Page 25 of Nothing to Fear

The moment they parted, he reached for her hips. “Baby—”

“I have to go.” Oh, if not for inevitability. “Thank you, I—I have to go.”

SEVEN

“I DID IT AGAIN.”

“Did what?” Jacob asked.

His voice had come to comfort her. Something about it was wrong, though she didn’t have the gumption to ask if she’d conjured that up in her own head.

“Made an idiot of myself.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. What happened?”

“I had dinner at my boss’s house. Our prize for the bake-off.”

“You didn’t have a good time?”

“The meal was wonderful,” she said, lying on her couch, coiling the cord around her hand. “I’ve never had food like it. In a restaurant, like even the toppest, poshest restaurant I’ve ever visited. They had staff too. Servers in their actual house.” She sighed, her eyes closing as her cord wrapped fist bumped on her forehead. “They can’t really live there.”

“Why not? What’s wrong with it?”

“People like that, in a home like that, it’s a palace. Can you just imagine what kind of carnage I could cause?”

“It may look different, but there’s no reason to think they’d be less at home there than you are in your apartment.”

“Bad example.” She squinted, though her eyes stayed closed. “The tougher I find it to sleep, the less I like staring at these walls.”

“You could visit a doctor. He could give you something to help you sleep.”

“Medication?” She shook her head at no one. “I’ve seen that path and it’s not pretty. No, I’ll be fine. I just need to kick myself out of whatever this funk is.”

“Seems the root of that is your trauma.”

“Why did I call it that? Why did I choose the trauma option?”

“Because being held hostage is a traumatic event. Why do you struggle to acknowledge that?”

“I had a boyfriend when I was fifteen. Not exactly a straight-A student, but I was acting out, I guess. I wasn’t the best student.”

“And the boyfriend?”

“His thing was tagging any weird place he could find.”

“Tagging? Spray paint?”

“Yeah,” she said and sighed. “I followed him around like a puppy dog, him and his crazy posse. It’s weird, isn’t it? How teenagers gravitate toward the kind of people we try to avoid for the rest of our lives? Maybe we don’t try, but we should try. Bad boys might equal great sex, they don’t equal reliable partners.”

“Sometimes it’s the labels that provoke the connection.”

“Maybe.”

“Why are you thinking of him?”

“Oh, uh, we were out one night, way past curfew, in the woods. At the time I thought he was the coolest person to ever breathe. I’d have followed him anywhere. We started in the group. One peeled away, one went home, then another, our numbers dwindled until we were alone. Just him and I. I knew he wanted to get to the witch’s house. That’s what we called this old abandoned building deep in the trees. We couldn’t find it. I thought we’d be there all night searching, maybe we’d never find it, maybe we’d die there, in each other’s arms like Romeo and Juliet, forever locked in our love.”

“It didn’t work out that way?”

---