Page 46 of Veiled in Brick

“We were busy talking about—”

“Zoey,” she croaked, “I don’t give a single flying fuck about the drama going on with who you decide to sleep with! You need to call the police.”

Liam’s face twisted up at her first sentence, but it only lasted for a moment. I mentally sidestepped his reaction, pushing it to the back of my mind.

“What are the police gonna do, Claire?” I asked her. “Keep an eye out for a man fitting the description of a fucking shadow? I didn’t get a good look at him.”

“I don’t know,” she returned, her tone salty. “But it’d be better than nothing, what were you gonna do otherwise?”

“I didn’t exactly plan anything out—bit busy being traumatized!” I retorted.

Gaze frantic, she paced to the kitchen, looking around aimlessly until she locked eyes with her purse, which had been haphazardly tossed on the floor of our foyer. She nearly jogged to it, ripping her phone from the inside and tapping the glass face only a few times before she placed it against her cheek. It didn’t ring for long.

“We’re done. Get down here.” She waited for a response. “A lot is wrong, Luke, I’m not talking about it over the phone, get down here!”

As Claire jammed her finger on the end call button with a vengeance, I asked, “Why are you involving Luke?”

She narrowed her eyes as if what I had asked was at the peak of idiocy. “We can all talk about how we deal with the potential fucking threat to your life together, yeah? Four brains are better than three.”

“Alright, yeah,” I replied in a sigh.

Claire paced the floor. Liam and I sat at the kitchen table across from each other. He eyed the white petals situated between us with such a hatred that I began to ponder the reality of spontaneous combustion. I offered him a weak smile, and his hard expression softened. He returned the gesture briefly before it fell away, and it was replaced with a quiet sadness much like the regret that I had seen written across his face the night before. My chest lurched with that thought and I blinked, lowering my head to break our eye contact.

He whispered, “Zo’.”

I kept my eyes on the table. “Hmm?”

“Are you good?” Liam continued to speak under his breath, and I followed suit with a hushed tone.

“Do I look good?”

“You look like you’ve been crying.”

“Astute; I currently have a crisis at hand.”

“Not about the flowers, Zoey,” he hissed. “Can ya look at me, please?” I obliged, feeling my eyebrows pull together as I saw his pleading eyes. I wanted us to be normal. Needed us to be normal. To be as we were. But we weren’t—and I didn’t have the heart to address that. He asked again, “Are you good?”

“No,” I replied, simply. “I’m not.”

His shoulders sagged, and his response never left him for the door opened once more, and Luke arrived. His hair was windswept as if he had run down the single flight of stairs, and he looked to Claire, speaking quickly.

“Hey, what—” His light eyes found Liam and me sitting at the kitchen table with the roses between us and his words faltered. “Ah—hey, er—guys?” Luke pointed to the flowers casually. “What gives, another wrong delivery?”

Tired of addressing any of my drama in the now, I was thankful that Claire took over—and relieved that what she spoke of had nothing to do with my inner turmoil that we had sidestepped earlier.

It all came out in typical Claire fashion—a profanity-laced rant that showcased her anxiety in a fragile, illuminated shadowbox. And, from Luke’s perspective, where it took off was far from where it landed. His initial reaction to her incoherent, crude stammering had him sighing out a breath, reasoning with her in gentle words and a loving smirk on his face. It wasn’t until he was in the kitchen cradling her jaw in both of his hands, softly ushering her to take a breath before she ran out of them, that he could fully understand the words that were leaving her pretty lips.

A muttered combination of, ‘Zoey,’ ‘fucking,’ ‘assault,’ and, ‘note,’ left her, and Luke craned his head behind him slowly. Claire’s face still in his hands, he squinted at the arrangement of white roses. His eyebrows rose as the full realization of the situation before us dawned on him, and his arms fell to his sides. He walked to where Liam and I sat, looked down at the note on the table between us, and touched it in a similar fashion to how Liam did previously.

Luke swallowed. “Oh.”

Claire exclaimed, “What do you mean, oh?!”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I—one second,” he replied quickly, waving at the air between them both. “I’m digesting this—you okay?” Luke spoke to me as he sank down into the seat next to Liam, and I nodded in return. “You have no idea who this guy is?” I shook my head, and he remarked, “Well, did you call the florist?”

“The florist?” Claire asked, moving to sit beside him at the head of the table. “She should be calling the cops, not the place that sent the flowers!”

“I already told you—I didn’t see what he looked like,” I reiterated my point, feeling myself teeter on the edge of hysteria as I crudely added, “And it’s not like I can go to the police with a description of how his voice sounded when he said he was thinking of what my pussy tasted like as he tried to pin me down, can I, Claire?”

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