Page 61 of Badd Ass
Nope, nope, nope.
Chapter 11
Zane
It had been almosttwo months since Mara left, and I was still fucking miserable. I was a complete bastard to my brothers and a jackass to the customers, to the point that when Bast and Dru got back from their honeymoon, Bast told me to cut the bullshit attitude or find a new job. So I dug deep, and pretended like shit was hunky fucking dory.
But it wasn’t.
I shouldn’t have let Mara leave like that. I knew it in my heart, in my soul. But how could I have asked her to stay? What would she do? You can’t base an entire life, a whole new relationship on knowing someone for a week. That’s stupid. I may not know dick about relationships, but I know they don’t work like that.
They just don’t.
To make matters worse, after the first month of misery, I finally broke down at three a.m. and drunk texted Mara. Spent a fucking hour composing that message, deleting and starting over, reading and re-reading a thousand times, tweaking it until it felt right.
Me:I miss you. What if I said I regret letting you leave?
When I finally hit the blue send arrow, the message popped up in the thread in the blue bubble; “Delivered.”
I stared at the screen for twenty fucking minutes, and it never changed to “read.” I passed out, and when I woke up, it was still delivered but not read.
Two days later, still unread.
A week, two weeks, and she never read the fucking message.
I called her, right on the two-month mark. The phone rang and rang and rang.
“Hey, this is Mara. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”
I let out a sigh right as the voicemail beeped. “Hey. Um, this is Zane. I—just call me back, okay? Please?”
I threw my phone across the living room of the apartment so hard it smashed against the wall. Bast, in the kitchen pouring a mug of coffee, glared at me.
“What the fuck is your goddamn problem, Zane? You’ve been a complete shithead for two months. What happened?”
“She left, and I let her. And now she’s not returning texts or answering calls.”
“Then it’s done, man. I’m sorry.” He came into the living room and handed me a mug. “Can’t really say much to make you feel better or to fix it. Other fish in the sea, time heals all wounds, all that is just bullshit. Hurt is hurt, man.”
“Fuck the other fish, I wanther,” I growled.
“Then go get her?”
“How? I don’t know where she lives, I don’t have her address, and she’s not answering her phone.”
Bast snorted. “Did you forget about your youngest brother? You know, the one who was recruited by the NSA?”
“Oh. Right.” I stood up and kicked at Xavier’s door. He opened the door and blinked at me sleepily. “Xavier, I need you to—”
He turned away from me without a word, rummaged through some papers on his desk, and returned with a printout bearing Mara’s full name—Amarantha Lucille Quinn—and a San Francisco address.
“About time, you pussy,” Xavier groused, shoving the paper at me. “Printed this two and a half weeks ago.”
And then he shut the door in my face.
Bast was smirking over his coffee. “He may not need much sleep, but when heissleeping, he really doesn’t like being woken up.”
“Clearly,” I said, reading the address over and over again, compulsively, as if I could conjure the woman out of the words.
