I was a firm believer that when important things happened, time just tended to inexplicably slow down. It could be the moment when you realized a friend had become your best friend, or it could be when you realized that you were at fault for something terrible, something you didn’t think yourself capable of. Or it could be the second when you saw someone you felt instantly drawn to, like they were essential to you in some way that wasn’t yet clear to you.
Like the first moment I laid eyes on her.
She walked into the bar, her hair a red halo illuminated by the winter sun, helmet tucked under one arm, looking as natural there as wings on an angel. All sounds around me faded to the periphery as the door shut behind her and she surveyed the area. The lighting was too dim to make out what color her eyes were, but they were luminous, darting around, taking in her surroundings in almost an obsessive manner, like she was nervous, or new.
One thing was for sure she was new to me. I knew just about every woman who walked in through that door to this bar, and I meant both the general meaning of the word and the biblical sense. I had something of a reputation, and I supposed I’d earned it. The world was full of beautiful women, and even the small town of Rio Seco was lucky enough to see a good number of them passing through. That was how I preferred my interactions with them in passing. I had a short attention span, and once was usually enough for me to quench my curiosity.
Once was enough.
If I’d cared enough to talk to anyone about it, meaning a professional at unraveling these kinds of things, I was sure I would’ve gotten a diagnosis of some sort of inability to commit, or open up, or let anyone get close to me.
At least, that was the casual diagnosis of a woman who had been stung by me declining to go out on a second date, in as many words. I think highly professional terminology like “immature motherfucker” was thrown around. She probably wasn’t wrong. She just didn’t have to be so combative about it. She broke every damn plate in my kitchen, and I’d since made the permanent transition to disposable dinnerware.
But that was then, and this was a glorious now, a brand new woman I was sure I’d never seen before. I hadn’t even had a chance to screw up anything between us. I could make a fresh start, be a perfect gentleman, or the man she needed for the moment. The way she tossed her hair over her shoulder was seared into my retinas, and when her roving gaze locked with my eyes, my heart did something funny and stupid inside of my chest, flopping around like there was something wrong with it. There was no reason why something as unearthly as this beautiful woman should be here, trailing her fingers over the bar, turning away from me, sitting down.
That was the thing about Rio Seco, though. It was a small town, but situated along a major crossroads. People blew through here like tumbleweed, stopping for a bite to eat or something to drink, a break from the roads that wound through the desert on their way to the mountains. Some people were gone within a matter of minutes, never to return. And some people got stuck, out of money or luck or both. Others just saw the magic of the place. I figured I was somewhere between those two stuck and love-struck with a town that never seemed to be much of a destination, just a stopping point on the way to somewhere else.
I started to push myself up out of the booth to introduce myself.
“You didn’t hear a single word I said, did you, Ace?”
I didn’t so much as snap to attention as seep reluctantly back into reality, dragging my eyes away from the woman perched on the edge of a barstool like a visiting deity.
“I was listening,” I said. “I promise I was listening. We were talking about…uh…jog my memory, if you would, bud?”
Jack sighed and shook his head. “Nothing important, apparently.”
Now he was just trying to make me feel bad, so I dug deeper into my memory to come up with something. “It is important. We were talking about your nightmares.” Though why nightmares could exist in the same world as that woman was beyond me.
“‘Were talking’ is the operative term there,” Jack said. “But as soon as that pretty thing came sashaying in here, you were miles away.”
I would’ve argued that she floated in rather than sashayed, but it didn’t matter.
“Anybody you know?” I asked, having to work to keep my voice casual.
“What, are you looking for an introduction?” Jack laughed at me. “I’m not enabling you.”
“I don’t need an introduction. I was just wondering if you knew her name.”
“And make your charmed life any easier? Hell, no. You can at least try a little, like the rest of us poor bastards. Though I’ll never understand what women see in this.” At “this” he gestured around my face and head, and I knew he meant my dark hair I kept pulled back in a knot and the beard I kept neatly trimmed.
“You’re just jealous,” I said. I sincerely thought that every man on the planet should give growing a beard the old college-try at least once in their lives. Women loved my beard, and I’d had more than one lover ruminate that my hair was better than hers. In a good way. It was something for them to get their fingers tangled in, at least; a way to draw them in.
“You going to go over there and introduce yourself to her or what?” Jack asked.
“I don’t want to be too forward with her,” I said. “Don’t want to scare her off.” Like she was some kind skittish pony who might gallop away at the wrong provocation.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” he said, a slow grin stretching his face. “What’s going on with you?”
