Page 236 of Deep Cover

28

Annie

Wherever Cole had disappeared to the night before, he never returned. Once the burn of alcohol had worn off, there was only the resulting sting and slight throb that a cut has afterwards. It doesn't hurt while it's happening, but sometimes it hurts after. Something about the injury and insult to the body. Too much pressure. Too much abuse.

I bandaged my ankle as I had intended, then stood and stared in the mirror. My hair was growing back from what Cole had done to it, too short yet to have any of my usual curl to it. Just dark fuzz starting up.

That was hard to forgive. He was trying to drive every bit of Vincent from me, but that had taken something of me with it. When undercover, I'd never had to wear my hair short. I liked my long curls. I was less enamored of men I'd met in the last year insisting on wrapping their fists in it and using that to drag my head back – or down, depending on what they wanted. But otherwise, I liked my hair. I thought Cole had too, so maybe he was punishing himself as well as punishing me.

When it became obvious he wasn't coming back, I tried the phones in the room, but they just went out to security.

"Is there a problem, ma'am?"

Matt Somebody. He was polite and distant as a lamppost. There was no emotion in him. He made me look deep.

"I'm trying to get a call through," I said. Once a tiny equilibrium had been established by the cutting my heart started to pound as I realized how long it had been since I checked in with Mark or my father. They'd both become used to my being able to contact them, something that never happened undercover, and as I'd thought in Paris, maybe they'd assume I was undercover, that I'd cleaned up enough to be usefully slightly dirty or I'd cleaned all the way up. If I’d died there, they'd never know, and for a while, that had looked possible.

I hadn't died there, so it was time to be in touch.

That hurt to think of them thinking, really. That I would get well and share none of that with them, only go back to work to apply my recovery to that.

Like me, but unkind.

"Sorry, ma'am. I don't have any orders allowing me to get you a phone."

"You never do anything without orders?" I asked, not sure where I was even trying to go with that.

"No, ma'am," he said. "Would you like me to put a request in for you?"

"Just stop calling me ma'am and we'll be even," I said.

"Ma'am?" he asked with no trace of irony.

I hung up on him.

I rebandaged my foot because it had bled again.

I did a light workout.

I took a shower.

I waited for Cole.

When he arrived, I didn't know how to ask if he was all right. It wasn't my place. I did it anyway.

"Thank you," he said formally. "It's been difficult without you and even more difficult to know what you went through. I'm just off kilter."

That he answered that way was proof of that.

"Sir, I need to call home," I said and instantly wished I hadn't. Even I wasn't sure where home was anymore, and Cole winced.

"I should have thought of that before now. Of course you can. I'll unlock the phones in my office. You can use those."

Having made my request and having it granted, I now wished I could do anything else in the world.

"Annie?" My father sounded freaked out. Instant guilt bloomed in me even though what I thought I could have done from within Vincent's lair in Paris I don't know.

"It's me, Dad. Sorry I've been out of touch." I expected him to call my mother to the phone but he didn't.

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