“What the hell is wrong with you?” Chief shouted.
His voice was loud, but honestly, his body language was doing most of the yelling. Wild arms swung out from his bulging neck, and all one hundred and ninety pounds of him were poised forward, ready to break my bones with a tad more attentiveness than a quick snap.
“Do you get some kind of pleasure from being a goddamn idiot?”
“Chief—”
“Shut up! I don’t wanna hear any-fucking-thing you could be thinking right now.”
The beat of my heart turned caustic. Bitter excuses and unfounded insults raced through my head, and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him he was the one who was asking fucking questions—but I thought better of it at the last minute.
Always perceptive, he read my mind anyway.
“They’re rhetorical, asswipe. I mean, Jesus Christ, you look like a sack of warm dog shit from your little trip to the bottom of the bottle last night.”
My jaw flexed at the news that he’d heard about last night. A picture of the chain of human telephone formed clearly in my mind. Jeremy is friends with Mona’s husband, Nick. “Jeremy—”
“Is a good fucking friend, so you keep your shit-talking mouth shut. I think you said quite e-fucking-nough when you came in here spewing hate at a woman you don’t even know.”
The f-bombs were flowing like water from his lips. It was his ultimate tell. Old Red wasn’t just a tad pissed; he was outright furious.
“I know her,” I contested. Her lead foot had introduced us.
You could see the kind of woman she was in every stupid stitch of her designer clothing. You could see it in her mossy, catlike eyes. I could see it in the way she held herself like she owned everything around her.
Lush lips, bright green eyes, and a body that could make a man weep, Ivy Stone was beautiful; I’d give her that. But none of that shit mattered to me.
I didn’t want anything to do with her.
Yeah, but you don’t have a say in the matter.
Worn and brittle, Red’s voice lost some of the volume but none of the grit. “You don’t know her. You’re all twisted up in your head, so much so you can’t see past your thick fucking skull.”
Mention of my head made it pound with more than just my hangover. My arms felt heavy, and my legs felt weak. I knew blood flowed quickly and reliably through my veins, but for the way I ached, they may as well have been dry.
I hurt. All over. Couldn’t he see that?
This whole film liaison bullshit was the fancy, slow, and excruciating version of a knife carving me up from the inside out. It might have only been a day since the chief told me I had no choice in the matter, but I already had enough memories consuming me to be considered an actual haunted landmark.
“You need to find someone else to do this,” I whispered. Pain and poison seeped out of me and spilled into the space between us. “Can’t you see what this is doing to me? And the fucking film hasn’t even started yet,” I added by way of a mutter, more to myself than him.
“You’re doin’ it to yourself,” he said softly. I could feel the rough edges of his declaration as it scraped across my skin. All of his bark was gone, but his decision was resolute. I was doing this—even if it killed me.
“Now, get yourself together. We’re gonna go out there and check on that girl, and I swear to God, you say one fucking thing I don’t like, and I’m gonna feed you your balls for breakfast.”
Hands in fists and teeth clenched so hard they’d be worn clean away in an hour, I gritted out my answer. The words tasted sour. “Yes. Sir.”
Chief Pulse moved to the door, but I stayed rooted to the spot as surely as if my feet had actually attached. As soon as he was out of sight, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then, finally, with sheer force of will and some emotional cutting shears, followed him.
Visions of days past clutched at my chest tightly as I cleared the threshold of the office and saw her there, perched on the edge of Glen’s desk, wild red hair covering the entirety of her face while she looked down at her hand. The skin where she’d burned herself was red and angry, and her knee bounced—tiny, fluttery motions—as Glen rubbed the inflammation with cream.
Guilt over my callous disregard for her injury and the lingering Jack Daniel’s churned and mixed in my stomach. I struggled against the impulse to throw up the rotten combination and stepped closer to the huddle at Glen’s desk.
Ivy’s head came up as I got near. Her body tightened and her eyes dulled, all green glitter and sparkle gone.
Translation: I wasn’t welcome in her personal space.
As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t fully blame her.
“Are you okay?” I asked, somehow finding a way to hustle the words through the fire in my throat.
Harsh words and pithy comments hung precariously on the tip of her tongue—I could tell. But with just one glance to Red, she held them back.
Instead, she gave me an answer. And it was genuine, every bit of it, as well as cool and detached. “I’m fine. I doubt they’ll be planning my funeral anytime soon.”
