Page 65 of Hounded

“I need tape for that pipe,” I stammered at last. “I’ll run to the store and come back. Couple hours. Max.”

The tape was in my tool bag on the bathroom floor. The hours were for me. To drive or walk far away from here. To hope Moira didn’t call and that Whitney didn’t show up, hot on the trail of a wayward phoenix. I needed time to decide if it was all too much to endure again and to consider the alternatives. I already knew none of them were good.

23

Indy

I found my wayback to the club, not nearly as ignorant of my own comings and goings as I’d let Loren believe. I found Chaz, too, who was apparently a fixture in the place. He wasn’t as excited to see me as he had been a few days prior, and he became even less enthused when I cornered him in the shadowy corner of the room with a single, specific question.

“What’s his name?”

While I thought my meaning was obvious, Chaz frowned. “Who’re you talking about, kid?”

As promised, Loren came back and finished fixing the shower. I didn’t speak to him again. Couldn’t stand it. Instead, I sat at the art desk in the living room and stared past the tabletop easel at the trees and hills in the distance. The trailer felt emptier than it should have with two people in it, probably because we were actively avoiding one another.

He’d lied about his job, maybe about his ex, too. I wanted that “dead” guy to be me because I needed to matter to someone. The void I felt in the Airstream thisafternoon was not limited to that time or space. I felt it always. My heart was as hollow as my brain.

Music from the towering speakers around the DJ booth rang in my ears as I scowled at Chaz. He was as greasy as it had been yesterday and he might have been wearing the same clothes, too. Like he’d never gone home.

“The guy I come here with,” I explained. “Dance with. The one who beat you up.”

Chaz’s pocked nose wrinkled.

“What’s his name?” I asked again what I should have found out the first time. Before I surprised Loren in the trailer park bathhouse and he looked at me like I was an axe murderer. He was afraid. That towering, Italian god of a man cowered at the sight of me, and I needed to know why.

“The crabby bastard?” Chaz scoffed. “You mean you don’t know?”

“I don’t remember!” I exclaimed loudly enough it made the potbellied man sway backward. It had been hard to admit in therapy and to answer constant check-ins about if anything had come back. Any flicker of life in the dark space of my mind.

I knew about the world, so it wasn’t a total loss. And I apparently know more about popular culture than Loren, who acted like he’d never heard of the Mario brothers. And I remembered how to take care of myself, though I wasn’t great at it. Cooking was not a skill I seemed to possess, and I couldn’t operate my own car, but at least I could do the basics.

I wondered a bit about my family, but those thoughts were fleeting. A father and mother didn’t seem to fit intothat person-shaped hole in my heart, but someone must have.

Chaz’s face scrunched, and I sighed.

“I think I know, but I wanna be sure,” I said, then asked once more, “Do you know his name?”

“Loren,” Chaz said, then added with a scowl, “He wasn’t about to letmeforget it.”

The confirmation made my heart soar, then immediately sink. It was exactly what I’d wanted to hear, that I wasn’t crazy for chasing after the man who seemed intent on running away from me. That there was a reason he felt so familiar. I thought about him constantly, being near me, holding me, touching me, even more so after I saw him naked. Since leaving rehab, I’d been a mess, but I was worse around him. Awkwardly babbling, blushing, and throwing myself at him in the hopes something would stick.

Against the wall, Chaz muttered to himself. “Kind of a girly-sounding name if you ask me. Makes sense, though. You’re both a little fruity.”

“Not too fruity to kick your ass,” I quipped. I felt ridiculous saying it. At 5’6” with glitter-painted nails and curly teal hair, nothing about me could be considered intimidating—but Chaz’s eyes widened.

Reaching into my mind, I grasped for frayed threads of memories. Little moments like the one in the waiting room at Hopeful Horizons, when Loren had looked at me with his dark eyes full of tears and told me he loved me. The recent encounter in the bathhouse with him shrinking away like I held a knife instead of blind faith. And today when I’d asked him flat out to admit what I thought Iknew—one of a few things I was nearly sure of—and he didn’t deny it. He said he regretted it, which was a thousand times worse.

Chaz crossed his arms and gave me a once-over. “Seriously, kid. First me, now your boyfriend? What else did you forget?”

I sighed. “Everything. And I think it might be better that way.”

It came out as a whisper, a whim that slipped into the crevasses in my mind and found room to spread. Loren didn’t want me. I was dead to him. He left me at rehab because he wanted me gone, and he only came around now because I was helpless, needy, and desperate.

There was more than one hole inside me. Needs that wouldn’t be met by love or any living thing. Alone in the trailer, I had all the peace and quiet I could want, but I craved a different kind of silence. I needed to put my wandering mind at ease, to quell the fear that I might be alone forever, that I would never recover the missing parts of myself.

The smiley face pill Chaz had offered previously would not do that. Ecstasy was a party drug that made colors swirl and lights dance. It made me giddy. Did I remember that? The feeling of spinning endlessly, only to crash into a pair of strong arms and look up to see…

Loren.

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