“Then he can take two pounds of flesh so I can buy a stronger one that’ll work,” I retorted. “After this shit, I’m sure you’re not surprised that I’m willin’ to pay a high price.”
“That number might be busy, darlin’, but keep tryin’ it. I ’spect, after you ran him through the ringer enough for him to be so pissed he cleaned you out, your ex is on the line right about now, makin’ his deal.”
Already in tatters, that struck so close to the bone, it was a wonder I didn’t dissolve.
“You’re a dick,” I hissed.
“Yeah, and a grateful one, seein’ as you led with this bullshit so I could get the lay of the land real fuckin’ quick, cut my losses, and get the fuck outta here.”
I felt my face start heating with fury. “I led with a hug, you asshole.”
“It was not ten minutes ago, Zara. I remember. Then I got whiplash with your one-eighty. You sure you aren’t already tight with the guy downstairs?” he asked with deep sarcasm. “Five more minutes, I reckon I’d have watched your head spin.”
“God! Can you get worse?” I snapped.
“Yeah, there it is. All woman. Pure woman. You don’t know what you want, except the part where you want what you can’t have and, somehow, that’s my fuckin’ fault.”
“If you have heretofore unshared issues with women, Graham, work them out with another unwitting female.”
“Not a chance. Haven’t done this shit in years. Gonna do my motherfucking best not to do it again, ever. I drink, I eat, I fuck, I leave.”
“Well, you got that down to an art.”
“Why the fuck am I still standing here?” he asked.
“Beats me,” I answered.
I barely got out the second word before he turned to go.
But I wasn’t done.
“Now look who’s walking away,” I remarked and he turned right back.
“Yeah. And advice. Take a good look, baby, ’cause this is the last time you’ll see my ass and you like my ass. You want it. I know ’cause I still got the scars from your teeth the last time you took a bite outta me.”
Fury and remembered desire rushed through me. So much of both I was paralyzed. I could do nothing but stand immobile and stare.
Ham raked me with his eyes from head to toe and fired the final shot.
“Christ. All the proof I need standing right there. All that pretty. Shiny. Looks sweet. Tastes sweeter. So goddamned good, you fuck up, put your trust in that sweet, then she sinks her fangs in you and releases the venom. Only one woman I know not filled with poison, knew her own goddamned mind, her shit was fucked up but she didn’t make it anyone’s problem but her own, and I let her walk away from me, too. The difference with her and you, babe, is that I regret lettin’ her do it. I drove here thinkin’ the same about you. Glad to know right off, I was wrong.”
After I took that bullet, he turned, prowled down the walk, and disappeared.
I stood there listening to the door of his truck slam.
I kept standing there as the powerful beast growled to life.
And I stayed standing there as I saw his headlights illuminate the drive and I watched him back out and drive away.
Only then did I move into my house, close and lock the door, and wander to my room.
I laid in the dark, stared at the ceiling, and let his words shift through my brain, over and over.
Then she sinks her fangs in you and releases the venom.
And as those words shifted through my brain, I thought, Yep, that’s me.
Chapter Three
Mendin’ Fences
Five months later…
With filled grocery bags in my hands, my phone ringing in my purse, I struggled through the door to my studio apartment. Dashing to the counter of the kitchen, I dumped the groceries, shrugged my purse off my shoulder, snatched my phone out, and hurriedly took the call before it went to voice mail without looking at the display to see who it was from.
“Hello?”
“Cookie.”
At the surprise of Ham’s deep voice calling me his nickname, my body sagged into the side of the counter even as my heart turned over.
“Are you okay?” I asked immediately.
“Yeah, but you aren’t.”
Just as quickly, I jerked away from the counter and my back went ramrod straight.
“Talked with Jake,” he went on.
God. Jake.
I hadn’t heard from Ham since that horrible night.