“Maybe I should, um, get her a drink. Or something.”
“You’re going to buy her a drink, but you don’t want to scare her away?”
“I mean take her order. I’m the bartender here.”
“You’re on break.”
“I could get off break.”
“You’re on break because you’re supposed to be listening to me bellyache.”
I groaned, and covered my eyes. “I’m the worst friend.”
“You’re not the worst friend.”
“You should’ve called Brody in for this.”
“Brody’s visiting a brewery in Santa Fe, seeing about getting a keg of one of their special edition ales for the bar.”
“No one here wants that. Everyone loves mainstream beer, here. Cheap beer.”
“I told Brody he could try something new.”
“Well, if Brody wasn’t off trying something new, he could be here, helping you.”
Jack huffed. “I don’t want to talk to Brody about this. I don’t want to talk to anyone about this. I don’t even want to talk to you about this, but here we are.”
“I’ll let Haley get the redhead’s order,” I said, sagging a little with some combination of disappointment and relief.
“Thank you, Ace. Thank you for clearing time from your busy schedule of womanizing to hear me out.”
“Any time, bud,”
“So do you have any advice?” Jack was still enjoying himself at my expense, amusement painted over his features at just how caught up I could get in a woman I’d never seen before, but I could see the exhaustion plainly through the grin. Oh, yes. That’s right. We had been talking about his nightmares, and what he could do to get rid of them.
I fought to direct my full attention to the man sitting in the corner booth with me, since he’d become one of my closest friends, after all. It was pathetic to let a beautiful woman distract me from attempting to diagnose Jack’s problems, even if she was an angel on earth.
“It’s just the same nightmare, over and over again?” I asked, frowning as I took a swallow of a beer I’d let grow lukewarm with inattention.
“Kind of,” he said. “Same theme, though, with a few variations. It doesn’t matter, though, because they always end the same me watching myself die.”
“What, like you’re looking down at your own body, riddled with bullet holes or something? You put your hands to your middle and they come away bloody?”
“No, I’m watching it. Like a movie. I can see my own face and everything, as if it’s from a camera angle or something.”
“That’s kind of messed up, bud.”
“I know it’s messed up, that’s why I’m telling you.” He looked exasperated. “I wouldn’t bother you with the minutiae of my dreams if they were normal.”
“Well, you never know with dreams. Who are you to say they aren’t normal? Have you done any research?”
“Like a music montage in a library research, or message boards on a search engine research?”
“Whichever makes you happy.”
“Well, the internet told me I’m dying.”
“That’s the internet’s answer to every malady,” I said, waving my hand in front of us to dispel that notion. “It’s the beginning of the war between robots and humans, you mark my words. Making people think they’re dying because of cold symptoms or bad dreams… That’s firing the first shot.”
Jack laughed, and that told me I wasn’t a completely useless friend. At least I could still bring humor to the situation, barring any real solutions.
“I mean, wouldn’t it be stranger if you weren’t having nightmares at all?” I asked. “If sleeping was just closing your eyes at night and opening them in the morning?”
“I wish it was as easy as that,” he confessed.
“But you’ve been through some shit,” I said. “If you keep insisting that you don’t need professional help, then maybe the nightmares are your way of processing getting blown up.”
He sighed. “For the millionth time, Ace, if I’d gotten blown up, I would’ve died. I didn’t get blown up.”
“You survived an explosion,” I said, finishing my beer with a toss of my head. “In my book, that’s as good as getting blown up.”
“I just want the nightmares to stop,” he said. “Have you ever had problems with recurring dreams?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“Then what are you doing differently? What can I do to get the kind of sleep you’re getting, where your dreams don’t bother you?”
“Get laid, for one,” I said with a grin.
“I should’ve known better than to ask you for advice.”
“It’s sound advice,” I argued. “Nothing like a little sex before bedtime to make sure you sleep like the dead.”
“Sleeping like the dead is what my nightmares are about, Ace,” he said with another heavy sigh.
“Okay, I’ll admit it. Poor choice of words.” I fiddled with the label on the beer bottle. “If you were really worried, you could always talk to somebody about it.”
“I’m talking to you about it.” He smiled. “You’re somebody.”
“As touched as I am, I’m talking about someone who actually knows something about recurring nightmares. Someone equipped to help you deal with everything.”
“You’re talking about a shrink.”
