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Then, well, Jersey.
I found I liked Jersey, a state that issued no apologies for anything. A place that took very little shame in its ugly parts. A place everyone thought was full of assholes. And, to be fair, it was. But those assholes were my kind of people. A place that got to be rural and urban, a beach and a sprawling suburb, where you could get good bagels and the great pizza. And, I'm not saying the movies and TV shows were one-hundred-percent accurate, but the guy who owned my pizza place got pulled in on RICO and murder charges a few weeks back.
It had grit and a raised chin.
I liked that.
It felt comfortable in a way. More so than the sprawling open fields in the midwest, or the often plastic perfectionism on the west coast, more than the everyone-knows-everything-about-everybody thing in the south.
There were probably better places to keep a low profile. I could choose any major city in the world, and all but disappear into it if I needed to. It was a trick that had come in handy more than a few times when I poked my head into the wrong rooms, and angered the wrong people.
If I were a smart woman, my ass would be on my way to Toronto, to London, Berlin, Shanghai, Moscow.
Literally any city.
Any single one.
Yet here I was.
Standing in the doorway of a furnished short-or-long-term rental.
In freaking Navesink Bank.
On the hilly side, I might add, looking down on the rest of the town.
Looking down on the clubhouse.
A grumbling sound rose up through my chest and out from between my lips as I stood there, looking out the two full walls of windows that made it possible to keep an eye on the compound while I made coffee, while I cooked dinner, sat down to eat, kicked up on the sofa.
What the ever-loving hell was wrong with me?
I had prided myself on doing what I had to do to survive, to get through this life that so often had the odds stacked against me.
I had needed to transform, adjust, mold myself into a new form.
It wasn't just the outside that changed either, replacing all that slight and lanky with tone and strength, even if I never did manage to get cut like so many other women who dedicated themselves to things like Crossfit did. It was enough, it got me by.
The transformation was probably more mental, more emotional than anything else.
At first, it had been out of desperation. To feel better, to make sense of it all.
But then it had been out of necessity. Young, stupid, gullible girls did not survive long in the places I had needed to duck into.
So I had to become harder, colder, more cynical, less trusting.
Hell, that last one hadn't been a struggle at all, to be fair.
My trust died on that fateful day fifteen years ago.
I'd never been able to find even a speck of it again, no matter what contacts I made, no matter how I tried at times. To connect. To lean on someone. To be a normal human being.
I guess, sometimes in life, when you outgrow something, you could never force it to fit you again.
Not when you'd twisted yourself into a new shape entirely.
I never, never would have survived all those years had I done something as epically stupid as what I was doing right now.
But doing it I was.
I had paid a month up-front, even.
A month.
I never committed to one place that long.
It was as though you were asking enemies to come find you.
I'd made plenty of those over the years too.
I didn't know if it was right, fair even, to lump Roan in along with people who had made it very clear they wanted to see me with another hole in my head.
I mean, he'd refused to even hit me back in the hotel room.
Though, I acknowledged as my gaze moved downward, one of my hands rubbing the other wrist where I had a new kind of bracelet - he had held on long and hard enough to leave bruises.
It wasn't the same thing, though.
It was easy to win a fight. Especially when you had a lot of strength on your opponent.
It was harder to let them try to beat the shit out of you while you simply tried to prevent them from doing a lot of damage.
He'd been careful with me.
I found myself oddly fascinated with the marks there, the little round spots where his grip had been, the width of them from his giant fingers. Fingers I knew all-too-well.
No.
I couldn't let my mind go there.
That wasn't going to help anything.
I was clearly confused enough as it was.
With a sigh, I hauled my duffle up on my shoulder, looking around the space.
It wasn't quite as modern as some of the hotels I'd stayed in since being in the states, but it was clean. Everything was sparse, but danced the line of homeyness. Which was always the plan with furnished rentals, I figured.