Now, he’d again talked with Jake, who I was distractedly surprised he was tight with, seeing as they worked together for just over six months eight freaking years ago and obviously kept in touch, which I knew Ham could do but Jake doing it shocked the shit out of me, and he was calling because Jake had spilled all my secrets. Again.
Not that they were secrets. Everyone in town knew that I’d had to close down my shop and had my house taken away from me by the bank.
This would have been humiliating if this freaking recession didn’t mean that not a small number of the residents of Gnaw Bone, most specifically the inhabitants of the now-dead, as in murdered, as in killed by a freaking hit man, Curtis Dodd’s developments weren’t in the same pickle.
“Baby, why didn’t you tell me?” Ham asked.
His voice was jagged.
I closed my eyes.
His voice sounded beautiful.
And it killed.
Damn it, I was not going through this again.
We were done. He clearly had issues with women. I wasn’t stupid. I sensed that during the five years we’d been friends with benefits, five years in which he wouldn’t commit to me or anyone.
But he’d made it plain during our last conversation.
“I seem to recall that I told you it was none of your business,” I reminded him.
“Serious financial problems that mean you lose your house and your shop, babe, are absolutely my business.”
“I’m not having this conversation again,” I declared.
He ignored that and asked, “And you’re workin’ at Deluxe Home Store? You? Zara. Jesus.”
“I need to eat, Ham. When a woman needs to eat, she does what she has to do. Thus the continued prevalence of prostitution, strip clubs, and porn films.”
“Fuck, Zara,” he growled and I heard the sharp edge of alarm in his tone. “What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”
“I’m not talkin’ about anything, and by that I mean I’m done with the conversation, as in, hanging up, Ham. Don’t call again.”
“Cookie, don’t hang up on me.”
“Good-bye, Ham, and I hope your shoulder healed all right.”
“Za—” I heard before I hit the button to hang up.
I turned the ringer to mute.
Then I fought back tears as I put away groceries in my tiny kitchen in my tiny studio apartment, which was the only thing I could afford on the shit wage I made at fucking Deluxe fucking Home Store. A big chain store that my friend Maybelline helped me get a job at when my life took its last major nosedive. A store that I liked working at only because Maybelle worked there, as did our other friend, Wanda. A store that was all right but so far from the coolness that I’d created in Karma, it wasn’t fucking funny.
* * *
Twenty minutes later…
I jumped when the doorbell rang and didn’t stop ringing.
“What the hell?” I whispered, pulling myself out of the couch.
I had a new couch. Not new new but new to me. My friend Mindy gave it to me. She’d put all her living room furniture in storage when she moved in with her husband, Jeff. The instant Mindy saw the state of what Maybelline gave me, she tasked Jeff and his best friend, Pete, with going to the unit, pulling out the furniture, and delivering it to my very humble new abode. Mindy also tasked Jeff and Pete with carrying away the stuff Maybelline gave me and, as she phrased it, “putting it out of its misery.”
Thus, I now had nice, but used, furniture that included an arm
chair. All of this was in one room, as studios tended to be, stuffed in with my queen-sized bed and Wanda’s mammoth so-not-flat-screen-it-wasn’t-funny-but-on-the-bright-side-it-had-a-remote TV.
It was good that I didn’t have to worry about furniture but I did have to worry about giving Mindy and Jeff money for their castoffs after Mindy breezily said, “Keep it. I don’t know why I did, except my obvious-but-to-this-point-unknown clairvoyance of knowin’ you’d eventually need it. Not to mention, you saved me the bother of havin’ to do something with it.”
She refused to take a cent mostly because, at the time, I didn’t have any. I still didn’t. But I was going to give her one (or a lot more than one) as soon as I had a few of them to rub together.
After giving Mindy some dough, next up, a new freaking TV.
In getting my life back in order, I had priorities. Thinking these thoughts, I went to the door cautiously as the bell kept ringing. Even in Gnaw Bone, a small town that was mostly sleepy but could do more than a decent tourist trade, or did back in the days when people had disposable income, one couldn’t be too careful.
