Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Second Arrow
“I quarreled with Mother, “ she began, images of ugly yellow linoleum rising up in her mind's eye as
she stared dazedly at the ugly yellow and green linoleum between her hands, feeling the hard surface of the floor against her knees. She blinked, focusing with difficulty on the can of pineapples as it settled to stillness. She watched it, wondering hazily why she was on her hands and knees in her mother’s kitchen. A drop of bright red blood stained the floor, followed a moment later by a second. She stared at the drops of blood, blinking in puzzlement at the bright stain of color sharply contrasting with the ugly mushrooms-and-dandelions pattern of the floor.
Wow, a disconnected part of her brain observed, she went straight for the big guns -- she could have started with the salt shaker or the turmeric, but instead skipped the spice rack and went for the canned goods in the cupboard.
As a third drop of blood dotted the floor, a numb spot behind her right ear began to pulse with a dull fibrous pain, making her eyes water. She levered herself up, using the doorknob of the kitchen’s side door for support. Almost immediately, the pain blossomed, as if the back of her skull was trying to pull itself free. She made a pained noise in her throat as she lightly touched the back of her head, feeling tacky wetness on her fingertips. When her fingertips brushed the tender spot through her hair, the pain stole her breath, filing her vision with pulsing white stars.
She tilted forward, listing as the world lurched to the left; only her death grip on the kitchen doorknob kept her from collapsing. Her right ear burned an instant after a wasp-like buzz registered. She flinched as a can clipped her ear, then hit the plasterboard wall, leaving a faintly yellowish green ichor radiating from its point of impact. The can tumbled to the floor, making a strange gurgle as it began voiding its liquid contents onto the linoleum.
Without pausing to look back, she forced herself to her feet to pull open the kitchen door, intent on fleeing her mother’s insane wrath before she reached the knife block next to the spice rack. As Nicolette pulled the door open, the afternoon sunshine beckoned, offering escape from the madness at her back. Something heavy hit her low on her back, almost bringing her to her knees as pain filled her abdomen and began climbing all the way to her throat. She stumbled to her knees, dimly aware of the uneven slate slabs of the patio tearing skin. She fought not to vomit as agony tunneled her vision.
Had to be the canned tomatoes, she thought hazily, only canned tomatoes to the kidneys can cause that kind of pain.
Once again on hands and knees, she forced herself to a kneel and pulled the side door shut -- Nicolette didn’t think her mother would risk throwing anything through the glass on the kitchen door; that might attract unwanted attention. The disturbance might require an explanation to the neighbors, possibly even the police. Certainly it would be gossip fodder about the Cooper family. Nicolette suspected that would embarrass her mother; Rose would do anything to avoid that.
I probably shouldn’t have called her a whore, Nicolette thought ruefully, nevertheless feeling a moment of primal satisfaction at Mother’s response. Nicolette sank back to hands and knees, panting, wavering on the edge of vomiting for what seemed like an impossibly long time before the pain finally began to recede.
Kidney shots are the worst, she thought as a modicum of rationality slowly reasserted itself. Behind her, the loud clack of the lock suggested the current discussion with Mother was over. When the ache in her back and abdomen lessened, she sat back on her heels, wincing, resting her hands on her thighs for support. The desire to vomit briefly reasserted itself, but she clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut as she resisted, forcing the nausea down. She hated throwing up more than almost anything else.
Still dazed, she forced herself to stand, the heavy fibrous pulsing in the back of her head keeping her nausea from fully dissipating. Without any conscious destination in mind, she walked unsteadily along the back pathway and let herself out of the gate onto the sidewalk in front of her home. Unthinkingly, she turned right -- away from Daniel’s home -- and began walking, feeling as though her head was wrapped in cotton as she walked toward downtown, to a bus to the city, then a Greyhound bus from San Francisco to Los Angeles to meet up with her cousin Francesca. Those three drops of blood filling her vision for hours afterward...
“I still dream about those three drops of blood on the linoleum,” she finished, a hint of unsteadiness clinging to her voice. She looked up, intending to shrug it off and continue her story, but was brought up short by his expression. He stared at her in shocked silence. He had always been polite to Nicolette’s mother and gotten a sort of icy, malevolent courtesy in return...but he could never shake the feeling that she was imagining plunging a potato peeler into the back of his neck as soon as he turned around or that she was debating whether she could get away with sprinkling ground glass in his lemonade when he wasn’t looking. He was horrified by Nicolette’s story, but somehow not as surprised as he would have guessed.
