Chapter Thirty-Three
SAWYER
The next morning, Pete picked me up from my house so we could go to the hardware store for a few odds and ends. I didn’t like leaving my car behind, but it wasn’t any trouble, and after the hardware store Pete dropped me back off. He wanted to take the rest of the day working on projects he’d bought the materials for, and I couldn’t help him with most of it anyway. So he dropped me off with instructions to take the day off.
I thought about whether Quinn was back in town yet. I needed to talk to her about everything that had happened with Stacy for sure; it bothered me that I hadn’t gotten the chance to do so. I felt like I’d cheated, even though I definitely hadn’t. Stacy had been gone from the house when I woke up that morning, gone without a trace, and as unnerved as I was by her sudden disappearance, I was glad for her to be gone.
When I looked down at my phone, I saw quite a few missed calls from Quinn and frowned. She must have been trying to get in touch with me. I started to call her back, and then paused at the door when I saw something poking out from under the doormat.
They looked like photographs. I picked up them up and dusted the small layer of dirt off them. Me, asleep in bed, with Stacy next to me in her underwear. Me, asleep with… cocaine? I thought at first that they might have been old pictures, but they weren’t. That was my current house, and I’d gotten some of those tattoos overseas.
How the hell had this happened? Was it photoshop? I squinted at the page and thought of the drinks I’d had the night before. But they weren’t enough to even prevent me from driving home, let alone enough to make me sleep.
Somehow, I had slept through this, if it wasn’t photoshopped. I didn’t know how, and I almost suspected that Stacy had drugged me. I put the photos down and then the question hit me: Who put the photos there?
Stacy could have done that, but it wasn’t likely. Was it? I looked down at the photos and at her, smiling in her bra and underwear and wrinkling her nose at the camera, and finally I began to get angry. I’d let her into my house, trusted her to behave herself for one night, and this was how she repaid me. It wasn’t fair, dammit, and I needed answers.
I opened the door to my house to see if she was back. She wasn’t, so I got in my car and started driving. Hell, I didn’t even know where to find her, especially if she didn’t want to be found. But all I could think about was what would have happened if Quinn saw those photos, and all the progress I would lose with her. She trusted me, and I couldn’t betray that trust.
When I went to her home, her parents hadn’t seen her. In fact, they hadn’t seen her in quite some time and asked me to send her back if I ran into her.
She’d lied about needing a place to stay. She’d lied about needing a place to stay so she could come into my house and set me up to… to what? What was her motive behind this? She’d give the photos to me, not the police—or someone else had. I drove to the place she used to work, and they hadn’t seen her in years.
I tried a few bars to no avail, and finally, I tried George’s. She was the first thing I saw when I walked in, sitting up on a billiards table with her hair done up in a braid.
“Stacy, I swear to fucking Christ,” I started, marching up to her.
A bulky man in a tank top that showed off his muscles walked up to me. “He botherin’ you, Stace?”
I sized him up and set my jaw. I could flatten this man into the floorboards without breaking a sweat. I’d taken worse down with less anger in my system.
“No,” Stacy said. “Maybe back up a little. He’ll kick your ass.”
The man looked slightly insulted, but he did back up. I turned back to Stacy and took the photos out of my pocket, shoving them in her direction.
“Where the hell did these come from?” I barked.
“Um, your house.” Stacy leaned forward, raising an eyebrow. Like she was daring me to contradict her, like she had any moral ground to stand on here.
“What did you do? You broke in my room and set this up?”
“Yeah, I mean, isn’t that obvious?”
“Why did you put these at my door?” I was fighting to keep some semblance of calm, and the veins on my neck were close to bulging. My jaw was almost too tight for me to speak, my words coming through clenched and forced.
“I didn’t put them at your door,” Stacy said. Her gaze was even, almost eerily calm.
“Then who the hell did?”
“Probably Quinn.” Stacy pursed her mouth like she was pondering over whether it would rain later in the day. “I mean, she was kind of upset when I showed her what you’d done.”
