Kristen Ashley - Games of the Heart

That was when I spoke.

“You read them?”

Mike nodded.

“You read my journals?” I asked again just to confirm.

“I did, Dusty. It killed me to read a lot of what I read but I read it. And now Rhonda is worried because, without sharing your secret, Darrin told her repeatedly he was worried that you weren’t making good decisions about men because of what happened with Lowe. And LeBrec could be a prime example of that. You need to think about that and what you’re going to do to make smarter choices before more of your life slides by.”

“So you’re breaking up with me because you found out a guy who turned out to be a serial killer felt me up.”

He blinked, his chin jerking back with his blink and hesitated a moment before he said, “It’s more complicated than that.”

“No, it isn’t,” I shot back.

“Yes, it is,” he returned immediately and firmly.

I suddenly leaned in and hissed, “Bullshit.” Then I took five steps to him, snatched the books out of his hand and shook them in the air at my side. “You know why Darrin had these? Because I gave them to him.”

Mike blinked with the chin jerk again.

“Yeah,” I snapped. “I was leaving town and was going to throw them away and Darrin thought the shit I drew in them was too pretty just to throw away so he asked if he could have them and I said sure.”

Mike stared at me.

I kept going.

“I also told him about Denny, like, the night it happened. He was pissed as all hell, got a bunch of his buddies together, found Denny and messed him up.”

Mike continued to stare at me.

“I don’t have any demons, Mike,” I kept snapping. “Darrin took me to Father Phillip and Father Phillip took me to visit Thelma Whitehouse. She’d been attacked a few years earlier and talked at some self-help group in Indianapolis. We got together a dozen times, maybe more. She was cool. So cool, only a few of the times we talked about Denny and then I was over it so we talked about a whole load of other shit because she was into music like I was and she introduced me to pottery making. She still sends me Christmas cards and those funny emails you pass around all the time and I do the same.”

“Dusty –” Mike started but I talked right over him, taking two steps back as I did.

“And Beau wasn’t a psycho dick when I met him, Mike. Dicks never are dicks until they think they have their hooks in you and you can’t get away so only then do they show you the dick within. He’s handsome and he could be really sweet and he was great in bed. He just can’t wrap his head around the fact that I’m the only woman in his forty years who kicked his ass out. Yes, he’s that conceited but that’s on him, not on me. And it’s totally uncool for you to suggest that me getting felt up by a lunatic when I was in high school is the reason why I make poor choices in men. It isn’t. I don’t bring that shit on myself. I don’t search that shit out. There are just a lot of dicks out there. And them being dicks isn’t on me either. They’re just dicks. Darrin was worried about the men in my life because Darrin is my big brother. That’s what big brothers do. They worry. He was settled and happy with his family. He wanted me to have that too. It wasn’t only Rhonda he told that shit to. He told me all the time he wanted that for me.”

“You changed,” he reminded me gently. “You became not you.”

“Uh…yeah,” I replied. “I was a girl. I was fifteen. I got my period, my hormones were all over the place and my sister was a complete and total bitch who seemed to exist to make my life a misery and some of that time she wasn’t even around anymore because she was at college. Still, she’s smart and she was committed to the task so she found ways to do it. My parents didn’t get the music I listened to and talked to me about it constantly, certain I was going to commit suicide or some stupid shit like that. I mean, what the fuck? So I liked Nirvana and Kurt Cobain blew off his head off with a shotgun. That didn’t mean Dad had to hide his which he did. They just didn’t get me. Nobody got me. I didn’t even get me. And this was because I was fifteen, I was artistic and I wanted my life to fucking start. Not tomorrow, not in three years, yesterday. I was young, stupid and impatient. I get that now. I get that then I was a little bitch and acted like one. I’m not proud of the way I was then and I know my behavior was ludicrous. I look at pictures of me back then and cringe. But, since then, I’ve been through more phases because that’s just me. I’m a woman. We do that shit. Hell, I’ll take my grunge phase over my Shania phase. Black leather pants and all that hair? Crazy.”

“Honey –” he began again and moved toward me but I leaned into him and snapped, “Don’t you fucking get near me,” and he stopped dead.

I stared at him.

Then I told him, “I’ll give you this. When Denny Lowe went on a rampage, that freaked me out. But only because I felt fortunate he didn’t snap when he was trying his thing with me. It sucked, that coming back up but it was way over, he didn’t get very far, I got away and I survived. I was even surprised he turned out to be as whacked as he was because, seriously? He was kind of charming before he got all handsy. That creeped me way the hell out but I guess they can be like that, people who are loop-di-loo in their brains. When Denny did his thing, wreaking mayhem all over The United States, Darrin and I talked about it a lot. But not because I needed him to comfort me. Because he was way more freaked about it than me thinking what could have happened to his baby sister at the hands of that madman. So it was me comforting my brother not the other way around.”

“Sweetheart –”

“I’m not done,” I snapped.

