It’s way too damn quiet here.

No bustling sidewalks, no traffic noise or late night partiers making a scene. There are no homeless people fighting at three in the morning, and not even an errant Uber honking for its passenger.

Unless you count the ghosts in this house whispering their curse words at me, my ears ring with the silence. I’d forgotten what suburban New Jersey was like since I’d last left seven years ago and never looked back.

The three-bedroom ranch was in worse condition than I’d left it in, and the place had been far from a palace back when I attended high school in this town. The carpet was now torn up, or pissed on, in multiple locations. The screens in the windows, or the actual windows, had been broken from what looked like shards of liquor bottles. The Formica countertops were scratched and burned, cabinet doors hung off their hinges, and the same ratty plaid couches were bottoming out in the living room.

Lying on my childhood twin bed, basically just a piece of plywood and a mattress, I notice that my room has remained untouched. Band posters plastered over every inch of wall, lyrics scribbled onto the desk and nightstand, what trophies I hadn’t thrown out still line the shelves. In the corner still sat my textbooks from senior year of high school, relics of days past that breathed as much of my history into this house as my father’s absence did.

The bastard. Didn’t even have the decency to burn the place down before he died.

I scroll through Hollywood Gossip’s website on my phone screen for the millionth time, waiting to see the pictures of Kara and I splashed all over the headline spot. It would be mere minutes now, the flock of seagulls, my name for paparazzi, waiting for us at the wedding venue were all too greedy for their next paycheck not to share those immediately.

The pictures must tell some story. If only they’d been privy to a bit of the conversation, heard the venom in Kara O’Connor’s voice. The fury in her pale purple eyes got me hard, my cock straining against my sweatpants even now. She could say she hated me until the cows came home, but there was no denying the sexual chemistry still buzzing around us like a swarm of dangerous wasps.

I can’t lie here any longer, so I rise, walking the house like a zombie. My feet lead me to the backyard, the quiet echoing in my ear drums. How many nights had I spent here, lying in the grass, watching the fireflies? Or sneaking through the back window. Not that it mattered, my old man had been too drunk most of the time to even care if I walked through the front door at three a.m.

My childhood memories had been pushed down to the bottom of the barrel in the last few years … but it didn’t mean they hadn’t risen to the surface after I’d stepped into Elm Hill this afternoon.

The late nights, the victorious football games. The shitty days at school, doodling lyrics in my notebook until every single teacher yelled at me. The stares that said I’d turn out to be nothing more than my deadbeat of a father. The fury that roiled in my gut knowing that one day I’d prove them all wrong.

And all of it had been with her by my side. Her pretty clothes muddied by the dirt of my broken-down truck. Her tan arms wrapped around mine as our classmates drank and skinny dipped in the pond we’d commandeered as our own. The mornings she’d sneak out of my window, running around the corner to be picked up from Marie’s house when she’d actually slept at mine.

Clicking on the website again, I refresh it. And finally, it’s there. The picture of Kara and I splashed across the header in full color, our bodies leaning toward each other as if we were the most intimate of lovers.

At one time, we had been.

My phone buzzed just as I began to read the first line of the story.

“Patrick.” It was a hello, a question, a demand for answers.

“They’ve identified her. I’m going to be paying the right people to keep this buzz circulating for weeks. Good work, now keep it up.” My manager of five years clicks off without so much as a goodbye.

Relief filled my system, but guilt crept in as well. I’d expected that, seeing as I was using her yet again for my own personal gain. But this was going to put me back on the right track, help to get the critics and womanizer naysayers off my case.

Plus, selfishly, I wanted to see her. I had spent years dreaming about her face, those violet eyes, that slim, petite build … I’d imagined so many times what I would say if I ever got the chance to stand in front of her again.

I hadn’t expected her to slap me, but I can’t say I didn’t deserve it.

My mission was to keep deflecting, keep gnawing at her. Get down so deep into her marrow that by the time I executed the plan Patrick and I had plotted out, she’d have no choice but to go along with everything I was proposing.