“Jesus, Nikki,” he breathed, “I knew things were bad, but...”
She smiled at him humorlessly, her bitterness silencing him, despite the dull ache he felt for her. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, as if he could somehow protect her from her memories...but some intuition told him the contact wouldn’t be welcome at that moment.
“I managed to get up and get out of the house, though I was still bleeding by the time I reached the bus stop downtown.”
He pointed to his eyebrow as he interrupted, “Is that how you got that?”
She glared at him, “No. You wanted this conversation and I promised that I would explain, but let’s set some ground rules; you can’t keep interrupting me--“
“Okay,” he responded automatically, then winced. “Sorry.”
“This is already difficult,” she added, nearly choking up.
He nodded, uneasy, struggling with the desire to enfold her in his arms and tell her everything was going to be okay, that it wasn’t worth it if her story was going to be that painful...that maybe he didn’t need to know, after all. But deep in his heart, despite his misgivings, he knew that without the whole story, his distrust and self-doubt would fester until it consumed him, quietly poisoning anything they might build together. He struggled with these countervailing impulses, the silence stretching. In the end, he just waited, wishing the whole evening was over.
She took several deep breaths, unaware of his internal struggle, “So I walked out and kept on going until I’d reached downtown. The week before that, I’d texted my cousin Francesca, basically inviting myself over for a visit. We had agreed that I could stay at her place, but we’d never agreed when I would actually head down there. I rode Greyhound to SoCal -- to Los Angeles, showing up on her doorstep without any warning. It wasn’t very nice, but I was desperate to get away from Mother; it felt like one more minute -- one more second -- would destroy what little of me was left.”
He spoke quietly, his voice almost drowned by the susurration of the breeze through the night grass on the other side of the trail, “That’s...that sounds unspeakable.”
His brow furrowed as a new thought occurred to him, “How long were you planning to go? How long did you know?”
She hesitated, sensing some of the thought underlying the question. Blinking rapidly, she shook her head, “I don’t know. I think it was just...something I thought about as a possible escape. The thought was always there, the plans made as a comfort more than...than as something premeditated. But as I got more desperate...”
She shook her head, feeling a tear spilling onto her cheek, the chill air instantly cooling the track, “When things finally reached a head, it all just...happened.”
Still speaking quietly, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me things were so desperate?”
Momentarily voiceless, she shook her head, fighting to speak.
“I tried.”
He stared at her, his anger kindling as he started to argue, to defensivel
y reject her simple assertion: You could have tried harder!
But the thought stopped before he could give it voice. Something in her tone, some plaintive note brought him up short, bringing back echoes from several conversations he’d had with his VA therapist about her -- conversations that wouldn’t have been possible even as recently as six months ago. He wondered if it was related to the change which had precipitated the end of his relationship with Carla.
Maybe Nikki could have tried harder, he thought, but was I making it harder by shutting her out? Is that why...?
He took a shaky breath as he felt the misshapen truth around his heart twist a little tighter.
Nicolette paused to light another cigarette while Daniel was momentarily lost in thought, her hands shaking as she struggled to keep the lighter steady, chasing the flame with the tip of her cigarette. When it finally ignited, she took a shaky drag, studying Daniel briefly before continuing, “So I crashed with her. From there...well, from there it was just one long series of bad decisions. Looking back, I think every time I had a choice of whom to trust, I invariably found the least trustworthy person in the room and immediately attached myself.
“When it started to seem like ‘Cesca was getting nervous -- everyone in my family was afraid of Mother -- I took up her boyfriend’s friend’s offer to stay at his place. The second I walked in the door, I knew It was a mistake, but I didn’t have any choice; if I bailed, it meant going back to Mother -- I had no money and nowhere else to go. I was already worried ‘Cesca was going to rat me out. She didn’t, but when I spoke to her later, she said it was probably a good idea if she didn’t know where I was.”
She sighed heavily, watching the end of her cigarette turn a brighter orange as she contemplatively blew her smoke over it, “But even so, I nearly gave up and went home after a couple days at his place. Roger and his roommates were pervy, but Roger was the worst of the bunch. Sometimes, I would wake up at night, and find him in my bedroom, watching me. Sometimes he’d do stuff.”
