1.

Present Day

11:02 AM

The rain was coming down in steady sheets as I stepped from the yellow taxi that had deposited me in front of Columbia Center in Seattle. “Keep the change,” I said to the driver as I reached back inside the taxi to pay my fare. I stood momentarily with the rain pelting my face, tilting my head back to see the top of the tallest building in the state of Washington—all seventy-six floors of it. I knew that fact because I looked it up on the Internet. I needed to get an idea of what I would be dealing with. Not that my friend Rob, who I was here to see, worked on the top floor, but it was close. His office was on the fifty-second floor, which meant a long torturous elevator ride. Something I wasn’t looking forward to at all. Back home in Woodfalls, Maine, the tallest building was the three-story Wells Fargo bank they had built across from Smith’s General Store a few years back. I was attending college at the University of Washington at the time, but back in Woodfalls it was big news. My mom, the town’s resident busybody, made sure I received daily updates about the construction. Now, as I stood here, the building in front of me made our little bank back home look like a dollhouse.

The rain was beginning to find its way down the generic yellow raincoat I had purchased from the Seattle airport just that morning. The pilot had gleefully informed us before landing that Seattle was having its rainiest September in years. The irony that the rainiest state in the country was having its rainiest year in history was not lost on me. Why wouldn’t it be cold, rainy, and miserable? It matched the way I felt about this place. Of course, that wasn’t always the case. When I first arrived in Seattle three years ago, I was a greenhorn from my podunk hometown. That was why I had chosen UW. It was as far away from Woodfalls as I could possibly get without applying to the University of Hawaii. Three years ago, I had decided that nine months of rainy weather was a fair trade-off to finally be surrounded by civilization. That and it was hundreds of miles away from my often annoying but well-intentioned mother. The endless array of restaurants, museums, and stores and the music scene had tantalized me, making me vividly realize just how lacking and uncultured Woodfalls was. Everything about Seattle intrigued me, making me never want to leave, but Puget Sound was by far my favorite thing about being there. On the weekends I would haul my laptop and textbooks down to one of the cafés on the waterfront. I would spend hours drinking coffee and working on schoolwork. That is, when people-watching didn’t distract me. That trait is something I had obviously inherited from my mom. Still, everything had been going along just the way I had imagined it would. It was liberating to be out from under my mom’s thumb and the prying eyes of everyone back home. Here I could be my own person, with my own life. Then everything went to hell. I met Justin Avery—the whirlwind hurricane who left my head spinning and my stomach dropping to my knees like I was on a roller coaster.

My thoughts were broken when a wave of water splashed up from the road, soaking my pants from the knees down. “Terrific,” I grumbled, looking down at the ruined pair of strappy sandals I had just bought. This was what I got for abandoning my typical attire of jeans and Converse shoes.

Stepping away from the offending curb before another rogue wave of nasty puddle water could finish the job, I focused on making it into the building without busting my ass, or, worse yet, breaking my neck. The fake leather that had seemed so smooth and comfortable when I bought the sandals was now doing a great impersonation of a roller skate. My toes were also threatening mutiny from the cold, only adding insult to injury. This was the gajillionth reason why I had vowed never to return to Seattle. The city and I had bad blood between us.

The only reason I was standing here now was for Melissa and Rob, my two best friends from college who had demanded that I be here for their engagement party. I’d tried every feasible excuse I could come up with—“I’m sick,” “I’m out of the country,” “I can’t get off work.” No excuse seemed to stand up to Melissa’s bullshit meter.

“You’re one of our best friends. You have to be here,” Melissa insisted.

“No. I hate you. I’m not your friend. I never was your friend,” I said.

“I wish you could see the world’s smallest violin I’m playing for you right now. Come on. Pull on your big-girl panties and stop hiding.”

An uncomfortable silence interrupted the conversation before Melissa finally spoke up again. “I’m sorry, Brittni. I’m a bitch for even saying that. I just mean you can’t let what happened dictate your life forever,” Melissa had reasoned. “Besides, you’re my maid of honor. I need you. Just think of this trip as a test, like dipping your toes in water. Chances are you’ll hardly see him, and if you do, it’s not like you guys even have to talk.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“You mean you’ll see me lat—” Her words were cut off as I ended the call.

“Maybe” was the best answer I could give at the moment. The only hope I had left was my boss.