And anyway, all sorts of freaky shit was happening in the county lately, starting with Curtis Dodd’s murder, which happened within days of Ham letting me walk away from him three and a half years ago.
It made me feel lucky that Gnaw Bone only had Dodd’s murder and all the resulting muss and fuss with his wife, a woman I’d always loved, Bitsy, and her friend, a guy I’d always liked, Harry, ordering the hit. Harry had even killed a few other people after losing his mind and not exactly going on a rampage, but any amount of bodies that dropped that added up to more than one seemed like a rampage to me. Holden Maxwell and his girlfriend, now wife, Nina, got involved in that mess, Nina by getting kidnapped and nearly shot on the side of a mountain.
This made me feel lucky because Gnaw Bone only had that.
Carnal, the town one over, had much bigger messes and that was plural.
In other words, next up, it was discovered that Carnal had a serial killer, thus making Ham the victim of one freaking me out even more, seeing as a lot of people lived their whole life not having a serial killer in it, not one town over and definitely not some whack job planting a hatchet in your ex-lover’s shoulder.
After that, again in Carnal, the fact their chief of police was a racist dick face became clear when it was discovered he framed a local but seriously hot if the pictures in the paper were anything to go by black guy for murder in freaking LA of all places. Not long after this dastardly deed was exposed, the dude lost his mind, that dude being the ex-chief of police. He kidnapped the black guy’s pregnant wife and, luckily, she shot him dead on the side of another mountain. This was “luckily” because that outcome was what it was, rather than it being the other way around.
Then another whack job in Carnal had been at work. This one was a fanatically religious woman who killed some lady up in Wyoming and kidnapped her kids, holding them captive for ages in her house before one was discovered by a local cop and his girlfriend, taken care of, and then that whole thing exploded in a mess that somehow got his girlfriend buried alive. Though I didn’t get that. Then again, I didn’t really want to. I quit listening at “buried alive.” That was enough for me.
Suffice it to say that, even though it was probably Mindy, Maybelline, Wanda, one of my other friends Becca, Jenna, Nina, or possibly Arlene, Cotton, or anyone else in Gnaw Bone seeing as I lived there all my life, everyone in town knew what had happened to me so everyone was watching over me, I still kept the chain on when I opened the door because my shitty apartment didn’t have a peephole.
When I saw who was outside, my mouth dropped open.
Luckily, the doorbell buzzing stopped.
Unluckily, the last person on earth I wanted to see was standing outside my door.
“Jesus, you don’t have a peephole?” Ham growled, looking incensed and Graham Reece looking, or worse, being incensed was a very bad thing. I’d learned that five months ago.
I didn’t have it in me to concern myself with Ham being incensed. I was more concerned with him being there at all.
To express this, I asked, “What the hell?”
“Open the fuckin’ door, Zara.”
I stared a beat, then pulled myself together.
This was not happening.
We were done.
I pushed the door closed.
The problem with this was it didn’t work, seeing as the toe of Ham’s boot was wedged between it and the jamb.
“Open the door, Zara,” he repeated.
“We’re done,” I told him through the gap in the door. “Move your foot.”
“Open the door.”
“We’re done, Ham,” I snapped.
“Right, then move back.”
“What?”
He didn’t repeat his order. He moved his foot but only so he could rear back and plant his shoulder in the door.
The chain popped right open, as did the door, and I went flying.
I righted myself as Ham, now in my apartment, slammed the door.
“You’re payin’ for that!” I yelled.
His eyes were beyond me, examining my new space as his mouth moved.
“Not a problem. I’ll reimburse what they take out of your security deposit when we move you out of this dump.”
I didn’t know what he meant and I also didn’t care.
I switched subjects.
“How did you get here so fast?” I asked, and his eyes finally came to me.
“I hope to Christ you didn’t miss local gossip because you’re spendin’ your days at Deluxe Home Store and your nights at some titty bar.”
