Page 62 of Steadfast
I took my cheesecake and got the hell out of there.
When I went into the alley to get into the Avenger for the trip to the Shipleys’, I could hear the garage phone ringing away inside.
Crap. The garage phone was the only way anyone could reach me, since I was too cheap to buy a cell phone. I heard the ringing stop. But then it started right up again immediately.
Fine. I unlocked the garage and ran for the phone, answering it before it went to the machine again. “Hello?”
“I’m so sorry,” Sophie said right away. “That sucked. I feel shitty. But that guy I was sitting with works for—”
“I get it.” My voice sounded tight, even though I really did get it.
“If one of my dad’s deputies had a hunch that we were…” She cleared her throat. “They’d harass you.”
This was true. They were harassing me already, but I wasn’t going to worry her about it.
“Anyway, he’s helping me with a question. It wasn’t a date or anything.”
It sure looked like one. Somehow I managed not to say that out loud. It would sound jealous as fuck. I took a deep breath. “Soph, you should go on as many dates as you want. With people you don’t have to pretend not to recognize.”
There was a deep silence on her end of the line. “I don’t want to date anybody, Jude.”
“You don’t want to be with somebody nice and normal? That can’t be true.”
“Fuck normal! Normal is dull. That’s what you told me when we were seventeen.”
“Yeah? I was a bonehead when I was seventeen.”Still am. “Don’t try to sugarcoat this, okay? I can’t be that guy sitting at the bakery with you. We can’t go out for coffee and go to the movies. So we’re just torturing each other right now. We fuck on Wednesdays and pretend that it isn’t going to end badly.”
“Jude!”
“What? Tell me how this ends.”
“I don’t want it to end at all.”
“Really? You want to spend the rest of your life meeting me for ninety minutes on Wednesday nights? That’s not living.”
“Things could get better.”
“How, Soph? How is that possible?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet.”
I snorted. “We are so fucked, and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise.”
There was dead air between us, and I knew I’d been an ass. But it was for her own good. The silence stretched on. Later I would realize that the silence between us was the only reason I caught on to what was happening upstairs.
Over my head, I heard a creak. Which meant that there was somebodyin my room. “Sophie,” I whispered. “Where are you right now?”
“Sitting in my car behind the bakery. Why?”
“I gotta go,” I said quickly. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
“We will? How?”
Another creak sounded above me. “Gotta go for now, babe.” I hung up the phone. Then I yanked a lug wrench off the wall.
Standing still, I listened again. I heard another creak. And a thump. Then the sound of feet running down shoddy wooden steps.
That got me moving. I exited the garage and crept toward the back just in time to see someone in a black hoodie running down the alley away from me. My chin snapped upward to look at the door to my room. It was standing open. But nobody else emerged.