“It’s a good time to go since I’ll need you more next month,” Ms. Miller, my principal at Woodfalls Elementary, had stated. “Mary Smith has her wrist surgery scheduled for October and won’t be able to return to work until February. I swear, I’ve never seen someone so damn gleeful over a surgery. I’m sure it has something to do with that god-awful book-reader thingy she got for Christmas. She’s always crowing about some new author she’s discovered,” Ms. Miller added, looking perplexed. “Me, I need an actual book in my hand, not some electronic doodad that will most likely come alive and kill me in my sleep.”

“I’m thinking now might be a good time to lay off the science fiction flicks,” I had countered dryly as I tried to squish the unease that had settled in the pit of my stomach. That was that. Ms. Miller was the only obstacle left. It seemed fate wanted me in Seattle.

Now, two weeks later, here I was with my shoes squishing across the tile floor of Columbia Center. It was glaringly obvious that nothing good could come from me returning to Seattle. I skirted around a security guard and headed for the women’s bathroom so I could survey the damage.

“Holy shit,” I muttered when I took in my appearance in the long expanse of mirrors that lined the wall. I looked like a drowned rat. My long hair, which I had painstakingly straightened earlier, had been replaced with my typical corkscrew curls that were the bane of my existence. “Damn,” I sighed as I pulled my compact from my purse so I could repair my makeup-streaked face. This was just another sign I shouldn’t be here. If my friend Rob hadn’t been expecting me for lunch, I would have chalked it up as a lost cause and headed back to my hotel. At the moment, I’d gladly trade my soaked clothing and frozen toes for solitude in my hotel room.

“Get a grip, wimp-ass,” I chastised myself out loud, ignoring a startled look from a form-fitting suit-clad woman before she hustled out of the bathroom. “Yeah, keep moving. Nothing to see here but the freako talking to herself in the bathroom,” I said, grabbing a handful of paper towels to mop up my feet and legs. Tressa, my best friend back in Woodfalls, would have a field day if she saw what a mess I was, and Ashton, my other friend, would laugh and make a joke about it. I was supposed to be the one who never got frazzled and always held it together. Tressa was the more dramatic one of our trio. She made snap decisions often, never giving any thought to the consequences. Growing up, I was often left holding the short end of the stick in most of her escapades, but I didn’t care. I envied her fearless attitude. I could have used an ounce of her fearlessness at the moment. I was the cautious one. The overanalyzing, skeptical, glass-is-half-empty kind of girl. Only once had I thrown caution to the wind, and it had bitten me in the ass. That one mistake was never far from my mind. How could it be? I left town and ran back home because of it. Being back at the scene of my troubles didn’t help the situation. I needed to get my act together. Two years was a long time ago. I needed to buck up or whatever shit they say to get someone to stop freaking out.

I pulled my brush from my bag and ran it through my damp blond locks, cringing as it tugged through the tangled curls that had taken over my head. After a futile moment of trying to make my hair look more dignified and less like a refuge for wayward birds, I gave up and threw it in a clip, which at least made it so that I no longer looked like the bride of Frankenstein from those cheesy black-and-white movies. I added a layer of my favorite lipstick and finally felt halfway normal.

“You got this,” I said, pivoting around and striding out of the bathroom. I ignored the eruption of laughter from the two giggling girls who were entering as I was leaving. Obviously I would be their comedic relief for the day.

I straightened up, finding the backbone that had liquefied and all but disappeared the moment the plane’s wheels had touched down on the wet tarmac that morning. “Screw him. He doesn’t own the city. I have every right to be here,” I told myself as I headed for the long bank of elevators to the right of the bathrooms. A small crowd of people hurried onto one of the elevators as the doors slid open. I declined to join the overflowing box, waiting instead for the next elevator, which would be less crowded. Being closed in with a group of strangers wouldn’t cut it for me. I couldn’t stand being in confined spaces anyway, but elevators and I had a hate/hate kind of relationship. I hated them, and if the seventh-grade hand-crushing incident was any indication, they hated me too.

“No problem. The doors will open and you will step inside. Nice and easy,” I whispered to myself. I knew it would require all my will and strength to remain sane on the elevator as it carried me up fifty-two floors to Rob’s office. As is always the case with my luck, he couldn’t have been on the first five or so floors, making the stairs a viable option. N-o-o-o-o-o, it had to be practically up in the clouds.

The ding signifying the arrival of the next car prompted me out of my inner whine-fest. I took a deep breath as if I were about to jump into water before cautiously stepping aboard the elevator. I exhaled a sigh of relief as the doors slowly closed and I found myself alone for the impending ride up. This was a good thing in case my hyperventilating, I-wish-I-sucked-my-thumb-or-at-least-had-a-stiff-drink elevator behavior decided to surface.

