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After a long day in the damn costume, I was ready to turn in my mask and my machete and go home, but that didn’t mean it was going to happen. Not tonight, because of the project I had to finish. I had heaved a sigh as most of my coworkers made a mad stampede to the door at five o’clock.
What was it Drew Carey said? “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”
I took a long sip of coffee and pulled up the Golden pet foods file on my computer. If the launch went well, that corner cubicle I’d had my eye on for a while could be mine. It wasn’t the same as an office, of course, but that space would still be better than what I had now.
Claustrophobically small, my own little area was jammed up against a window that let in heat in the summer and cold breezes in the winter. The window was currently festooned with sticky notes reminding me of this appointment and that deadline. The notes were supposed to remind me of things I needed to do, but because I was also cursed with a truly bad memory, or I had been since I’d returned from New York. I often forgot to take a look at the damn notes, though, a kind of running joke around the office with my cubicle mates. My shortcomings weren’t quite as amusing to my supervisors.
Suzanne had told me as much earlier that day at lunch.
“Jace, you’ve got to get more organized,” she said as she unpacked a chef salad from her lunch bag, along with enough crackers and croutons to feed most of the people in the break room. “Seriously, we’re all beginning to wonder what’s up with you. I hate to bring this up, but since you broke up with your handsome boyfriend, you’ve not been yourself.”
I chose to ignore that last comment and took out a huge slice of cold, greasy, delicious pepperoni pizza and a Diet Coke from my bag. I was tempted by the chocolate birthday cake that someone had left out on the table, but I saw Suzanne eyeing my lunch with both disdain and envy, so I decided to forego dessert so as not to antagonize her any more than she already was.
“It has only been a few weeks.”
“It seems longer. You two seem to have such a volatile relationship, it’s been hard to keep up.”
I rolled my eyes but refrained from comment. Sometimes that was the best way to handle Suzanne, who could be intrusive and nosy about my personal life. I took another bite of pizza and she sighed.
“Really, I don’t see how you can eat like that every day and look the way you do. It’s going to catch up to you someday. And why do you even bother with the Diet Coke?”
I shrugged as I took another bite. “You cut down where you can.”
She shook her head in disgust. “If I ate half that much for lunch, I’d weigh three hundred pounds. Where in the world do you get that kind of metabolism?”
I took another huge bite and shrugged. “I don’t know, but I thank God for it, especially on days like these. I need the extra energy.”
Suzanne picked at her salad and relentlessly returned to unpleasant subjects. “You know that John told me he didn’t really trust you to get it together enough to handle this launch for Golden? Not a good sign, Jace. Not good at all.”
“John’s an asshole,” I said belligerently, but in a really soft voice as I glanced around to make sure no one else was listening. “I don’t know how you stand to work with him,” I said, on a roll now. “If I had to work directly under him, I’d have killed myself a long time ago.” I took a gulp of soda and let my eyes stray longingly back to the cake. It called to me in a dark, siren’s voice.
“You need to find a way to get along with him,” she said. “And if the breakup with your boyfriend is causing all this, maybe you should think about getting back together with him.”
Suzanne didn’t have a clue as to what she was talking about, but she’d never let that stop her before. After I had fled New York City, Dylan had found me again within six months. I’d always taken great pains not to mention where my parents lived or given him any personal information about myself, but he somehow found out. I had claimed my childhood had been difficult and I wanted to forget it. He’d never seemed interested in the least. Since he was totally self-absorbed and loved the idea that I belonged only to him, he never pursued any of my history much, and never asked questions. He had seemed to accept it at face value.
Why had I lied about my perfectly normal childhood? I didn’t know. Some sense of self-preservation, maybe, because right from the very beginning, I’d been scared of him, though I didn’t like to admit it. I was also fascinated, enthralled and obsessed by him—all of those things. And yet only a few days into the relationship, I realized there was something about him that simply terrified me. Something I couldn’t really name or put my finger on. Whenever I tried, my thoughts became jumbled and confused.
On the one hand, I was terribly lonely for Dylan after I left New York to come home, and I’d pined for him. And no matter how crazy that made me seem, even to myself after all that had happened between us, I couldn’t shake the feeling. It had been hard to give up my dreams of him and the future we might have had together, but I told myself I was seriously messed up for even thinking that way after what he’d done to me.
Then in March, a few months after I’d run back home, I received a text from him telling me he knew where I was, and he’d be seeing me soon. I took it as more of a threat than a promise.
I was shocked when I’d gotten his message, asking me if I really believed I could get away from him so easily. Despite his lies and his cheating and the constant manipulations, when he arrived in Atlanta two months later, he came to see me and begged me for another chance. And God help me, I gave him one.
I’d resisted at first. Or at least I tried to. I’d told him I’d given him way too many chances already, and that he would never change. I said it would never work between us after all that happened in New York City, and I thought it was best if we didn’t see each other again.
He’d simply refused to accept it. He’d kept showing up like a bad penny at my door, cajoling and pleading until I finally gave in and agreed to give him one more chance. That’s the kind of rock I was when it came to Dylan Malone.
We still fought over everything. He was terribly possessive and resented the time I spent with my family. I had finally decided in the fall, after another terrible fight, that I couldn’t do this dance with him any longer. It was simply taking too much out of me, and my health was suffering. I hadn’t been sleeping well, and I had little energy. I was having terrible dreams that I could never remember the next morning. Then there was the sleepwalking thing, and people constantly commenting on how much weight I’d lost and how listless and pale I seemed. I had body aches that had begun shortly after Dylan came to Atlanta. My doctor said it was possibly fibromyalgia and blood tests also showed that I was also badly anemic. I’d been prescribed iron pills, vitamins and more rest, but so far, none of it seemed to help.
When I broke up with Dylan, he only smiled.
He was right in what he had no doubt been thinking. We couldn’t stay away from each other. That short breakup had gone about as well as the others, which is to say, not at all. He still came around whenever he wanted to, and we argued constantly. I hardly even remembered the last fight, except to know that Dylan had been viciously angry and threatening, and he told me at one point that he’d never let me go. I knew I should have had my head examined for carrying on with all of this as long as I had. I had to get my head back into my job and my family and do everything I could to forget all about Dylan Malone.
He had been abusive to me, and he’d cheated on me in New York, and yet when he showed up unexpectedly at my door, as recently as two days ago, I let him in. I hated myself for it. He was wrong for me in every possible way, but I couldn’t seem to say no to him.
I was a month behind on the mortgage, and constantly dodging calls from the bank and assorted bill collectors, so I couldn’t afford to fuck up this project at work and give John Atkins any excuse to get rid of me. So many things occupied my mind these days, so many responsibilities piling up on top of me, that things like work had taken a back seat.
I sighed, deciding I needed to stop woolgathering and get back to work.