“So what if I am?” I shrugged, spreading my hands. “People see them for a lot less earth-shattering reasons.”
“I don’t want to see a shrink.”
“Do you want to get a good night’s sleep without watching a cinematic rendering of your own death?”
“Well, yeah, but there are limits to what I’d do. Like I wouldn’t kill a man to get some nightmare-free sleep.”
I jerked a little at that, even as Jack paled at what he’d said.
“That’s stupid,” he backtracked. “I didn’t mean that. That was a stupid thing to say.”
“Nobody would think any less of you if you went to go talk to a professional about what was going on,” I said. “Nobody would even have to know.”
“But I would have to know,” he said. “I would think less of myself.”
“Why?”
“Because there are people who have been through much worse than me, and they’re getting by just fine on their own.”
“Bud, let’s take a good, hard look at this.” I held his gaze, then lifted my eyebrows. “You suffered extreme amnesia after survivingan explosion in Afghanistan. You literally had to be told who you are while you were recovering from your injuries. You have no idea” Jack tried to cover his face with his hands in consternation, but I stopped him, grabbing one of his wrists. “No, I’m not saying this to attack you or make you feel bad. You still don’t have any memories prior to waking up in that hospital, do you?”
Jack didn’t say anything to that, but he didn’t have to. I knew that he didn’t have the memories. That he’d had to be informed of his own name, where he was from, who he was. He’d returned to his childhood home and had drawn a blank, the complete absence of feeling driving him away until he found Rio Seco. We’d met when I was still a recent transplant, too, and had shared an affinity for the open road, the emptiness of the desert around us. It felt like a fresh start, Rio Seco, and I knew it attracted Jack just as much as it did me.
“Talk to someone,” I urged him. “A professional. I care about you, man, and I don’t like to see you like this. But I don’t think I have the skills to help you get through this.”
“I know this is a pain in the ass to sit there and listen to”
“Stop. That’s not what I meant. I just want you to be okay. That’s all I care about. Don’t do anything you’re uncomfortable with, but you deserve to seek out help if you think things aren’t working right now.”
“I was just sort of expecting the memories to start coming back already,” Jack said. “The doctors said there was still hope for that to happen, but I don’t remember anything. It’s like my life just started in that hospital. And now these nightmares feel like even more of a setback than…”
“Hey guys.” Chuck slid into the booth as Jack trailed off. “What’s going on?”
“What’s up?” I slapped his shoulder and scooted over to accommodate him in the booth. “Just sitting here, discussing”
“We were just talking about the hot redhead at the bar,” Jack interrupted smoothly raising his eyebrows at me. “Have you seen her around here before?”
I guess I could understand that Jack wasn’t too excited to discuss something like recurring nightmares with just anyone, but Chuck was one of us. “Us” being the Horizon Motorcycle Club. In Jack’s defense, Chuck was former law enforcement, like me, instead of former military, like Jack and our other two members, Sloan and Brody. We were all fans of motorcycles and the open road, though, which bridged any other differences we might’ve had with one another.
“I think I would’ve remembered someone like her,” Chuck said, rubbing his chin. “She’s definitely just passing through, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“Hopefully not,” I said, making rings with the condensation on the bottom of my beer bottle.
“What he’s saying is that he hopes he can give her a reason to stick around,” Jack translated, grinning.
“If anyone can do it, it’s Ace,” Chuck said loyally.
“You flatter me,” I said. “I’ve been on my break, or else I would’ve tested the waters already. You off from work already today?”
“Finally caught up on everything, so I decided to take off from the shop and celebrate,” he said, clinking the neck of his full bottle of beer with my empty one. “Of course, that means there’ll be like twenty people waiting for me to open up shop tomorrow. That’s always how that works get caught up, then get pulled under again.”
“Well, at least you have work,” I said. “Too many cars to do repairs on is better than too few, right?”
“You’re right,” he agreed.
“If you were ever not busy enough to make money at the shop, I’d break my bike to give you work,” Jack said.
Chuck laughed. “Thanks for that. Don’t hurt your bike, though.”
“It would be fine,” Jack said. “I know you’d take care of it, and if I hurt it too badly, I’d just scrap it and get a new one.”
“Must be nice,” Chuck said, shaking his head and raising his eyebrows meaningfully at me.
