Page 48 of Best Friend Burden

That was the wrong thing to say. He exploded.

“There will not be a next time!” he said. “Do not ever do this again, do you understand?”

The guy from the Italian food truck had made a sarcastic comment about Kiefer being like a father, but now he sounded exactly like my dad, commanding respect just because he was bigger and louder than me.

That freeze switch in my brain was now flipped between fight and flight, and I wasn't sure which it was going to land on.

"Do you understand?!” he repeated.

My dad always wanted me to submit to him and fall in step with his authority. What he should have realized was the best way to get me tonotdo what he wanted was to demand it. If he had thought to ask me nicely and treat me like a human being, well, I very well might still have been living in Texas.

I loved my dad, but our relationship was strained, largely because of stuff like this.

And I cared about Kiefer, too, but if this was how he was going to treat me, then I didn't need him in my life.

“Fuck you,” I said to him, and no matter how slurred those words have been, drenched in my accent, I knew he understood them completely. I walked right past him towards the door.

He grabbed me by the shoulder, holding me back, and I turned around and slapped him hard across the face. Perfect aim. Even with some drinks in me, it was hard to miss that sharp jawline.

The shock of the slap got him to let go of me, and I ran straight towards the door and headed out without looking back.

I was furious at Kiefer; how could I have been so blind? There were so many layers to both of us that had crept to the surface, and neither one of us even bothered to stop and think.

And then I remembered that I'd slapped him, and I felt horrible. How could I do that to him? He was yelling at me, but he’d barely even touched me, and he was right to be mad. I should have let him know ahead of time or maybe not invitedeverybodyfrom the food court. Maybe it could have just been a small get-together with me, Kalle, Chelsea, and maybe one or two others.

But how was I to know so many people would want to go to a stranger's apartment on a Monday evening after a long day in the hot sun serving customers? And I wasn’t the one who brought the drinks. In fact, I wasn’t sure who did. It wasn’t my fault. Plus, it was a get-together among friends. Drinks were to be expected.

If he'd talked to me like a normal person, maybe I could have explained it to him, and he would have understood.

But that’s not the way it happened, and at that very moment I realized that Kiefer and I were at two very different points in our lives. That our perfect little love bubble was just burst by our past demons that had been brushed under a blissful rug, and history was in fact repeating itself. Not only for him, but for me too.

CHAPTER20

***KIEFER***

The second the door closed, I regretted everything I'd done. I snapped to attention and went after her, but she was making her way through the corridor too quickly. I turned the corner just in time to see the elevator doors closing.

“Melody!” I shouted as I dove forward, trying to get my hand between the doors before they closed, but I was a split second too late. Pounding on the call button did nothing. I'd have to wait for the elevator to bring her to her destination — almost certainly the garage — and make its way back up.

I ran through the hallways to the other side of the building to take the stairwell. She was long gone by the time I made it down to the garage. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I could have sworn that I could smell the lingering odor of her car's exhaust in the spot it had once been.

Out of breath, I made my way back up to the apartment. With each step, a nightmare scenario unfolded in my head. I didn't know how much she'd been drinking at the party, but it seemed like a lot based on how strong her accent had taken over. What if this was some cruel irony of fate, and she'd die just as Wendy had, after a big fight in a horrible accident?

I relived the moment when I had to go in and ID the body, but this time, it was Melody that the coroner pulled out, horribly bruised and lifeless on the gurney.

The rational part of my mind tried to comfort me by saying that just because it happened once, it didn't mean it was going to happen again. Melody drove all the way out to Los Angeles from the middle of Texas without a problem. What were the odds that tonight was the night that something bad happened to her?

But she wasn’t drunk when she drove out from Texas. And it was so bad that I could smell it on her breath. Some kind of vodka mixed drink with a ton of sugar. And I could hear it in her words. And see it in her eyes. She was in no position to drive right now.

I couldn't live with myself if she died. I was terrified for her, but also for myself. I knew I was in a rocky place with everything going on at work. The one nice thing I had to look forward to was that Melody would be at the apartment when I got home. And maybe that was a tad selfish, but I worried that it would be too much and I would fall into a relapse, especially with all that the guests had left behind. If I did — if I even took one sip of a beer — I worried I'd never be able to dig myself out.

No matter what it took, I had to get Melody back to the apartment and make things right with her.

I pulled out my phone and called her. It rang several times and went to voicemail. So I called again. And again and again until on the fifth try, it didn't even ring. She'd turned her phone off.

Or it had been destroyed in a horrific car wreck.

I couldn't think like that. There was no point in putting myself through the pain of having lost her until it was definitive.

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