the unexpected, but I was in a mood, and I didn’t really care that it was cheap.

I dropped my cuffs loudly on the table, and Cavendish gave me a very startled look, his eyes darting from the cuffs then back to me, again and again.

“How did you do that?” he asked, looking like he’d gotten a genuine kick out of it. That was good, because if he got a kick out of me phoning it in, I had a good shot at impressing him with my more involved tricks.

I shrugged. “Magic,” I told him.

He laughed.

I called Danika for five days, over and over, without a response. I finally resorted to leaving message after message, at first angry, then pleading, then sappy, then angry again, and finally, flat out desperate.

I told her I loved her, which I probably shouldn’t have said for the first time in a message, but I was desperate. I called her a coward, then cursed her, then begged her.

I tried to go to the house once, but she only sent Jerry out to tell me that they would call the police if I didn’t leave.

After that, I holed up in my apartment for days, and went into full on self-destruct mode. I was drunk or high or both every waking moment, denying to myself that this could possibly be it for us.

What if she never talks to me again? I tortured myself with that question. I didn’t know what I’d do. I was filled with regrets. I hadn’t opened up to her as much as I should have, and she’d complained about it often. I should have spilled my guts about everything, even if I did hate to talk about the crap she wanted me to tell her.

I found myself telling her everything about me in voicemails that she’d probably never even listen to. I was that desperate.

“I’m not good at this sort of thing, but I’ll do my best. If you’re hearing this, you know I’m trying here, and in return I’d just like to hear from you, to have a clue how you’re doing.”

I took a deep breath, trying to figure out where to start. “Fuck. Maybe I should be texting you this, or emailing, or something, but bear with me. I’ve never liked relationships. I’ve never thought that something like that could serve two people equally. I saw that from the way my mom was with one worthless boyfriend after another. She’d bend over backwards for them, and all they had to do was feed her bullshit lines and act halfway decent some of the time. I guess that’s why I started to think they were kind of a scam. This belief was reinforced for me, over and over, as I watched her let men walk all over her for the sake of the ‘relationship’.”

“Nat was just sort of the icing on the cynical cake. We were just kids when we got together, and we made a lot of stupid mistakes. Nothing I did ever made her happy, and she had all of this emotional blackmail crap she tried to pull on me daily. Still, I stuck around, because I was young, and stupid, and I wanted so badly to be the opposite of my father, to be the guy that sticks around through thick and thin, that I was willing to put up with a lot, even being miserable, to prove that I was better than him, that I was nothing like him.”

The message timed out, and I called again, waiting for the beep, and then continued right where I’d left off.

“Nat guilted me into getting her a ring. A ring I couldn’t afford. She was relentless about it, said all of her happiness was tied up in it, and if I didn’t make her happy, well, that was my fault, since her happiness was my job. She wore me down, and I busted my ass to get her a way too expensive ring. She told me it embarrassed her, because the diamond was so small. It was a three thousand dollar ring, so I had no idea what she meant, but that was how the relationship went. There were more bad times than good, more work than fun, more misunderstandings than communications. It exhausted me, and I was already fed up when I found out she was sleeping around.”