Jack could afford to make statements like that. He didn’t want for money. He’d gotten some kind of windfall at some point that filled his bank account, even if he couldn’t remember where it came from. It was more than enough money to buy the old building that now housed the Horizon MC Bar and fix it up into what it was today. And now that the bar was turning a nice profit, Jack had more money than he knew what to do with. He’d had the recent bright idea of hosting events to help revitalize historic downtown Rio Seco, where the bar was located, and that’s what the club was currently focusing its attention on.
“Man, Ace, that redhead hasn’t taken her eyes off of you since I’ve walked in,” Chuck complained. “Don’t tell me we all need to grow out our hair and beards to get that kind of attention.”
“She’s looking at me?” I gulped, more than a little fascinated by how that set my pulse racing. I had something of a reputation in the club as being popular with women, and it felt strange that this mystery redhead was having this kind of an effect on me.
I was actually…nervous. And I had no idea what to do with that information. I was popular with women because I was usually so self-assured. I knew what I liked, and I knew what I wanted. The mystery redhead fit both of those desires, but there was something about her that took me completely out of my element. I wasn’t used to not being in control of the situation when it came to women. I was really, really good at taking control.
I glanced as casually as I could over my shoulder just in time to see her quickly look the other way, taking a determined pull of her beer, studying the rows of liquor bottles lined up on the shelves behind the bar like they had some kind of message to impart to her.
“Break’s over,” I announced, sliding out of the end of the booth. “I’ll talk to you gentlemen later.”
“Good luck,” Jack said, toasting me with his beer bottle.
I threw away my empty one and walked as casually as I could behind the bar, edging around Haley.
“You good?” I asked her.
“Yeah, I’m going to take off for dinner,” she said. “I should be back in an hour or so.”
“Take your time,” I said. “I’ve got this covered.”
“If you think you’re going to screw me out of tips, you’d better think again,” she warned, a glint in her eyes. “I’ll be back in exactly an hour.”
“I’m not going to steal your tips,” I said, rolling my eyes at her. “We have the perfect racket going here, remember?”
“I’ve got all the male patrons wrapped around my little finger, and you have all the female patrons,” she recited, smirking. “Well, most of the time. I flirt with everyone, just in case.”
I leaned close, conspiratorial. “Me, too.”
Haley laughed. “Good luck with that redhead.”
“Close your tab with her before you go, if you want,” I said. “That’s your customer, not mine.”
“She’s only ordered one beer,” Haley said. “And I can’t really get a read on her.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know which team she swings for. She didn’t really respond to my flirting.”
“Then it’s my team.”
“I don’t know, Ace.” Haley slid her eyes over, and I knew she was studying the redhead. “She kept looking at you a lot, and when she would turn back to the bar, she would seem a little bit… I don’t know, angry? Afraid?”
“I’ve never seen her before in my life,” I said. “Unless she’s got something about beards and beautiful men, I don’t understand what I possibly could’ve done to make her angry or afraid without even meeting her.”
“That’s why I told you ‘good luck.’” Haley tapped the watch on her wrist. “See you in an hour.”
“Have a good dinner.”
I fidgeted for a few long moments with the glassware Haley had washed a bunch of glasses before going on her break, so there wasn’t much to do and examined the stash of limes and cherries and olives to see if anything needed replacing on the tray before moseying down the bar toward the redhead. She was even more beautiful the closer I got to her, a work of art from every angle.
“Are you doing okay?” I asked her, giving her what I hoped was a pleasant smile. I was so nervous that it was hard to tell. From her reaction, though, I was afraid that I’d bared my teeth instead.
“No, thank you,” she said, turning to look elsewhere, her eyes falling on the television, which was showing a football game.
I waited for a few moments, certain that there had been a miscommunication and it would just take her a handful of seconds to realize that she’d answered my question in a way that didn’t make sense. But if it ever did dawn on her, she didn’t let on, her gaze burning holes in the TV.
“You a football fan?” I asked her.
“No.”
“I can turn it to any channel you like,” I offered, tapping the remote control in front of her. “Or I could give you the power to choose.” I didn’t know what she would do with even more power than she already had over me. If she would’ve told me to dump the margarita mixture over my head while singing a song, I would’ve done it happily. I would’ve done anything she wanted.
She took the remote, pointed it at the TV, and turned it off. One of the regulars actually watching the game lodged a faint vocal protest that faded at the look the redhead gave him. She still looked resolutely at the darkened screen, away from me, and that was the second indication I had that things weren’t going exactly to plan for me.
