Page 28 of Save Me

“We tried to find you. We tried,” he says quietly, and I can hear the pain in his voice. “The second I pulled up at Poison Ivy I knew something was wrong. You’re always waiting for me out front, but that night you weren’t. I thought maybe you got distracted, maybe you were still inside talking to one of the girls, so I came to find you.”

He pauses, his eyes flickering with despair as he recalls what happened. He takes my hand gently in his before continuing.

“When I saw your phone on the bar and you nowhere to be found, I panicked. My mind went in a million different directions imagining what could have happened to you, trying to figure out where you could possibly be. I have never lost it in front of other people before like I did that night. But no one had seen you, no one knew where you had been. Until Greg told me he sent you to take the trash out twenty minutes ago.”

He takes a shaky breath, as if trying to settle himself.

“Twenty minutes,” he growls. “No one looked for you after you went outside and didn’t come back in. No one paid enough attention to think it was weird you weren’t finishing up behind the bar, or to notice that you left your phone.” His voice is barely above a whisper now, and I can feel his muscles tense as he talks before taking a deep breath. I mirror the breath he takes, willing my emotions to stay locked somewhere deep inside of me.

“I went out back, looking for you, praying you would be there, and afraid—so afraid—of what I might find. But you weren’t there. There was no trace of you as I walked around the building in the dark. And then I saw it. Your underwear ripped and left laid out neatly on the gravel.” The rage in his voice is palpable, and when I take a breath, it’s as if I can hear the moment Tanner ripped my underwear, as if I canfeelthe tug ofthe fabric pulling against my skin as the gravel dug into my back and legs. I shake the vision from my head and swallow the bile in my throat as Jax continues, “And I knew this was a message, I knew whoever took you wanted me to hear them loud and clear. Wanted to tell me that I fucked up and they were going to get to me through you. And I am so, so sorry.”

A lump forms in my throat as I hear Jax tell me what happened from his perspective, recounting the worry and panic he faced when he realized I was missing, and the helplessness he felt not knowing where I was or who took me.

“I’m not used to being caught unprepared, of letting others get the upper hand. In my world, this is how you get killed, how my parents got killed. But there I was, standing outside, my thoughts going a million miles a minute, trying to figure out which of my recent business dealings went south and who might have taken you. I went back inside and when I saw Greg—the man who sent my girlfriend outside alone at 3a.m., I snapped. I have never—and I mean never—lost control like I did, but I don’t regret it, in case you’re wondering.”

“Is he…” I trail off, searching Jax’s face for any sign of what happened.

“He’s fine. Or he will be. I didn’t do anything that won’t heal eventually.”

I nod, unsure of what to say, and my chest tightens as I try not to relive that night, the panic that surged within me, the fight that didn’t make a difference.

“What took you so long to find me? I waited for you. I hoped you would come. It was the only thing that kept me going for so long, but then… you didn’t, Jax. You didn’t find me soon enough…” I blink a few times, trying to keep the tears at bay.

“I underestimated Rhett. I never should have, but I never thought he would do something like this. I went knocking on a few other doors first—”

“He said he messaged you,” I cut him off, needing to make sense of all this. “He said he told you where I was and how much he wanted, and you didn’t care. He said I was nothing to you, nothing but a fling… a way to get your dick wet.” I wince, reliving how those words made me feel as they came out of Rhett’s mouth. The first of many nails being hammered into my own coffin as fragments of my soul slowly died under his watch. My heart hammers in my chest and tears well in my eyes.

“Rhett lied to you. I swear it on my life, and I’ll swear it on anyone else’s. I’d do anything—anything—rather than leave you surrounded by people I know wanted to hurt you. The second I realized he had you, I came for you.”

“So the only reason you didn’t find me sooner was—”

“Was because I was looking for you in the wrong places… looking into the wrong people. And I will never, and I mean never, forgive myself for that.”

“I was worried that you hadn’t bothered to come looking for me. And if you weren’t looking for me, then it would probably mean no one else was either, and I was just going to… be stuck there. Disappearing from the world without a trace.”

“Except for Sam,” he says casually.

I jolt at the name on his lips.

“Sam?”

“She’s as tenacious as a bulldog when she wants to be,” he says, as if he’s thinking out loud. “She texted you a couple days after that night, after we realized you were missing. And when you didn’t respond… well, I don’t think I’ve seen that many texts from one person before.” The corner of his mouth tilts upwards slightly, as if a smile is trying to work its way onto his face, but the anger and grief are holding onto him too tightly.

“What did she say?” I ask, feeling stupid for not even picking up my phone since being back. It’s stayed on my dresser sincethey found me, and I haven’t so much as gravitated towards it, not ready to be thrust into reality quite yet.

“I didn’t respond—not for the first week. I knew that as soon as I did it would open the door to more questions. But then…” He trails off as I hang onto every word. “Then she threatened to call the police. And the FBI. And a SWAT team if you didn’t reply as, and I quote, ‘No one goes a week without checking their phone so you’re either dead, dying, or ghosting me and I won’t let any of that happen without my knowledge.’”

I smile, and the thought of having a friend who was genuinely concerned about me makes my chest swell.

“And then her texts got more serious. She threatened to call your parents and toactuallycall the police if she didn’t hear back from you. So, I called her.” He looks at me, assessing my reaction as my breath hitches.

“What did you say? What did she say?”

“Oh, she panicked. It took a while to calm her down, all while trying to remain calm myself. We hadn’t found you yet, and I was not in a good headspace,” he recalls quietly. “I told her that if she went to the police it wouldn’t be a good outcome for anyone, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Did she go to the police?”

“No.”

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