“You bitch.” I threw the photos down on the table. “You did this all to fuck over my relationship?”
“It’s not fair,” Stacy said. Her lower lip quivered and she bit down on it. “You know that? It’s not fair. We get in deep with some hard shit and you take off, and I’m alone. And I don’t have any money. My parents keep paying for all my bullshit. I never get better. And you come back all better, like nothing ever happened. I have to go to rehab or jail and I can’t ever get a job again and you did the same shit I did but you’re scot free. It’s not fair. I’ll never get better, and you deserve to know what that feels like.”
“I never stooped to your level.” I expected to yell, but my voice only grew quiet, dangerously quiet, restrained because if I didn’t keep it down I would explode. “I did what I had to do to make it out okay. There was never anything stopping you from recovering but yourself. You think I went to a fucking vacation resort for six years? You have no fucking idea what I’ve been through to get myself back on track.”
The insinuation that I had got off easy was enough to end the conversation. I couldn’t hear the rest of what she had to say. “The fact that you think I got off easy is enough,” I spat. “You’ll never change. You’ll never fucking change. You’re never going to get better. I hope you fucking rot.”
“We both will, you self-centered shit,” Stacy barked back at me. “You think Quinn is going to want you after what she’s seen? You’ll end up alone like the rest of us.”
If she were a man, I would have hit her. As it stood, I knew there was nothing else I could say that might sway her. I needed to salvage my relationship with Quinn. I needed to try and make things right. Especially if what Stacy said was true and Quinn had seen the photos. There might not be any saving it. Everything might be over, for good this time.
I called Quinn and sat in the car in the parking lot. She didn’t answer, and so I called her again, and then a third time.
I closed my eyes and set my fists on the steering wheel. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to go to Quinn’s house, to her office, anywhere she might be and talk to her in person. But if she wasn’t answering my calls, she didn’t want to talk to me, and I didn’t want to force her to talk to me if she didn’t want to. She would come around when she wanted to.
But there was a chance she wouldn’t. I drove home and managed, somehow, not to hit anything in my blind rage. I stomped inside and slammed the door behind me.
Quinn might be leaving me. I thought of all the times I’d pictured her at the kitchen table in the mornings, having her coffee on the porch. I’d been stupid enough to think that I could deserve her, that I could overcome my past and have something so good in my life.
Except that I had overcome my past. I’d done everything I could and more to overcome my past. I was better now. I’d convinced myself that I was beyond it all. It was Stacy, or perhaps my empathy.
It was bullshit. It was all bullshit, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. The hours went on, and I began to get tired behind the eyes. My brain was still wide awake for some time, and I laid in bed staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know if I’d be able to go to sleep, and I was almost afraid to. I checked the locks again to make sure no one could get in. Stacy wasn’t there. No one was there but me.
I’d be alone for a long time if Quinn had deserted me.
Despite how alert my brain was, my body began to get too tired to stay awake. Sometimes in the SEALs, we would need to stay awake for a few days at a time, and we would take short naps during the day to keep our bodies from getting exhausted. When I drifted off to sleep, it was the SEALs that I saw.
My old teammates behind my eyes were so alive. I couldn’t remember a time that I’d ever been part of something so important. In the SEALs, I belonged somewhere, I meant something, I stood for something that meant something. There was no gray area. It was doing your duty, and that was it. There weren’t horrible ex-girlfriends. Our pasts didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the task ahead, and everything else could wait until later. And later could be drunk or slept away into nothing.
And as much purpose as there was, there was so much more blood. That was behind my eyes, too, every time that my body tried to sleep. Blood, screaming, sounds and smells that I never wanted to experience again. I knew what it smelled like when people died in the desert. I knew what it smelled like when we couldn’t bury them and so the sun tried to dry them out, make it easier. I knew what it looked like when new recruits didn’t duck in time, and could tell what type of grenade had exploded based on the holes in a man’s face.
I woke up and found myself still there. I slept, and went back. I tossed over in my bed and prayed that one day, maybe, I might wake up.