“I’m not working at a titty bar, Ham, so you can stop concerning yourself with me and move on”—I paused—“again.” I bit off the last word then what he said penetrated and I asked, “What gossip?”
“Managing The Dog, Zara, have been for a week. I live in Gnaw Bone.”
I felt my eyes get huge as my stomach clenched.
“You’re managing The Dog?” I whispered, aghast.
“Yeah. And you just got a new job. You start after you work out your notice at Deluxe,” he returned.
“What?” This also came out quiet and horrified.
“You’re waitressin’ for me. Shit hours but, if I remember correctly and since the view hasn’t changed except to get better, with your face, tits, and ass, great tips. In the meantime, we’re movin’ you out of this shithole and, you don’t got a girl who can take you on, you’re bunkin’ with me.”
Bunking with him?
Was he high?
“I am not moving in with you,” I declared.
“You aren’t livin’ in this place either.”
“It’s fine,” I snapped.
“It doesn’t have a fuckin’ peephole, and, babe, reminder, I just popped that fuckin’ chain not two fuckin’ minutes ago.”
“Well, seeing as my other callers won’t force themselves into my place, that shouldn’t be a problem,” I retorted.
“Zara, got a scar on my shoulder that proves fucked up can hunt you down just ’cause you’re breathin’ and you’ve lived in this county through some serious, crazy, sick-fuck shit. You need a goddamned peephole and a decent lock. And, you can get it, a man at your back and that man’s gonna be me.”
“You’re either high or you’ve lost your mind, Graham Reece, because there is no way in hell I’m moving in with you.”
“I don’t want your body, Zara. I want your safety,” he shot back.
Ouch. That stung.
With no other choice, I powered through the sting. “Either way, neither are yours to have or give anymore, Ham. We’re done.”
“Don’t let pride or bein’ pissed stand in the way of reason, babe.”
It was then, I’d had enough. More than enough. Of Ham. Of life. Of everything.
And, seeing as I’d had enough, I totally lost it.
“You’re not listening to me!” I lea
ned in and shrieked the last three words so shrill Ham’s head jerked. “We. Are. Done. I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to talk to you again. I do not want you in my… fucking…life. Now get out, get gone, and please, God, stay gone.”
Shockingly and infuriatingly, this tirade did not make him move toward the door. Instead, it made him take a step toward me, lift a hand my way, and say in a soothing voice, “Cookie, take a breath and calm down so we can talk.”
“I’ll calm down when you’re out of my fuckin’ house.”
“Babe—”
I took a step back, turned, didn’t know why the hell I was turning since, in that tiny pad, I had nowhere to go, so I faced Ham again, and said quietly, “I lost my home. I lost my dream when I lost my shop. I nearly lost my stupid car and I had to sell a bunch of shit like my stereo so I wouldn’t. I lost my husband and with him went my furniture. I’m working at a place I hate, making practically nothing. I have no idea what my future will bring. I have nothing to look forward to. I live day to day doin’ nothin’ but gettin’ through the day. I do not need this shit. Not now. Not from you. Not from anyone. If you care about me even a little bit anymore, Ham, you’ll get gone and stay gone.”
“I’ve always cared about you, Zara.”
God! Killing me!
“Then get gone.”
“You gotta listen to me—”
“You’re not getting gone,” I snapped and he leaned in.
“Shoe’s on the other foot, babe, you knew I needed you, would you leave me? No matter how much I said I wanted it, you knew my shit was fucked, would you walk away from me?”
Seriously, it was exasperating that he had a point.
I decided not to speak.
Ham saw his advantage and took it while taking another step toward me.
“You saw me on TV, babe, and I know, the way you were freaked, you picked up the phone within seconds. We were disconnected for fuckin’ years, you saw the shit that went down with me, you reached out. So I know you wouldn’t turn your back on me.”
Definitely exasperating.