“Send me to the Fort,” Nico begs. “I’ll work the case from there. I don’t care. I can’t be around her anymore.”
It’s as if his words curl up and swing straight for my stomach.
“You know I can’t do that,” Donny says gently.
“Please,” Nico begs. “You have to let me leave.”
“My decision is final,” Donny says. “I need you here.”
I can hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. A long silence passes before Nico’s voice comes back, hard and angry.
“She invites herself along to everything with no respect for anyone else on the team,” he snaps. “She treats everything like a joke. She acts before thinking. She never stops talking. She’s too emotional, and above all, we don’t need her.”
Oh.
Okay.
Cool. Great. Awesome.
I press my back against the wall, my hands balling into fists at my sides. I’m only inviting myself along because I’m trying tohelp. I want to learn. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re new at something.
My throat burns. I swallow hard against it.
Screw him. I may be emotional, and yes, I do put my foot in my mouth, but I’m working on it. I’m trying so hard to do a good job here, and at least I’m not fuckingmean.
I walk past the door before I can burst in there and tell Nico exactly where he can shove his opinions about me. My hands are shaking with the need to punch something. I actually thought we were getting somewhere. That conversation in my room—I thought maybe he didn’t hate me anymore, butno.
When I walk into the kitchen, DJ’s sitting at the table and eating an apple in front of her open laptop.
“Can we go to a bar?” I ask.
DJ looks up from her screen, one eyebrow raised. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
“So?”
“So, it’s the middle of the workday.”
Right. Normal people with normal jobs don’t just leave in the middle of the day because their feelings got hurt. I should go back to the library and keep reading or do something productive instead of spiraling over what Nico thinks of me.
Except my chest feels like someone’s sitting on it, and if I don’t get out of this house right now, I’m going to lose it. DJ must see it on my face, because she closes her laptop and throws the apple core in the trash.
“One of the good things about this job is the flexible hours,” she says, standing up and grabbing her jacket off the back of the chair. “Let’s go.”
If the bar DJ brings me to were a human, it would be a barely-conscious farmer slumped over in a rocking chair with a piece of straw hanging out of his mouth. The building is made of crumbling brick with a wooden sign that creaks in the wind, and the neon sign is missing half its letters. But as long as it has alcohol, the building could be falling over for all I care.
I order a double Jameson. The bartender barely glances at my ID before pouring and I knock it back in one pull, feeling the whiskey burn all the way down.
The bartender scratches his orange beard. “Bad day?”
“Can I get another?” I glance back at DJ. “What do you want? I’m buying.”
“I’ll have a beer,” DJ says, sliding onto the stool next to me and giving the man her ID—I glimpse West Virginia on the top. “Also, some peanuts. Please.”
The second whiskey goes down faster than the first. I can already feel the volume on everything turning down.
“So,” DJ says, uncapping her beer. “Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you, or are you going to make me guess?”
“I overheard Nico talking to Donny about me.”