She glanced over at Daniel, startled into silence when she saw him snarling and holding onto the table with a white-knuckled grip. She shook her head and hastily clarified, “Never anything to me. The first few times, I woke up, completely unsure whether I’d dreamed him there. Bastard never said anything, so I always just assumed...” her voice trailed off as she shrugged.
“Either way, I needed to come up with rent money, but I had no skills or work experience and was underaged for most things. At one of my other roommate’s suggestion, I got Roger to get me a fake id -- which put me in even more debt to that jerk -- and applied for a job in this little club on Sunset.”
“A club?” he asked, a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He already knew the answer, but couldn’t keep himself from asking, hoping...
Irritated at the interruption she snarled, “Yes, a strip club. Are you going to let me tell this or not?”
He raised his hands in surrender, struggling not to snarl a snide rejoinder.
She was doing what she had to do to survive, he told himself with grudging admiration. His chest tightened with sympathy as he wondered how scared she must have been.
“I slung drinks for a couple of months, but it wasn’t enough for rent and the debts I owed. When Joey -- the manager -- started pushing me to take the stage, I did.”
Daniel felt himself tightening up. He could imagine the scene, could see in his mind’s eye: Nicolette, exhausted after an evening’s shift (because he knew she never did work in half-measures), being cozened by some slick-haired sleaze to get up on the stage and take her clothes off or be fired or...God knows what. He was surprised how angry the mental image made him, and how angry he was at her for giving in and being willfully complicit in surrendering her modesty to a bunch strip-club zombies, staring at her while she showed them everything...
He looked up and caught her studying him as he realized she’d fallen silent. He fought to slow his breathing, to calm himself down.
In a small voice, almost a whisper, she offered, “If you want to leave, I’d understand...”
He stared at her, surprised at the suggestion. It had never occurred to him to leave before she finished her story; it didn’t seem fair not to hear her out -- especially knowing how hard this was. He’d asked for this, after all, had practically forced it -- it would be chickenshit not to see it all the way through, and cruel to make her do it again later.
“Finish,” he growled.
She nodded, “So I danced. The money was pretty good -- better than I expected. I guess I danced well, because a couple months after that, I was approached by an agent to do a photoshoot for a magazine,” she glared at Daniel's glower. “A skin mag, yes. In retrospect, I think it was a set up by Roger; I think he got a kickback for scouting me for an agent in the business -- Stanley Janacek. I spent about six months doing a photo tour of the skin mags and websites; it paid pretty well -- well enough that I could leave Roger behind. At that point he was starting to get scary, like he was nerving himself up to do more than watch me sleep.”
It’a a good thing this Robert character isn’t in the room, he thought, as a cold sensation settled in his stomach. How much worse is this going to get?, he wondered, studying her, comparing her curled in and defensive body language with the timeline she’d filled in. He wondered how much she had left out, how much there was yet to tell that could account for her shakiness and distress. He closed his eyes, steeling himself.
She shook her head, blinking rapidly, “So I made another brilliant decision and moved in with Stan.”
She stared sideways at him, studying his reaction. He did a good job hiding his reaction, but she could see the muscles standing out on his neck and the back of his right hand as he closed it into a fist. She could see the thought forming behind his eyes as he stared at her resentfully, angrily, You made me wait after all we’d been through, but when that sleaze comes along you spread your legs when he gets you a job at a porn mag...?
She looked away from his burning gaze, feeling the weight of his betrayal and hurt. She wanted to apologize, to offer some balm about Stan eventually getting what he deserved, something, anything to ease his pain; she hated seeing it, hated knowing she was partly (or wholly, depending how you looked at it) to blame. But there was nothing she could do about it now, except finish her story.
He couldn’t help thinking of the variety of magazines that had circulated through the barracks during his time in the military. He vividly recalled some of the glossy, sometimes disturbingly explicit photos; his mind kept trying to substitute Nikki -- the shy girl he had grown up with -- onto those pages, imagining his squadmates passing her around while they wiled away the hours between missions. He could hear Hurtz and Sanches critiquing the photographs, debating scores for each individual part of her, pretending to sound erudite and sophisticated around the degrading and sexual content of their conversations...doing other things with her, later. They had hated him when he was promoted to sergeant and took over the squad.
He interrupted her thoughts, his voice strangely toneless as he asked,“Skin rags, Nikki? Really?”
