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A shiver runs down my spine. “And what’ve you been doing since you got out? Are you really obsessing about me that much? I thought I already paid the price.”
“No, Cora, you haven’t begun to pay my price. See you tomorrow.”
I open the door and get out of his office and run back through the strip club until I’m back in the truck and driving fast toward home while Kady asks me over and over what’s wrong, but everything’s wrong and I don’t know how I can ever make her see it.
Chapter 2
Cora
I don’t sleep. Why bother sleeping when I know what I’ll dream?
The second I close my eyes, I’ll see Nolan again, but the younger Nolan, the boy from the woods—tall and lanky and lean with that vicious smile and that boundless energy. The boy with the long dark hair and the smile that broke my heart, even when I was a little girl. In my dreams, we’d run between the trees trying to catch each other, but I’m always out of reach until finally his fingers wrap around my throat—
I don’t need to sleep right now. I don’t want that dream anymore.
I get out of bed and stand beside the window as the sun rises over the trailer park. I think of Momma like I do most mornings while standing on this rug. The carpet in here was ruined after she got killed, the blood seeped in too deep. I couldn’t get it out and I couldn’t afford to replace it, so I cut out the stained section, hoping the floor underneath might be better, but there’d been so much blood that it stained the metal and plastic a deep rusty brown. I found a rug some rich lady out in East Cobb was tossing away and covered the whole mess over. Now I think about Momma and her lean smile and her glazed-over eyes and the way she’d brush my hair and make us dinner. I miss her whenever I stand on it, which is every morning.
I make coffee, careful not to wake Kady. She had a late shift at the truck stop diner after our visit to the strip club last night and she only got home a little bit ago. I head outside and stand on the front porch, sipping from my mug, listening to the birds wake up out in the woods. I spent a lot of time in those woods running from Momma, hiding from her drunk boyfriends, her meth-head boyfriends, her sober-but-still-asshole boyfriends.
I hated Momma so much back then.
Now I’d give anything for her to come back to me.
But that’s how I met Nolan. He was back there standing beside a creek hiding from his own problems one day and it became a kind of ritual. Go to the big tree down the bend and sit on the roots until either he showed up or I went looking for him. That was our safe place, far from everything.
A truck rolls down the road. It catches my attentions and pulls me right out of my ugly memories. It’s big and black and new, not the sort of truck I see in the park very often. It slows and stops and the window rolls down.
Nolan looks at me and I look at him.
“Am I too early?” he asks.
I shrug. “It’s all right.” Except it’s not. I wish I had time to shower and change before he saw me, and his smile suggests he knows it. “Let me put on different clothes real fast.”
“I knew you’d be up. You always liked to rise with the sun.”
I look away. I hate that he knows me so well. And that I haven’t changed. “You want some coffee?”
“I’m good. I’ll wait here.”
I shrug and head inside. My heart’s pounding in my head and I think about waking Kady, but I don’t want her to come along for this. I don’t know what Nolan’s about to do but it won’t be good, and I don’t want Kady to watch it. Despite everything, she still has feelings for her piece-of-shit ex even though he’s a meth-dealing trash pile with more illegal guns than brains in his head. The heart wants what it wants. Or at least it thinks it does. Sometimes the heart is a total moron.
I learned a long time ago that you can tell the heart to shut up and be quiet, and if you keep at it long enough, it’ll listen.
I throw on clean jeans and a black shirt. I debate on jewelry and stick with Momma’s cross. I put up my hair, slip into my sneaks, and I’m out the door and in Nolan’s truck in only a few minutes. That’s me, as low-maintenance as can be, although sometimes I wish someone would let me take a long shower and do my makeup for an hour before leaving the house, but we don’t all have the luxury.
