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The door slams behind me as I head down the stairs to the street. I press call as soon as I’m on the sidewalk, but the phone just rings and rings in my hand, so I hang up and try again. Four, five times. No response. Her voice makes a shiver run down my spine.
“Hey, this is Kate. Sorry I can’t talk right now. Please leave a message after the beep.”
What do I say here? How do I explain?
“Kate. It’s Fabian. Call me.”
Then I send a text:
Ring me back. It’s urgent.
21
Kate
Awoman in a long black coat is chasing me, and the green hedges of the maze bend and sway as I turn left, then right, wind whipping down the narrow alleyways as I fight to stay upright. I round another corner, and a flash of light appears up ahead, and I turn and glance quickly behind me. She’s close now, and ragged breathing fills my ears.Follow the light.The beam bobs, moving on, and I race toward it, chest tight. My heart lifts as it gets closer—someone is holding it! Then a claw lands on my arm, and I twist around and she’s right there, all black hair and snarling rotten teeth. I keel over backward into the soft earth and I’m falling, sinking. Oh God, I’m going too far, into the ground, and I scrabble at the sides to climb out, but she laughs as soil starts pouring down on top of me.
My eyes snap open to lines of slats on blue blinds.My bedroom. I roll onto my back, heart still hammering. It was her, my God. It was her. I press my hand to my chest, blinking. The image of them in bed together tightens my throat. Could this be any worse? Unless he was married and had kids—the bastard. This is the end. I’m going to tattoo it on my body somewhere so I don’t forget, maybe my hand so I remind myself every damn day.No sexy bad boys. I laugh, trying to choke it all down. What will it take to get through this? The months of avoiding David, the fact that I was still affected by it two years later. I turn my head. My backpack is sitting on the floor by the bed, and my phone is plugged in on the nightstand, a note from Liss propped up next to it. She must have come in with everything after I dropped off.
“Gone to work. Call me when you wake up.”
I gasp as I register the number of missed calls and texts, all from Fabian. My finger hovers over the texting icon—do I want to read all his crappy justifications? His lovely “girlfriend” will have no doubt mentioned that his “cleaner” called by. He must know I walked in on them. What could he say? I wish I’d taken a picture—I could send it to him as a card with “GOODBYE” scratched over it.
The sheer quantity of messages is like déjà vu, though; this is exactly what happened with David after I told him it was over. He kept calling and sending things, and I read them all and it made it a hundred times worse. I know what I need to do. I grit my teeth, clicking through the menu for the delete button, watching them all disappear. I’m not reading them. I’m not listening to them. Then I remove Fabian’s contact details and all his texts, going right back to day one. At one point I looked back through David’s messages, and the warmth and love in them ate away at me for over a year. It was a special kind of torture. No. No. Not doing that again. All gone.
I stare down at my phone: Jo is top of my call list, and on impulse I press the button. She answers after two rings with a sharp. “Kate!” And I deduce immediately that Liss has talked to her. “Come to my office.”
“You know?”
“Liss called me, but she didn’t give me details. Come here, Kate, please.”
I want to see her. I want her soothing words and warm hugs.
“Tell me I’m not an idiot for making the same mistake twice,” I whisper.
“Jesus, of course not!”
“You got the only good one,” I say, and why did I say that? But Janus is Fabian’s best buddy, and I can’t understand why guys don’t ever see this kind of behavior as an indication that their friend is an asshole. Do I think Fabian is a jerk? Goddammit, I don’t. I pinch the skin on the inside of my arm, hard. Wake up, Kate! I should hate him, the lying, cheating …
“He has his moments,” Jo drily interrupts my mental tirade. “He can be a real jackass too.”
I laugh at this. Somehow Jo always manages to say the right thing.
“But maybe not finding him in bed with someone else,” I say, and she groans.
“Seriously, you have to come here to tell me this whole thing. I am not doing this over the phone. Janus is going to tear him apart.”
“I’m on my way,” I say, climbing out of bed with a deep breath. I need to cry on her shoulder and have her build me back up again.
22
Fabian
Iglance at the sky, then the time on the screen. Fuck. 6 p.m. I’ve rung Kate about a hundred times, sent text after text, phone glued to my hand all day. Around 2 p.m., I went to her apartment, figuring she’d be up after her night shift. I called, buzzed on her door, hung around for a couple of hours. She should havebeenthere. Where thefuckis she?
A hurricane is building somewhere deep in my body. Even Nadine has stopped coming into the bedroom on some pretext or other, as my responses to her guileless questions about how to work the oven or her phone get more and more explosive. My hand drums on the desk as I watch the test code I’m running—the number of errors is higher than the last time I tested it. My face goes into my hands. Everything is going backward, like a rope slipping through a ratchet. I make some stupid, too-generous decision and someone exploits it. I punch my knuckles into the side of the desk, hard, shaking them out to relieve the pain.
When I said Nadine could stay for a night, I gave her two rules: It was one night only, and she couldn’t interrupt me. So, when she opens the door again, something hot and dark settles over me.
