Bait: The Wake Series, Book One(96)

Grant said she.

I pulled a towel off the rack in my bathroom and wrapped my hair up first. Then I wrapped the larger one around my body and grabbed the phone that Grant handed me through a half-closed door.

I sat on the toilet lid. I thought that maybe I'd imagined what Grant had said. Maybe my overactive imagination just wanted to hear it was him, and so that was what it chose to hear. It had been doing that a lot. His name was everywhere. Television. Movies. KC and the Sunshine Band. Kansas City was the worst. Everything was Casey this Casey that. Yeah it was spelled KC, but it read the same to me.

I saw his beer in restaurants and hotels when I traveled, having been referred by him. Even after everything.

I heard it in a store one time and then I shouted it, too. I couldn't help myself. Heard a man shout it and then I repeated it, yelling at the top of my lungs. It was his friend's name. I think they might have been partners. And I looked really foolish.

I heard it in my dreams, too. That made waking up a real bitch.

Then there it was written in Helvetica Neue in my shaky hands.

Casey.

“Hello,” I said, calmly. Even though I wasn't.

“Hi.”

I was him. My heart raced and my vision blurred, my eyes fluttered closed on the other end and I felt the urge to laugh. I sat there in the john and waited for him to talk again. Speaking had been stricken from my resume.

“Blake, are you there?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I answered. “How are you?”

How are you? That was the stupidest question I could have asked and I definitely didn't want the answer.

If he was bad, I was worse.

If he was great, it would have killed me.

“I'm here,” he said. “Sorry to call. I know it's… Whatever, listen, Micah is at the hospital. She wanted me to call you and let you know that the baby is on its way.” His voice gave nothing away. Flat. He just spoke. I couldn't tell how he felt at all. That kind of really sucked, because I was dying to know how he was. At least then I might know how I was.

Of course he was calling me for that. The baby.

He wasn't calling me for me. Or for him. It was for the baby. I desperately tried to swallow the disappointment.

“Right. Is she okay?” I asked.

“She's doing fine. She is in labor, but she's doing great so far. She thought that you would want to know.”

Still, I couldn't get a read on him. It was like we were merely acquaintances. Maybe that was what we were.

“Good. I'll get a flight. I was going to be in town this week anyway. Which hospital?” My voice was all over the place. I sounded like a pubescent boy. Squeaking through my awkward swallowing and around my heaving lungs. Through all of it, though, I still wanted to burst out laughing.

I had stayed away from him and him from me. We were following the rules. The unspoken moral code of a person in a relationship, and a person who liked living out of a suitcase.

He abided by them.

It was daily recovery and nightly withdrawal. Which was odd because he'd only ever spent one night with me. Yet, that's always when I thought of him the most.

“We're at Senton.”

“All right.” Then I laughed. Maybe it was a nervous thing, maybe my body was happy and reacted by chuckling at the worst possible minute to spite me. “Sorry.” I coughed.

“What's so funny?” he asked.

“I don't know. I just felt like laughing.”

“You're so weird,” I heard him say softly, like he thought it out loud. I heard it though. Humor. Candor. It was small, but I could smell it like blood in the water.

“Weird because I'm laughing?” I cracked.

“Yes. This is totally supposed to be awkward and uncomfortable and you're ruining it for me.”

Then I cackled. Laughter poured out of me and I folded over with joy. He was laughing, too.

“Seriously, Blake. This is weird. Stop laughing. It's f*cked up. We're in a fight.”

In a fight, like when my brothers would lock me in my room? Like when Kari used to borrow my clothes and then not return them in high school? In a fight suggested it was only for now. That eventually we wouldn't be in a fight.

We were in a fight and that sounded like the best news I'd heard in months.

“What are we fighting about?” I asked out of morbid curiosity. It had been way too long since I'd taken a dip in the vast, open mind that was Casey.