She looked pensive for a moment, ignoring the hint of disgust in his voice as she tried desperately to put some of her experiences into words, to help him make sense of her experiences, “When I was living at home, I was a non-entity. I barely existed to my parents, and I guess my younger sibs adopted the same attitude toward me out of self defense. I could wander through the house for days like a ghost...until something set Mother off.”
He blinked at the apparent non-sequitur, his distaste momentarily forgotten as he tried to anticipate the connection.
“It was hard getting in front of the cameras at first,” she continued, “doing some of the things they wanted me to do.” Nicolette glanced at him, once again intuiting the direction of Daniel's thoughts, “No sex or anything, or least, not during my first pass through the skin mags, but some of it was...”
She remembered the embarrass
ment, the bewilderment, the overwhelming feelings of degradation of that first shoot as the photographer expertly ramped her up, pressuring her to make little concessions, starting with the buttons on her blouse, ending with...everything.
“But at the same time...suddenly I was the center of attention. Suddenly, everything was all about me, and me being there. Everybody was paying attention to me. I felt, I don’t know, important, alive...real. Without me, none of the light and movement and noise would be happening. It was all about me, the ghost become visible.”
Daniel studied Nicolette, watching as she sank into the vision in her mind’s eye, surrounded by people; photographers, stylists, assistants, maybe even set and prop people. But as she spoke, he could see a subtle change in her demeanor, a change he doubted she realized was visible; she became animated, enthusiastic...even excited. It disturbed him, made the woman sitting across from him seem alien. Things that he would expect to cause regret or shame or humiliation...he was instead seeing pleasure, excitement...even gratification.
Dimly, a word suggested itself, a word that he had never really seriously included in his vocabulary until he started spending time with a PTSD group that used to meet at the Catholic Church on weekends: validation. Briefly, Shelly’s words came back to him, suggesting that he’d found one of those mysteries to solve, reconciling the girl he thought he knew with this stranger sitting before him. The notion that she may have come back distilled still intrigued him. For one brief moment, the mystery hung shining before him along with the choice to put aside his hurt bitterness and disgust and explore this mysterious and suddenly exotic woman, to explore his feelings and see what might be found. He hung exactly in the balance, the vision Shelly had offered him on one side, his self-satisfied and involuted urge to hold onto his pain and feed that darker, destructive, petty side of his nature on the other.
But in some dim, atavistic recess of his brain, he intuited where the story was going, his unacknowledged jealousy fueling his feelings, making him struggle not to see her as dirty, reprehensible...contaminated, as if she was somehow complicit with Hurtz and Sanches and their ilk, their crude possession of her likeness somehow clinging to her. If he hadn’t been so overwhelmed, he might have realized the implications of his jealousy, perhaps pushed back those atavistic impulses and allowed himself to reach a different conclusion. But the mental image of her stripping for a room full of Hurtzes and Sancheses, spreading her legs in some cheap skin mag, while he -- and his love -- had been kept at a distance...
By the time Nicolette resumed her telling, Shelly’s words were lost to him; they would remain lost until it was almost too late.
Nicolette sighed, some of the fey energy draining out of her, the dark circles under her eyes seeming more visible, “The thing with the magazine tour is that they thrive on fresh meat. Once you’re no longer fresh, the photography gigs dry up and you’re back to dancing or working the floor...or doing other things, if you’re desperate, scared and not scared enough. By the time I was through with the photography tour...or it was through with me, really -- I had gotten used to the income. It just seemed impossible to continue without it. It didn’t help that Stan and I kind of brought out the worst in each other. When, as my agent, he suggested I show up for a movie shoot where I was supposed to be an extra -- nothing else, Stan assured me -- but that it would pay...I trusted him and took the bait.”
Nicolette nodded at Daniel's bitter, knowing expression, “Yeah, I wasn’t there as an extra. By the time I figured it out, the whole production schedule was depending on me doing my bit. I knew if I bailed, Stan would be super pissed and would probably be taking it out on me for weeks, and so many people there were depending on me...so I went through with it; I cried a little bit at first, but once I realized that everybody...that I was the center of attention, the impetus driving all that light and movement, it was like being asleep then suddenly being alive and important and, I don’t know...real, like I mattered -- only much more intensely so!”
You mattered to me!, he wanted to shout, feeling a curious heat rising through his throat and suffusing his body.
One word began reverberating through the unlighted corridors of his mind from the darker parts of himself that combat had taught him to tap into, the rageful, hateful part of himself that allowed him to survive where civilized impulses became counter-survival.