“Not a fan of TV, then?” I asked, keeping my voice friendly, but it was as if I hadn’t spoken at all. The redhead didn’t even react to me. I tried to assess the situation, God, I tried. Was there something wrong with my face? Something in my teeth? Did I smell bad? Was my zipper down, and my dick hanging out? What in the hell had I done to irritate her so thoroughly that she refused to even acknowledge my presence?
I turned around for a moment to look at my reflection in the mirrored paneling behind the bottles of liquor on the shelves, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with me except for the fact that I was crashing and burning. I hoped Jack and Chuck weren’t witnessing this, but when I checked the reflection of the booth in the mirror, they were chatting about something else, apparently, not even looking at me.
The same could not be said for the redhead. She was looking at my reflection hard, her brows drawn together, but when she realized I was studying her, too, she lowered her eyes again.
I turned back around, perplexed enough to blunder onward, trying to draw something out of her.
“Can I get you something else?” I asked, ducking my head down to try and catch her gaze, which was pointed purposefully downward, away from me.
“I still have plenty of beer left,” she said, tapping a fingernail on the glass bottle. “And I can buy my own drinks, thanks.”
I chuckled at her assumptions. “You have plenty of beer left because you haven’t been drinking it. You ordered that thing almost an hour ago and you’ve only taken a couple of sips. What, you don’t like it? Fruity little things more your number? I can get you a piña colada, if that would sit well.”
“I told you that I can get my own drinks.”
“You would be getting your own drinks. I’d just make them.”
She looked directly at me, then, and I could see her eyes were blue as day, beautiful, and dawning with realization.
“I’m the bartender at this joint,” I said, because I was feeling magnanimous.
“You’re the bartender,” she agreed. “That’s why sorry I assumed.”
“No apologies necessary.”
“Though I probably would’ve guessed sooner that you were the bartender if you had been, you know, tending bar, instead of drinking in that booth over there.”
Oh. It seemed like she hadn’t been really sorry after all.
“Not much bar to tend in the middle of the day,” I admitted. “Haley had you.”
“And so what are you doing again, exactly?”
“Checking on you. You don’t seem happy.”
“I’m doing just fine.” She took a drink out of what had to be a room temperature beer at this point. “I don’t know that it’s in your job description to make sure that I’m happy.”
She really wasn’t going to make this easy, was she?
“I like for everyone to be happy in this establishment,” I said. “And if we’re being honest, outside this establishment, too. Are you all right?”
“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m just fine, now.”
She held my gaze and chugged the rest of the beer, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand before tossing a bill on the counter. Did that imply that she wasn’t doing fine before? Why was I puzzling over this? She didn’t look away until she was walking across the floor, toward the exit, and even then, I couldn’t rip my stare away.
“What am I doing wrong?” I wondered aloud, watching the door slam shut. I brightened when it opened again, but it was just to admit Sloan and Brody, the other members of the motorcycle club. The latter checked over his shoulder a couple of times, frowning, as he approached the bar.
“Man, that chick is not happy about something,” Brody said by way of greeting.
“You are just in time,” Chuck called from the booth. “Ace just got rejected.” Dammit. So he and Jack had been watching.
“No,” Sloan crowed. “By that redhead that just stormed out of here?”
“Didn’t even get her name,” I admitted, slack-jawed, too dumbfounded by my failure to be self-conscious about it.
“Well, did you proposition her before you even asked her name?” Brody asked.
I slid a pair of beers across the counter to him, and he gave one to Sloan.
“Give me a little bit of credit,” I said. “I was just being friendly.”
“We know your brand of friendly,” Sloan said, taking a sip from his beer. “It’s can be a little too much for some people.”
“No, I’m trying to tell you that I didn’t even get past small talk,” I said. “Didn’t even get to a point to tell her my name. All I was able to establish was that I was the bartender, and she didn’t want to be here.”
“Well, good riddance, then,” Brody said. “If she doesn’t want to be here, we don’t want her here.”
Brody was speaking from a practical point of view. He was the manager of the bar, taking care of the ins and outs of the business so Jack could sort of sit back and enjoy the success of his investment. Brody liked things to be orderly around here. He didn’t like fights or unfriendly patrons. If someone got too drunk, he even took them home himself. It made sense that someone like the redhead, who no one could get a read on, wouldn’t be welcomed here, but I couldn’t banish her from my mind, too. What had rankled her so much that she couldn’t even be blandly polite? Had my very presence made her act like that, or was that just her personality? I found it hard to believe that someone could be that patently unfriendly. It had gone beyond unfriendly, really. She had thrown me off everything. I still felt off balance, even with her gone from the bar.
