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“I’m listening.”
“Not the same thing as talking. It takes two to have a conversation.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
Ugh. Why did he have to ask her that? And what was she supposed to say?
“Who’s Courtney?” She wasn’t sure where the question had come from, but somewhere in the recesses of her brain, the name Duffy had thrown at Jack had been agitating her, refusing to go away.
If she’d thought the silence had been thick before, it was nothing compared to the current heaviness of quiet.
“Jack?”
“My girlfriend when I was seventeen.”
Okay. Not necessarily what she’d been expecting him to give as his answer. Why would Duffy have brought up a girlfriend from more than a decade ago?
“She had long black hair, the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, and I was convinced gravity itself couldn’t hold her down she was such a free soul.”
Ugh. She did not want to feel jealous of his teenage girlfriend yet listening to Jack describe her, hearing the admiration in his voice, green filled her veins.
“She sounds beautiful.” And Taylor’s voice sounded envious.
“She was.”
Was. Heaviness fell on Taylor’s chest. Was. Did that mean...?
?
?I fell in love with her before I even knew her name.” Jack sounded far away. “When she told me her name was Courtney, I knew she had to be lying because I’d have guessed Star or Rain or Cloud or Petal or something equally earthy, you know?”
She didn’t, of course, but he wouldn’t have heard her answer either way because he wasn’t with her. Memories of a woman he’d loved had hold of him, and he was far away.
“When I finally found my voice I told her as much. She laughed and told me I could call her anything I wanted. I told her my name, and with that carefree laugh she had she said, ‘Okay, Jack.’ I was sixteen at the time and she was eighteen. Age didn’t matter. Just being with her.”
His eyes closed and he paused a moment, seeming lost in his memories.
“She’d run away from home years before and had been working music festivals for cash ever since. Sometimes parking cars during the daytime, sometimes working food booths, sometimes doing Lord only knows what to make ends meet.” A short spurt of air came from his pursed lips. “I grew up around drugs and free-living, and was no saint, but Courtney got mixed up with some things better left alone. She hid it from me at first, but soon enough I saw the highs, the lows when she needed a fix. I hated it but was so in love with her I’d have done anything for her.”
Taylor wasn’t sure she wanted to hear more yet waited with bated breath for him to continue.
“We had been at a music fest in California for a couple of days and had another night to go. I was seventeen, almost eighteen by then. She was living hard. I don’t know where she got the drugs, how she afforded them or what she did to get them. Like I said, I didn’t want to know,” he admitted. “One minute we were dancing and living what I thought was the greatest life ever and the next she fell at my feet and never woke up again.”
“Oh, Jack. I’m sorry.” She was. Sorry for the pain she heard in his voice.
“We had argued about how much she was using on occasion, but she wouldn’t quit. Don’t get me wrong, I was using stuff better left alone myself, but even so I could see the dangerous tightrope she was walking. I should have made her get help. Instead, I was as addicted to her as she was to her next high, so I turned a blind eye. In the long run, it cost me her.” With tortured eyes, his gaze met hers. “I should have saved her, but I didn’t.”
“You know as well as I do that a person has to want to get help, Jack. You can’t make someone overcome an addiction.”
“Logically, I know that. But my seventeen-year-old heart has never believed it.”
“I know you, Jack. If you could have helped her, you would have.”
“It’s where I met Duffy, you know.”
She hadn’t but waited for him to continue.
“I figured she’d just partied too hard and would sleep it off. But something inside me told me more was going on. I picked her up and carried her to the medical tent, praying she had just passed out and wasn’t in any real danger, that she wouldn’t kill me for telling the medics she’d possibly overdosed and wasn’t picky about how she got her high. She crashed within a minute of me getting her to the medical tent. They tried to save her. Duffy and another man, a doctor, but she...was gone.”
