Page 89 of When Annika Met Thom

“Aren’t you going there now to get Annika’s bags?”

“Lucky you,” Leo said, giving Thom a poke in the chest. “I’ll grab dinner with her first. The clock is ticking.”

Thom pulled off his harness and headed for the change room. He had to get back to the apartment and get Cerberus before Leo made some asshole move.

Maybe Leo’d already made one.

Thom broke into a run, even as he pulled out his phone. “Tessa? I need a huge favor and I need it now…”

* * *

The last personAnnika wanted to see again was Leo. She supposed he had something to say to her, but she wasn’t in a mood to be encouraging. He tried to insist that they get dinner, but she kept heading for the subway station. Finally, they got on the train and she kept her silence as they rode the train back to the apartment. That kiss. How dare he touch her like that? She was fuming when they walked from the subway station, and completely ignored his every attempt to start a conversation.

“We could get dinner,” he said for the ninth time.

“Not hungry,” Annika snapped, realizing that she was starting to sound like Thom.

“But, Annika, we have to talk.”

“No.” She spun to face him in the corridor outside the apartment door. “We don’t.”

“But after all these years…” he smiled, trying to appeal to her.

“Did Cerise throw you back?”

“We don’t need to talk about her. Let’s talk about us.”

“There is nous.” Annika felt nothing but anger. “I’ve been here almost two weeks and now, when I have to catch my train home, you decide you want to talk. I think you don’t want to talk at all. Finally, we have something in common because I don’t either.”

“You don’t mean that. Come on, Annika…”

She unlocked the door then tossed him her set of keys. He caught them awkwardly, then looked at them in surprise. “You might as well have these now,” she began, then realized something was wrong.

Cerberus was gone.

Annika spun to look, but the dog’s leash was gone, too. And it wasn’t just that Thom had beaten them back to the apartment. The dog’s dish had vanished along with the stool it sat on. Thom’s jackets were missing. There were no weights in the bedroom or bananas on the counter.

Annika checked the closet in the bedroom and the cupboard in the kitchen. She looked in the fridge and in the bathroom, but every sign of Thom’s presence had been removed from the apartment.

She turned back to Leo, who was looking smug. “Where is Thom?”

“I guess he took me seriously.”

Annika seized his sleeve and shook it hard. “What did you say to him?”

“I told him to move out,” Leo said, his tone defensive. “I told him to do it now.”

“But you can’t do that. He paid you rent.”

“His loss,” Leo said, his lips drawing to a thin line.

“How can you be so mean?”

Leo leaned closer and bit off the words. “He fucked you. That’s how.”

Annika slapped him so hard that his head snapped to one side. “Don’t you ever say anything like that to me again,” she said through her teeth. “You’re not the innocent party here, Leo. You werefuckingCerise and you didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me that we were done.”

“So, doing Thom was getting even?”

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