Defiled, that part of his mind suggested, thinking of the worst of his squadmates, she’s been defiled.
He hated the thought, hated the implied judgementalism, hated his own hypocrisy -- it’s not like he’d been particularly celibate after she’d left -- but he struggled to push the thought aside.
“It was like, I could use all the crazy things that Mother said and did to me, things she used to terraform my sexuality with shame and self-loathing, all the...other things. Once the director called ‘action’, all the rage and hatred and self-loathing would rise up, seeking an outlet, somewhere I could vomit it all out...and there would be my coworker, ready to receive it...”
Daniel watched, feeling a curious mixture of disgust and curiosity as his mind attempted to fill in the details. Her story didn’t feel finished, but she had lapsed into silence. He felt as though he could still get around his own prejudices, could still work his way through her story and find things that were admirable about it, despite the horror he felt at the extremes she’d been driven to by her bat-shit insane mother. He wanted to scream at her to be done, but her continued silence filled him with sinking dread.
He watched as she unconsciously pulled at the AlAnon pendant on the inner chain clinging to her throat. Wordlessly, he pointed to her necklace as she rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. She didn’t break her gaze from the ocean, but picked up his gesture from the corner of her eye, “I was just getting to that. It’s...” Nicolette closed her eyes, “I’d been in the industry for a few years, living with Stan, blowing through money. I had picked up some habits back when I was dancing, but those habits got worse when I started doing films. I...”
She glanced at him; tears had begun running silently down her cheeks. She wanted to explain, to offer him some reassurance, but after a moment, Nicolette realized that her reassurances would be empty.
She shrugged, the casualness of the gesture belying the tension in her body, “It was tough getting through the day after I left, but somehow it just kept getting harder. With fear of Mother still driving me, and without...”
She lapsed into silence, momentarily unable to continue.
Without what?, he wondered, without me? He wanted to snarl, “but you could have had me!”
“Some days I needed a little help, some days I needed a lot. I needed help waking up, needed help sleeping, needed help feeling, or not feeling, or forgetting. Then I needed help dealing with pain.”
She shrugged, not bothering to swipe the tears off her cheeks, “I told you Stan and I brought out the worst in each other. He used; when I started working films, I started using more. We used a lot. Coke, meth...uppers in the morning to get out of bed, Oxy to take the edge off the come down, ambien or Xanax to help me sleep, alcohol to feel good, E when I wanted to party. I was all over the place. Stan and I went to a lot of parties; a lot of those parties tended to get pretty wild. Whatever came my way, I did.”
“Cocaine and Oxycodone? That’s...really dangerous. Mixing any of that stuff... I pick up guys that mix all the time -- mostly as a favor to the ME's office, it seems like.”
Nicolette shrugged, “I didn’t care. Thing is, all that is really hard on your wallet. Both Stan and I were perpetually broke. It didn’t help that Stan probably stole from me, and I spent money...” she shook her head in remembered amazement “I spent a lot of money on stupid, stupid things. But when you’ve got a monkey riding your back...”
Daniel felt a chill sweep through him, a premonitory coldness. He didn’t want to hear the rest. He shifted in his chair uncomfortably while Nicolette paused to gather her courage.
“Stan’s mother had a bunch of friends she played bridge with -- an elderly bunch that was generally pretty wealthy. Stan heard that one of them -- a widow -- was going on a cruise or something. They did it all the time. He planned to break in while she was gone, lift some of her jewelry, then pawn it for cash to tide us over until my next shoot. By then I had built up a fairly successful brand, had a group of people I worked well with; I was working once or twice a week. I was making good money -- really good money -- but we were using pretty bad, spending ahead of my paydays.”
Daniel was disturbed when her voice became unsteady, the tears redoubling. He silently begged her to stop, considered telling Nikki to...but he was rooted to the chair, captive, already knowing the end of the story, but helpless to leave before he’d heard the final confirmation from her. To leave now would leave the slightest bit of uncertainty, and that just seemed...intolerable.
“I didn’t want to go -- I refused to go, but Stan...Stan could be pretty insistent when he wanted something -- wheedling, threatening, begging, intimidating...he could get mean. So I bought gloves and dark clothes and on the day Stan chose, I went. I still tried to argue him out of it, but he just...just wouldn’t l-listen. Stan...Stanley got the dates...got the dates wrong.”
She paused, taking deep breaths, feeling her guilt and self loathing boiling out of their carefully managed compartment in her mind.
