January 17, 2018
“You shouldn’t. You need to stay here. Give her time, man.” Ryan chews on his pen cap, sitting in his truck. “What did Pop say? Give her time and space. She’ll come around.”
“It’s killing me.” We’re in our work trucks. It’s just after nine-thirty at night and we’re waiting to monitor a popular snowmobile trail, making sure snowmobilers are behaving. “Left a message for her.”
Ryan stops chewing and rolls his eyes. “You fucking did not. You’re an idiot.”
“Because you give the best love advice? Besides, I talked to Mer about it after I did it, and she agreed.”
Ryan pauses.
“Every time I bring up my sister, you get this weird fucking eye twitch, and you’re quiet. What the hell is going on with you two?”
Aaron pulls up next to me, our lieutenant with him. “Ready to roll, boys?”
Ryan hops in with me and gives Rookie a biscuit from his truck.
“Dude, you do that every time. Rookie is a trained machine. You bringing him biscuits is making him soft.”
“It does not. He needs a few treats from Uncle Ryan, don’t you, Rookie?” he says.
“Pathetic.” I shake my head.
We caravan down to the trail.
Alex is in my head. She’s so in my head that I can’t seem to shake her. She’s the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. She haunts my days. My nights. Mornings though are the worst. She still hasn’t returned my call.
Ryan’s on his phone. “No fucking shit. No fucking way. Look.”
He moves his phone in my face, and all I see is a picture of Alex.
My heart stops. “What? I can’t see shit because it’s too close to my face.”
Ryan scrolls through his phone and reads, “Author of Be with Me, Alex Fisher, plans to attend the Golden Globe Awards as the movie based on the book has been nominated for two Golden Globes. This information comes to us through her rep. Fisher, we’re told, is healing from an injury from a fall she took two days prior. The show will be aired on January 28.”
A fall? A fucking fall? That’s what her rep said?
I got the report. Clay tried to choke her. I called her after I read that, too.
The article, according to Ryan, makes no mention of what happened. Small towns tend to keep small-town business. I’m thankful to the chief and the Belle’s Hollow PD for not breathing a word. That would have been a shitstorm that I know Alex wouldn’t have been ready for, not with all she’s been through.
Our patrol is quick as the weather has turned frigid in a matter of an hour. Not a lot of traffic, which means snowmobilers are making better decisions. We pack up in our trucks and head home just after eleven.
At midnight, I fall into bed after a hot shower. Before I turn out the light, I grab Alex’s letter from the drawer in my nightstand. I try to picture her long, dark hair falling into her face. Her quiet words she mumbles as she sleeps. Every time that happened, when the whimpering started, I’d roll into her, moving into her space, her skin to mine.
I want to be the man who fixes her, makes her whole again. I want to be the man she calls when she gets news like the Golden Globes. I want to be the man to hold her when awfulness happens. I just hope she’s coming through this—us, what she’s been through—all right. But maybe it’s fate that I’m not in her life now and that maybe what she needed from me was to be the man in her life at the time.
Are you fucking kidding yourself, Eli?
Go get her, Eli.
Go fucking get her and tell her you want to be the person she loves forever.
I keep the letter in my hand, turn off the light, and try to get some sleep.