“Welcome to life for the rest of us,” Sloan said, clapping me on the shoulder with a look of commiseration. “You’ve been living a charmed life with the ladies thus far, Ace. Maybe your charm just ran out.”
“Maybe,” I muttered, though I wasn’t convinced. There was something else there, and the cop I used to be wasn’t able to let that kind of thing go.
For a weeknight, the bar was pretty busy, and I was able to push the redhead from my mind by necessity. I was holding multiple conversations with people who had bellied up to the bar, as well as maintaining an ongoing banter with the rest of the guys in the booth. Chuck retired early he was an early riser, due to the mechanic’s shop and Brody ducked into the office after a while, probably to put in orders or check inventory. The bar did well for itself, but that was to be expected. It was the only place to drink in town, so there wasn’t any competition. The tips kept coming in strong until closing that was one of the perks of a small town, since everyone knew everyone and we all helped each other out.
It wasn’t until much later, when I was back home at the apartment, when I turned back to the puzzle that the redhead had presented. It wasn’t so much a turning back, though, as it was a complete invasion of my mind. The way her blue eyes had flashed at me in disdain. The way she simply hadn’t belonged here, like an ocean in the middle of a desert. Why had she stopped in at the bar? Why was she in Rio Seco?
I paced the apartment. It wasn’t big, and I grew more agitated the more laps I took. I heaved a sigh and fumbled on top of the refrigerator until I came up with a pack of cigarettes, the lighter jammed among the cancer sticks that remained.
Jack had made a funny calendar for me on the refrigerator, adapted from one of those counters keeping track of how many days it had been since an accident occurred, found in factory settings. On the top of the flippable numbers, which I adjusted from “23” to “0,” Jack had scrawled, “Days since Ace smoked a cigarette.” Back to zero.
I was supposed to be quitting. I’d gone more than three weeks without, but I was agitated to the point of breaking into my emergency stash of stress cigarettes. Thanks a lot, well, whoever she was.
If I drank the Kool-Aid I found on the internet about smoking, though, I knew I only had myself to blame. I might not have been able to control how the redhead treated me, but I could always control my reactions to other people. I was the only one in control of my feelings and my actions, and I could choose whether I really wanted to smoke this cigarette or not. Fuck it. I could always stop after the new year, let it become a resolution for yet another year…
“Goddammit!” I exclaimed, launching the pack of cigarettes across the kitchen. They hit a cabinet and clattered down to the floor, scattering.
Why did I feel like this? I slid the door open to the tiny patio not much more than a pad of concrete surrounded by a dilapidated wooden privacy fence and looked up at the sky. The stars out here shone so brightly, and I concentrated on my breathing, coming out in puffs of vapor because of the cold. There were places were the stars dazzled you, and you couldn’t help but get giddy at just how many of them there were. You felt small in the best way. Small and infinite.
I exhaled purposefully, and my urge to light up gradually seeped away. Something about watching my breath come out in clouds helped, tricking my mind, perhaps, into believing that I was smoking a cigarette.
The real trick, though, was figuring out why I was in this state to begin with. It wasn’t the end of the world, some girl not liking me. Just because I’d had a ton of successes before today didn’t mean that I had to be so shaken up inside. There was something about the redhead that troubled me. I’d never seen her before in my life, so I could rule out some link to my past.
With a rush of realization, I understood that the possibility of knowing her from before was what had been consuming me. I’d never seen her around Rio Seco, but she had to be from somewhere, just like I was. And I’d left that somewhere because of some pretty serious incidents. The kind that still showed up in my nightmares from time to time, though not as viscerally as Jack’s nighttime wanderings.
The kind that had me worried that, eventually, someone would show up looking for me, searching for the man who used to be a cop, retribution in mind.
But could it really be fear that motivated my angst over the redhead?
I went back inside it was frigid outside tonight and reset the smoking calendar to “23,” hesitating before I gave a small smile and turned the second number to “4.” Twenty-four whole days without a cigarette. Amazing.
I took a quick shower and laid down in bed, swathed in blankets, loath to crank up the heat and get another exorbitant electric bill. It would be nicer if I had another body to help heat up the covers, but that just wasn’t in the cards for tonight. Tomorrow was another day, I was living in paradise, and I’d probably never see the redhead again.