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“Bang it—perfection awaits.”
I started to reach for the needle again, but I paused for a second.
“It always ends.”
I shoved myself back from the table, half-walked, half-stumbled to the bedroom, dropped most of my clothes to the floor, and fell into bed. I wrapped my arms around my head and buried my face into the mattress. I wanted to just melt into it—disappear into the blankets and pillows forever—but instead, I turned my head to the side and stared at the window.
Though I didn’t recall having gone to sleep, I must have dozed off because I was suddenly engulfed in her scent. My eyes flew open, and my heart leapt with hope, but my arms were only filled with Tria’s pillow.
I was still alone in the bed.
Hugging the pillow to me, I buried my nose in the fabric and inhaled deeply. My legs throbbed, and my eyes burned, but I squeezed them shut and tried to blank it all out. I knew how to do that—I was good at it. I’d practiced forcing unpleasant thoughts from my head for years. If it got worse, there was already a needle ready for me in the other room.
Rolling over, I grabbed her pillow and tossed it to the other side of the room where it landed on top of all the dirty laundry. I mentally smacked myself for thinking about how much better going to the laundromat had been with Tria to go with me and turned over to face the window again. I liked the empty black pane as it looked out onto the night.
Another large breath helped clear my nose of her scent—sort of—and I closed my eyes to try to go to sleep again. This shouldn’t be that hard. I’d done all this before. I was an expert at shutting out everything and everyone around me. Being alone was nothing new.
In fact, I preferred it—always had. That was why every time I fucked a girl in the past, I always wen
t home right afterwards. It was always better that way because I didn’t want them to end up too clingy. That’s what I should have done with…with her in the first place. I could go back to that again—no problem.
And Tria could go back to…what?
A brand new sense of panic came over me, and my mind no longer seemed willing to block anything out.
Financially, Tria had been almost completely dependent on me. Yeah, she had a part-time job, but it wasn’t enough for her to be able to afford rent on her own place. She still had a few weeks left before her first year of school was over. She had nowhere to live, no steady income to speak of, and she was pregnant.
And alone.
I shook my head and clenched my teeth.
She wouldn’t have to stay alone, though. She was intelligent and beautiful, and she could probably capture the heart of the first guy she ran into on campus. There were a lot of them out there, and a sob story like hers about her asshole, junkie boyfriend knocking her up was bound to call to one of them. Hoffman was pretty much known for only choosing the highest quality applicants to go to school there, so there was hardly a dud in the whole bunch. She’d have someone good to take care of her and the baby.
My baby.
I swallowed down bile.
Some other guy was going to end up with her, raising my child. She might even give it to Nikki and Brandon, and the baby would grow up in that little town, dragging lobsters out of traps.
“No!”
I sat straight up.
“No fucking way!” I yelled out into the dark, empty room. “No fucking way is my kid going to grow up in that fucked-up loony bin! No one’s gonna raise my kid but me!”
I jumped out of the bed, yanked on my sweatpants and boots, and ran out of the house. My feet pounded the cement as I ran for the bus stop, realized that at four in the morning it was going to be at least an hour before another bus came by going the right way, and took off running again. Even with a lot slower run than I usually managed, I made it to the subway in less than ten minutes.
The security guy gave me a bit of a look, like maybe he recognized me from the other day, but he was going to let me on until I realized I didn’t have any money on me. I yelled a bit, but it wasn’t helping, so I ran back out to the street and hiked my way to the other side of downtown. I ran the last four blocks in the early morning drizzle. The hospital loomed in front of me.
“Dr. Baynor won’t be in until nine o’clock,” the chick at the desk informed me. She eyed me up and down, and I realized I wasn’t even wearing a shirt—just some drawstring pants and my boots. “His office hours are posted on—”
“Where’s his office?” I asked.
“Are you a patient of Dr. Baynor?”
“Yeah,” I said as I tilted my head and turned sideways. “Want to see the scar?”
She ignored my comment but did at least tell me where his office was. I found my way to an elevator and then down the hall to a door with his name on it. I knocked just in case, but no one answered. I twisted the knob and found it unlocked.