My relief was short-lived when a hand reached between the closing doors, causing them to reopen.

“You know, sticking your hand in like that can result in serious injury.” Personal experience had me pointing that out before the words locked in my throat.

All the air escaped from my lungs and I wheezed out a startled swear word as the elevator doors slid closed, trapping me inside with him. I would have gladly shared the ride with a couple of brain-starved zombies instead of him.

Our eyes locked as all the animosity and hatred from two years ago radiated off him in waves.

“Justin,” I squeaked out in a voice that was totally not my own.

“Selfish bitch,” he greeted me with venom dripping from each word as he punched the button for the fifty-second floor with the side of his fist.

I cringed as the elevator walls began to close in on me. I knew he hated me. He had all but shouted it in my face the very last time we’d been in the same vicinity. His eyes and words had cut me like razor blades. Every syllable had traveled across the quad until all the students who had been lounging around had turned to stare at us with morbid fascination.

Justin was the love of my life.

2.

October 2010

I met Justin on a drizzly October day during my sophomore year at UW. I disliked him on sight. He was covered in equal amounts of tattoos and girls who giggled at every word that dripped from his lush lips. Everything about him screamed bad boy, from his ripped jeans and pierced eyebrow to his painted-on white T-shirt. This, combined with his smoking a cigarette, pretty much sealed the deal for me. I’d lost my grandma to lung cancer a year ago. Ironically, she’d never smoked a day in her life, but my grandpa had smoked like a chimney before he passed away when I was five. Turns out all that crap they say about secondhand smoke isn’t some mystical fairy tale. That shit really does kill.

I ignored Justin and his admirers as I ordered a strawberry Danish and a coffee before setting myself up at a table under a large umbrella. I had a paper due the next day in my Teaching in Diverse Populations class. Usually, I preferred the café here to the library because it was closer to the dorms. Besides, my dorm room that morning had proved to be more of a distraction than an actual study haven. My roommate, Melissa, was a total sweetheart, but her constant interruptions made getting anything written nearly impossible. She was buzzing about some big Halloween party at Alpha Delta Phi the following week and freaking out about what kind of costume she should wear as she frantically searched the Web for something original that would catch the eye of some guy. I told her to go as a Victoria’s Secret angel and she’d be all set. “You know, sexy panties and bra—add in a pair of wings and you’ll have all the attention you want.”

“I don’t want to attract that kind of attention,” she wailed, glaring at me.

“Hey, you said you wanted to snag a hunk. Your words, not mine,” I pointed out dryly as I closed my MacBook. I lifted my backpack from the floor and stowed away my laptop and books.

“What about this one?” she asked, whipping her computer around to reveal a person covered in purple balloons.

“You want to go as an atom?” I asked, slinging my backpack over my shoulder.

“They’re grapes, not an atom, smart-ass.”

“So wear the bra and panties underneath and then you can pop the balloons at an opportune time.”

“Shut it,” she snorted, throwing a pillow at me. “Wait, where are you going?” she asked as I headed for the door.

“Look, I love you despite the fact that you’re a total spaz, but seriously, you make studying damn near impossible,” I answered, throwing her a kiss.

“Do you want me to order you purple balloons?” I heard her call through the door as I headed down the hall.

I shook my head. She was a mess, but surprisingly, we’d really hit it off after a few initial speed bumps last year. Melissa’s vibrant and enthusiastic personality reminded me of my friend Tressa. Every emotion she was feeling was always on display for the world to see, like she was throwing up the Bat-Signal or something. Everything was a big deal whether it was good or bad. I was the polar opposite, not wanting the whole world to know every little detail about me. On our first night as roommates, I’d watched her with morbid fascination as she had buzzed around our room chattering nonstop about the great year we were going to have, and how we would be the best of friends. After hours of endless chatter, she had finally fallen asleep in the middle of regaling me with stories of all the parties and hot guys we would be exposed to now that we were in college. While she snored loudly in the bed next to mine, I vowed that first thing in the morning, I would do everything in my power to switch roommates, but by the time the next morning had dawned bright and early, she didn’t seem nearly as bad. Of course, that was probably because she woke me with a steaming cup of coffee from the small kiosk near our dorm. Anyone who recognized the importance of a morning hit of caffeine couldn’t be all that bad. I won’t lie, though; during the next few weeks I did question the sanity of that decision. Now, a year later, I was glad I didn’t follow through with my initial plan. Sure, there were still times she wore on me, but she was pretty terrific all the other times. Even if she did act like a hyped-up Red Bull junkie most of the time.

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