AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Moving me out to the cabana is a half-measure. I know Tripp Walker well enough to know that, even with the ugly secret of Annalise’s and my scandalous meeting remaining only that, I’m still not the person he’d want staying alone on the property with her. I could be insulted, but I get it. He knows me. He knows about my resistance to commitment and the hearts I broke early on because of it. He knows about the occasional, up-front one-night stands that ensued in an effort not to be a total scoundrel. He knows my coarse humor and my inability to shut it when I really should. Worse, he knows about the other things I’ve done and will continue to do if I get my job back, the things that can never be erased from my psyche. Of all of it, this is where he’s most sympathetic because he’s been there himself.
Doesn’t mean he wants it for his sister. He had a hard enough time reconciling with his own past to a point where he could let Avery in and claim a new life. A real life. And, although we’ve both walked the same dark ways, I’m fairly certain I’ve pushed more limits, embraced it all more fully.
Despite the vast downside of the way I make my living, I do want my job back, and the thought that I might not get it disturbs me. Regardless, my undercover days are over, so, best-case scenario, I end up with a desk job or regular old field work.
Worst case, I go to jail. I desperately don’t want that.
Tugging my shirt off, I drop onto the edge of my new bed, one that’s not nearly as heavenly as the one in the main house, and dig my toiletry kit from the depths of my duffel. I haven’t needed the bottle with the little white pills for some time, but this night…
I pitch the kit, unopened, back into my bag. I hate the way the pills—prescribed by my doctor, by the way—make me feel. They make me drool, too. I’ll save them for the next time I get shot. Who needs sleep anyway?
As I reach for the water bottle on my nightstand, I catch a look at myself in the mirror. Quite a sight, I must admit. Despite the increased acceptance of tattoos, mine challenge the limits. Shocker coming from me, right? I was counting on a dark room with Annalise tonight. Sure, in the end she probably would have seen. I don’t hide them exactly, but I find it’s better if the revelation comes later rather than sooner. It’s not that I’m embarrassed by them, and I don’t mean to deceive, it’s that…
I straighten. Yes, yes that is what I mean. But this is the first time I’ve allowed myself to see it this way.
I deceive. Heck, subterfuge has been my livelihood for so long I don’t even notice. I know good and well that most women, at least any I’d have interest in passing time with, would run screaming if I sported my tats on the front end. Anyone who knows the significance of some of them would rightfully run for cover.
Fresh food for thought.
Just what I need at bedtime.
CHAPTER 5
Annalise
My bedroom feels strange, although not a thing has changed here since my last visit home. Nothing other than its owner.
It’s me. I’m what’s different.
When I was fourteen, I purged my room of anything and everything pink. I was done with childhood. Oh, my angsty teen self. I’d give almost anything to have those days, that innocence, back. Before my senior year in high school, I executed a similar redo, making my room more college-coed chic than high school kitsch. This is how my room looks now. Further, it’s exactly the way it was during my last stay here, the break between the spring semester—what should have been my graduation—and the summer session at the university. Even since then I’m a different person. And why is that? Kyle, of course.
I met Kyle at the third nuptial event of the summer wedding circuit. He was a groomsman, I his paired bridesmaid. He was a third-year law student at a top tier school. He was tall, outright dreamy, and nice. Really nice, or so I thought.
We danced, we talked. We exchanged numbers. He was my date for weddings four and five. I suspected we weren’t on the same page faith-wise…but it felt so good not to be single for those events. Three more weddings in and we’d already discussed forever. Looking back, I suspect it was only the setting that produced such talk.
The first weekend of August, the big event was in Fort Worth. The bride had reserved individual rooms at a swanky hotel for all of her bridesmaids. Kyle planned to drive up. I told him not to bother booking a room. I told myself and him that I would share with one of the other girls and he could use mine. But, if I’m brutally honest—and tonight I’m stripped enough to be—I had another plan. The one-point-five glasses of champagne at the reception were not to blame.
When the moment finally arrived, I did the thing I’d committed at a young age to never do short of marriage. Why should I wait? Among other things, my chastity was supposed to weed out the bad ones. I’d bought into the whole why-buy-the-cow thing. And yet, of the half-dozen-plus nuptials I would attend last summer, I knew for a fact that all of those brides had long since givenitaway.
Well, except for one, the last of the marathon summer. By the time it arrived, Kyle had decided we should see other people—something I learned he’d been doing all along—and I was in the throes of a pregnancy scare to boot. By then, my friends weren’t around any longer, to cry with me, to hold my hand through the drama, to hate Kyle on my behalf. They had moved on with their lives, and I was in it alone. Eventually, nature reassured me I had one less issue to cope with.
Maddie, a friend since elementary school, a time when I was more solid in my faith, positively glowed in her deservedly white gown. There was more love in her groom’s eyes than I’d seen in all six weddings prior.
If I’d doubted the depth of my mistake before that August weekend, I no longer could. I had willfully violated my convictions and was reaping the results. Nonetheless, an irrational need to have Kyle back, tomake things right—as if that were even possible—consumed me. That’s what this morning’s confrontation was all about. I did not accomplish my goal, but it did shake me out of the delusional Kyle-fog I’d been stumbling around in for weeks. Now, I just pray I never see his sorry face ever again.
So. One could reasonably scratch his head at my present antics. On top of the Kyle fiasco, tonight’s behavior might also have something to do with my state of mind after the loss of the job I’d been recruited for last spring pending my May graduation. I had signed on the dotted line, yet that graduation didn’t happen, delayed thanks to a snake of a man who was also a professor.
I can’t quite explain how lonely my college town felt with every last one of my close circle walking the stage and then walking on to bigger and better things.
At my core, I am a very social person, and I’m recently coming to recognize that I have a problem with solitude.
I curl onto my side. I’m dabbling in psychoanalysis beyond my paygrade here, but I’ve always assumed I got out of my dysfunctional early years unscathed. I was adopted at the age of five, yet I’m starting to wonder if my need to be with people, to be perpetually surrounded, goes back to my time with my biological mother. She wasn’t abusive per se, just very, very neglectful. My memories of those times are less actual recall, more a feeling: loneliness. Abandonment. And since I was barely a kindergartener, toss in fear.
Wow. I guess I shouldn’t have given Tripp grief for being stymied by his—much worse—origins.
My head hurts. My brain aches. Every one of the synapses in my gray matter is in pain from thinking so much. I’ve always been a sanguine, free-spirit type. This dark, pensive person who can’t sleep for thinking all the time is unfamiliar.
Yep. I should have paid closer attention to all those Sunday school lessons.
