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He already told me to stop peering over my shoulder, peeking through the blinds, watching to see if the cops are going to roll up on my house. I’d been expecting them from the moment the shot echoed through my house, and even turned the television back off after I hung up with Link. Either they were coming or not, and the blaring volume on the set was adding to my jumpiness.
They are coming. At least,oneis, but Link said it’s okay. If he gives the word, the cop will help him, and I know I shouldn’t believe anything a gangster says, but this isLink.
Even if he’s all grown up now.
I’m still in shock. I have to be. I freaking killed a man tonight, and while that keeps on running on repeat in the forefront of my mind like a song I can’t get out of my head, I can’t help but marvel at what a man Lincoln Crewes has become.
Is it the shadow of a beard on his strong jaw? His chiseled features, so wild and untamed and fierce despite the suit trying to contain him? It can’t. Looking at him, facing him from opposite sides of the couch, I notice that the first three buttons on his white shirt are undone, giving me a peek at his tanned chest and part of the tattoo he has hidden beneath it.
His suit jacket has fallen open. I don’t know if he wants me to see the gun perched dangerously at his hip, but though I started when I did, it’s… it’sdifferentthan the open threat Joey made, keeping his gun on his thigh. Link has it because he’s a dangerous man, and while I know he’d pull it in a heartbeat if he felt he had to, it’s as much an accessory on him as his tattoo.
Link’s hair is shorter than it used to be. That adds to his dangerous air, losing any of the softness he once had. His body is bigger, muscles more prominent as they bulge beneath the suit. He still has brawler hands, I think to myself, looking at his thick knuckles.
You can take the fighter out of downtown Springfield, dress him up, give him power and money… and, deep down, I want to believe he’s still the same kid who would fight in the back alley for twenty bucks and a pizza to bring home to our apartment.
I want to believe that—but then I glimpse into his dark eyes, seeing nothing but the promise of retribution and barely stifled fury without any of the love my Link once felt for me, and I know this isn’t Link at all.
This is the Devil of Springfield, and I’m at his mercy.
I gulp, and he frowns.
“Hey,” he asks, pushing his big body off of my couch. “You still drink that tea shit?”
Back during my college days, when anxiety over exams got to be too much, I settled my nerves with a steaming mug of chamomile tea. Link never touched the stuff, but he was always my biggest supporter. At the first sight of one of my freak-outs, he would start brewing a cup.
I nod.
“Where do you keep it? In the kitchen?”
“Yes,” I tell him.
Without another word, he starts across the living room, walking past Joey without a single look, though he does pause when he reaches my spread-out dish towel.
He goes to toe the towel with his dress shoe.
“No. Don’t do that.” At his look, I feel a wave of shame rush through me. “Puke’s under there,” I explain. “I threw up my dinner.”
And the most I could do while I waited for Link was cover it up with a towel. I left Joey’s destroyed face on display, but tossed a dish towel over my vomit because I couldn’t bring myself to clean it up while I waited to see if Link would show.
“Understandable,” he says, stepping over the towel. “I’ll get someone to clean that up when they come for the body.”
Does that mean he’s really going to help me? When all he said was that Joey deserved his fate, he didn’t add anything about what I should do now, and I wasn’t sure how to ask.
I don’t get the chance now, either. He pushes the doors to my kitchen in like he owns the house, vanishing into the other room. Part of me thinks I should get up and follow him. The other part feels weighed down by fear and stress and something I can’t quite understand right now, so I stay seated on my couch, not sure what else to do while I hear my former love move around my kitchen.
He’s gone for about six or seven minutes, and I spent that entire time realizing something. At first, it hits me that I didn’t tell him that I keep my tea bags in the cabinet over my fridge, or that my mugs are on the other side of the kitchen. I have a tea pot that I keep stored in a lower cabinet, but he didn’t ask about that, either.
And that’s not all.
I never told him where I lived, or where to find me. But after I called him, he was here in no time at all. Maybe I could explain that away as him looking me up on the internet or something before he hopped in his car, but what about the gun…
I told him I used it. He’d asked how I got my hands on a “piece”, wondering if I killed Joey with his own gun, but after I pointed out that the much larger gun was still where my ex hadn’t been able to reach it, I admitted that I fired the pocket pistol he sent me all those years ago.
He didn’t deny it. When I called it his gift, he sat there with an unreadable expression on his handsome face, waiting for me to continue.
Because Link already knew where I lived. He’d mailed me a weapon through the mail right after I moved in, and now he’s in my kitchen, going through my things as though he belongs in there.
As though he never left me.