“Mrs. Hamilton was home, but we didn’t realize it until it was way too late.”
She stopped, unable to continue, feeling her carefully tended heart begin to break as the toxic filth in her mind spilled over, covering and drowning it, crushing it under its weight. She felt tears run down her cheeks as her breathing became labored.
Daniel watched as she collapsed in on herself, feeling his dread smothering the tiny kernel of hope that this chapter of her story could somehow come right, could still find some way, against all odds, to be okay. He knew the conclusion, but he still needed her to finish it; in that moment, he hated her for coming back and disrupting his healing, for giving him hope and then taking that hope away, for revealing the mental image of her which he had put on a pedestal and clung to concealed something putrid and rotten; he had just been too deluded by his own desires to see that truth.
“And then?” he asked coldly, the strain of appearing calm giving his voice a roughened edge.
She shook her head, her voice strained and full of surprise that he’d even have to ask, “And then?” She closed her eyes, a fresh river of tears running down her cheeks, “Stan found Mrs. Hamilton -- he panicked when she freaked, I guess. I didn’t see it happen, but by the time I caught up to him, she was already in pretty bad shape.”
Her face crumpled as she paused, struggling to continue, “Later, when we were both in custody, they were much more interested in Stanley. I guess the police had some grudge against him for other things that they’d investigated in the past. The DA offered me a deal...I took it. I testified against Stan and he went away for a very, very long time. I pled guilty to lesser charges -- but they dropped the conspiracy and robbery charges, along with the grand theft and aggravated assault charges they got Stan on. I was sentenced to four years in The CIW, though I got out six months early for good behavior...that was 3 weeks ago.”
He felt despair. As the silence stretched on, Daniel’s heart pounded in his chest.
Shelly was wrong, he thought bitterly, she isn’t more of what used to make her her. She’s less...she’s destroyed herself completely.
He wanted to be somewhere else with an overpowering need, somewhere out of this darkness and damp and horror. He stood up, silently turning to leave. He felt her hand clutching his arm as she half stood to reach him, her voice thick with tears, almost incomprehensible, “Dan, she didn’t--“
She fell silent as he roughly tore his biceps free of her grasp. She sank back down as he spun around, his eyes filled with tears despite his snarl, his clenched rage rendering his visage nearly unrecognizable. He ignored Nikki’s flinch as he reached across the table, his darker self momentarily in possession of his actions. Very gently taking her chin in his hand, he leaned forward. For one crazy instant, she thought he was going to kiss her, irrational hope igniting from the ashes. But when he had pulled her head until she was leaning over the table, the cigarette having long since burned down in her hand, forgotten, he said, with every ounce of coldness and betrayed loathing he could summon into his voice, “It would have been better if you had died.”
Even as he said the words, before he even registered her expression as her face crumpled, or he heard the harsh choking sob that she fought to suppress, he regretted his words, wished almost immediately that he could take them back.
But his pride and his anger had him, were running riot; he roughly thrust her head away as he turned on his heel and began walking through the Magnuson’s yard, swaying as if drunk, stumbling blindly along the path toward his car. His eyes burning as he reached for his keys, he pulled the door open and settled behind the wheel.
An hour later they were both sitting, staring out into the darkness, not thirty yards from each other. Nicolette felt numb and broken; everything she had hoped for when she returned to Half Moon Bay lay in ruins around her. It had taken the better part of half an hour to stop crying; even now, an occasional tremor ran through her, causing a fresh wave of tears to escape her burning eyes. She was chilled and exhausted, desolation settling over her. She hadn’t expected her story to be well received; Daniel's reaction had been worse than anything she’d anticipated. She felt like a fool for hoping. She let her head fall forward, trying to shrink down into her jacket for warmth, though no amount of external heat could reach the frost she felt settling over her heart.
Daniel sat in his truck, darkness pressing in all around him. His knuckles and palms ached where he’d punched the dashboard when it had felt as though he couldn’t contain his pain and rage. Rage at Nikki, rage at Rose, rage at himself for wanting to take his words back, rage at the roaring darkness in his own mind.
She deserved it, he told himself, flinching away from the defensive note he was hearing in his own thoughts.
I need to get myself home, he thought, wishing for the security of his apartment, reflecting that this had been his worst weekend in a long, long time.
It was a long time before either one of them left; but it was probably just before dawn before they both found sleep, troubled and shallow as it was.