Page 61 of Wreckage and Rain

Don't ever contact me again unless she tells me it's okay. And if you try to find her before she's ready, I will end you. I have a creative mind and zero legal boundaries. Test me.

Every person who loves Summer has closed ranks. She is inside the circle. I am out.

***

Dominic arrives in twenty minutes. He just got back from a business trip in Europe. He walks through the front door without knocking. We've had that policy since college. I think that if Dom was in town, he wouldn't have let things get this far. This is on me though. I have no one else to blame at this point. I have fucked up my life.

He finds me on the couch. Last night's clothes. Hair wrong. Cracked phone on the rug across the room. The general appearance of a man taken apart.

"Jesus." He stops in the doorway.

"Summer left me, she's gone Dom."

"I know. Autumn called me." He sits on the coffee table across from me. Knees almost touching mine. His face is wearing something I have never seen on him.

"Tell me what happened."

I try. I tell him what I remember, which is almost nothing. The celebration. The team. My father pulling me into his office at three and telling me to wear the navy suit. The Butcher Block. Then the bar. Then a limo. Then waking up in a hotel I don't remember checking into, half-undressed, with Cheyenne's arm across my chest.

Dom's face goes very still.

"That is all you remember?"

"There are pieces. Like watching a movie through frosted glass. Photos. Camera flashes. Her hand on my arm. Then nothing. Then a hotel ceiling."

I can't say it. The words I slept with Cheyenne won't form in my mouth because I don't remember sleeping with Cheyenne. I remember her being there. Close. Photos. Then nothing. A six-hour gap where memory should be, filled with chemicals and confusion.

"How much did you drink?"

"Three. Maybe four."

Dom's face changes. Sharpens.

"You had three drinks and lost a whole night."

"I don't lose nights. I haven't lost a night since college."

"Colt." He leans forward. "Listen to me. You had three drinks and ended up in a hotel room you can't account for. You woke up half-undressed next to a woman you wouldn't have chosen to be in bed with if you had been operating with a working brain. That isn't alcohol. I hate to say it but it sounds like it was something else."

The words hang in the air between us.

Something else.

"She wouldn't..."

"Who picked the place?"

"Cheyenne."

"Who ordered your drinks?"

"Cheyenne."

"Who ended up in the limo with you, in a hotel room with you, and is texting you fourteen times this morning?"

I stare at the rug. At the phone face-down on the floor.

My phone buzzes from across the room. I don't move. Dom gets up. Picks it up. Brings it to me.