As much as the words were innocent, harmless filler to her, they were like a goddamn bullet to the chest for me. Funeral. That word was associated with memories I didn’t want to lose myself in. It was all too fucking painful, and the chief noticed and moved to defuse the situation.
“Look, why don’t we call it for today? Ivy should at least get someone to look at her hand. And you should go home and get some rest, Levi.”
I nodded. I was on shift today, but nobody needed me to be out on the streets like this—least of all me.
“We’ll meet back here again tomorrow morning and try this again.”
Resolved and ready to get some space, I nodded my acquiescence and got the hell out of there.
My old truck started up on the first crank—the furthest thing from a given on days as cold as today—and I pulled out. Destination: unknown.
“Well, well, well, look what the toilet puked up.”
I smiled at Jeremy and settled into the chair in front of his desk at the bank. He was a loan officer here, had been for a decade, and he was one of the most well-liked guys in town.
And he was a much better friend to me than I was to him.
“I’m sorry for last night.”
“Yeah, well.” He waved a hand. “My life would be too sedate without you anyway.”
I shook my head and picked up the framed picture on his desk, turned it around, and rubbed my thumbs down the silver frame thoughtfully. His wife was laughing, her head thrown back as she looked up at him, their youngest baby on her hip, and he had their eldest daughter in the air, hands up and ready to catch her as she came down.
None of them gave even one fuck about the camera. Everything that was important to them was well within arm’s reach.
“Your life is perfect,” I said as I set the frame back in its place. And it was. He had it all figured out; what was important, what wasn’t. I envied him with a poisonous intensity.
He smiled then, but his eyes, they stayed keen as they surveyed me closely. “So…what’s up, Lee? What are you doing here?”
I smirked and steepled my fingers in front of my chest, pressing hard enough that a couple of them cracked. “I thought it was obvious. I’m apologizing.”
His dark brown brows shifted closer together, and his mouth pursed. “Survey says that’s bullshit. I’ve had to drag your drunk ass home more times than I can count, and I’ve never received such a royal showing. Something brought you here today other than clearing your conscience.”
I did a quick once-over of his compact, muscled body, trying to calculate if I could take him. I knew he worked out five days a week, but I was a cop, for shit’s sake. I was in superb physical condition.
Still, given the pint and a half of Jack still roiling around in my stomach, there would be better days to test it. I settled for verbal aggression instead.
“I could tell you what a fuckface you are for telling Nick about last night. Would that make you feel better? You know he tells Mona fucking everything. And once Mona knows, Old Red knows too.”
He shrugged, completely unaffected.
The bastard. Why couldn’t he ever take the bait like a normal fucking person?
Suddenly tired, I dropped the front and gave him the veneration he’d deserved from the beginning of this impromptu meeting. I was ninety-nine percent sure he’d spent time last night cleaning up my vomit. I was all kinds of an asshole for shit-stirring at all.
“Fine. I just… The chief gave me the day off—” He raised his eyebrows and sank back in his chair, hands at the back of his fresh-cut russet hair and elbows out. “Ordered it, really,” I clarified with a hard swallow. “And I didn’t want to go home.”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he pushed to his feet all the same. “Come on.”
Forehead pinched, I followed his lead and got to my feet as he grabbed his jacket out of his closet and headed for the door. “We’re going to breakfast,” he told Karen, the twentysomething and very pretty receptionist at the front desk, when we passed her by. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
She smiled and nodded, briefly meeting my eyes with carnal interest. I considered it for half a second before tossing the idea out like garbage. She had too close of a connection to my friend and this town, and I only fucked strangers. I broke into a jog to catch up to Jeremy.
“Going to breakfast, huh?” I asked, slinging an arm around his shoulders.
He shook it off dramatically and shoved my shoulder. “Yep. And then you’re going to go home and shower the fucking filth off of yourself and get some rest so you can be at my house at five thirty.”
I barked a laugh. “And why’s that?”
“Payback. The girls will be thrilled to have Uncle Levi as a babysitter tonight. I can hear their squeals now.” My eyes narrowed playfully. “I’ll make sure they have tons of new nail polish to try and all the latest Justin Bieber playing through the house when you get there.”
I laughed, rubbed at my eyebrow with a very particular finger, and shook my head. “You’re a cruel man, Jer.”
But really, that sounded like exactly what I needed.