Shimmy Bang Sparkle(34)

She turned over her shoulder and looked at me, her eyebrows pushed together. “Are you OK?”

I didn’t know what the fuck I was, but I most definitely wasn’t OK. I didn’t let her see it, though. “Yeah, but I gotta go.”

“OK,” she said tentatively, searching my face. “Talk to you later?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I leaned in and placed my hand on the small of her back and put a kiss to her cheek. Everything about her pulled me even closer—the softness of her skin against mine, the way she leaned into the kiss. I savored her for those last few seconds, before finally stepping away.



By the time I got to the elevator, I felt like a douchebag. By the time I got to the parking lot, I felt like an idiot. By the time I left my parole officer’s place, I felt like the King of the Assholes. Because I left Stella to face a shitty day in a shitty place, all by herself, and all because I’d spooked like a horse in the starting gates.

My apartment still smelled like her. I dropped my keys on the counter and splashed my face with water from the kitchen sink. I opened the fridge and grabbed a quart of orange juice. Unscrewing the lid, I downed a few big gulps. It tasted like it might’ve passed its drink-by date, but I didn’t give a fuck. I supposed there was some sort of unwritten dude code that said when you felt like this, you should go get shit-faced or hit a heavy bag or whatever. But I didn’t have the energy for any of that, because I wasn’t angry—I was just fucking bummed. I headed for my bed and lay facedown on the mattress. When I inhaled hard, I could smell her lotion, her perfume, her. And then I felt something under my arm.

I opened one eye to look at whatever it was.

Her panties, in a hot-pink ball.

Fuck. Tornado or not, the way those panties made me feel told me the truth: I didn’t want to step away from her. It didn’t fucking matter if it was a bad idea. Superman knew it. Kryptonite was a force of its own.

I rolled onto my back and unfurled her panties, untwisting the lace. The shiny fabric glistened in the sun, and I ran my thumb along the delicate scalloped edge. Who the fuck knew what came next for her. Maybe stealing that engagement ring had been her last job.

Yeah. Right.

But the truth was, I didn’t fucking know because I hadn’t asked. And if I turned away from her now, for good, without giving her a chance to say her piece? New me was going to be a lot of things, but chickenshit wasn’t going to be one of them.

Dropping her panties on my chest, I pulled out my phone, opened up the browser, and typed in her name. What came back at me was so cute, so nice, so damned lovely that it made me groan.

In spite of all I knew about her so far, Stella was worlds apart from me in every way. On the internet, like in person, she was wholesome, adorable, and yet naughty underneath. I thumbed through her public Facebook photos. In one, she was standing on a mountain ledge, at the summit of a hike maybe. She had her arms spread out wide on either side of her, and she was beaming at the camera. The wind had caught her hair, and on her face was pure joy. In the next, she was holding Mr. Bozeman’s Priscilla, who was kissing her, and Stella had the nose-wrinkle laugh going strong. As if all that wasn’t heart-wrenching enough, the next one was a photo of her in a Halloween costume—a Playboy bunny, complete with fishnets, ears, and a puffy pink tail. She was looking over her shoulder at the camera, one hand on her hip.

Fuuuuuck.

Holding my phone up above me in bed, I thumbed back and forth through the photographs again and again, before backing up into the search results. The next link down was for a pet sitting service called Pawfully Cute. Somehow, the website felt like she’d designed it herself. Clean, organized, bright, and cheerful. I clicked on the ABOUT US link, and up popped three photographs. Ruth, Roxie, and Stella.

I clicked on Stella’s picture to enlarge it. There was a sparkle in her eyes that made me smile immediately and gave me a throb of warmth and joy. Like a reflex hammer hitting my heart. She was an enigma, and I wanted to get the chance to take every petal off that rose. But it would all be built on a house of cards if I kept on pretending I didn’t know what I knew.

So I went back to our chat window and tapped the telephone icon to give her a call. With every ring, my heart pounded harder. Three rings, four. It rang through to her voice mail. I listened to her kind and happy voice tell me to leave a message, followed by that long and ominous beep.

I inhaled hard. If I confronted her, I knew I’d lose her. But if I met her halfway, I might have half a shot. “Hey. It’s me. It’s Nick.” I knotted her panties around my fingers. “Do me a favor. Go to Google and look up Nicholas Adam Norton. If you’re still interested, give me a call. If not,” I said, and let her panties fall to my chest again, “I totally understand.”





17

STELLA

There was a voice mail from Nick on my phone, but the reception in the hospital was so bad that every time I tried to listen, I lost the call. The red notification circle taunted me all day as I went with Roxie to radiology, holding her hand tight and handing her tissues, until they wheeled her off for X-rays in a lead-lined vest. It teased me as I held Ruth’s hand too, as the doctor talked about a compound break and pins and surgeries. It felt like a hot little coal in my pocket while I asked the doctors nine hundred questions, while Ruth slowly put her hoodie up again, and while she stared silently at images of her jagged bones on the computer screen on the rolling cart.