He closed his mouth and held my eyes.

I let him do that for a while then I whispered, “Thanks, Mike. It’s good to know early you’re an asshole. I’m glad to know that now before I gave my heart to you because I had one day with you and I was all set to wrap it up in a tidy bow and hand it right over. I’m glad to know you don’t want kids but I do so even if you weren’t an asshole, we’d be wrong. And I’m glad to know you know straight up you wouldn’t make a move for me seeing as it would suck to be with a guy who I spent one weekend with and got excited about the possibility that Hilligoss would be a ten minute drive away every day rather than a six month wait. I actually got excited about being home again and watching Fin and Kirb finish growing up and going to their football games on Friday nights. So it’s good to know I’m not with a man who didn’t give enough of a shit about me to consider that same thing.”

“Dusty, give me a chance to speak,” he said softly.

“No, you’ve said enough,” I returned immediately and then kept right on talking. “You know, I don’t know what went down with your wife or that Violet woman. What I do know is I’m not them. And I also know that twice, you jumped to conclusions about me, this time making it three. And I’ll mention that not one of those times did you actually take the time to speak to me like an adult about the shit going on in your head. So, I’ll add to things I’m glad about and that is that I don’t have to endure a lifetime or however long we might have lasted of your tests. Me proving I’m good enough for the super hot, gorgeous Mike Haines. Because frankly, that would be exhausting.”

He didn’t speak and I noticed his face had gone blank.

So be it. It was time for me to finish up.

So I did.

Speaking softly, I told him with complete honesty, “What I’m not glad about is that you showed me something amazing and then you yanked it right away from me. I’m so sick of men toying with me like that, playing games with my heart. So the last thing you get from me, Mike, is that I’m really, really not glad after caring about you and thinking the world of you for decades that you turned out to be a man like that.”

Then I turned, tossed the fucking teenage angst bullshit journals I wrote twenty years ago on his couch and started to move through the room so I could get the fuck out of there.

I didn’t make it and this was because Mike caught my upper arm as I tried to pass him.

My head snapped back and I hissed, “Take your hand off me.”

“You laid it out, Angel, and I deserved it now you give me a chance to explain.”

“Take your hand off me.”

He pulled me gently in front of his body and dipped his head closer to me, whispering, “Give me a chance to explain.”

I stared up at his face.

God, I wished he wasn’t so beautiful.

“Take your hand off me.”

“Honey, give me a chance –”

I went up on my toes and in his face, screamed, “Take your hand off me!”

Then I didn’t give him the opportunity to comply. I wrenched my arm free, took two quick steps past him then whirled.

“No more chances, Mike, this,” I pointed to the floor, “is strike three.”

Then I ran out of his house.

Luckily, he didn’t follow me.

And luckily I made it home safely even though my visibility was limited due to me crying my fucking eyes out.

* * *

Saturday, 9:36 p.m.

Mike stood in the cold on the balcony off his bedroom staring at the Holliday Farm lit up in the not so distant distance and holding his phone to his ear.

Not surprisingly, he got voicemail.

“Sweetheart, don’t leave without phoning me. There’s more to say. I’ll meet you wherever you want. But we need to talk, Dusty. Please, honey, don’t leave without seeing me.”

He took the phone from his ear, hit the button to disconnect and continued to stare through the cold dark.

Then he put the phone on the railing of the balcony, picked up the glass of bourbon also sitting on the railing, lifted it and threw it back.

Then he put the glass to the railing and trained his eyes back on the farm.

“Fuck, I’m such a fucking dick,” he whispered.

Then he grabbed his phone and the glass, turned around and walked back into his house to get more bourbon.

* * *

Tuesday, 9:49 a.m.

I got on the plane carrying a white bakery box filled with fresh Hilligoss donuts for Jerra and Hunter.

I’d turned in my rental by myself.

I didn’t look back after I got through security.

And after the plane leveled out, I couldn’t help but think I couldn’t wait to be home.

With her hands carrying the handles of a hamper filled with folded, clean clothes, Clarisse walked through the door at the top of the stairs that led from the basement to the living room. When she did, she saw No stretched out on the couch watching TV, his hand in a bag of microwave popcorn.

His eyes came to her, dropped down to the clothes she was carrying, he grinned his teasing grin and she knew he was about to say something that was going to tick her off.

“Penance or are you workin’ off the allowance you owe Dad?”

She stopped and stared at her brother.

It wasn’t either.

Something was wrong with Dad. She didn’t know what it was but whatever it was made him not right in a way Clarisse didn’t like. Since they came home from Mom’s last Sunday, he’d seemed sad or mad. She didn’t know which but it felt weirdly like a combination of both. What was weirder was that he didn’t seem mad at someone, he just seemed mad. And Clarisse thought it seemed almost like it was at himself.

Clarisse didn’t like it when her Dad was mad at her. What she did like was that when he got mad, he said it right away, explained it, doled out punishment and they moved on. This was unlike her Mom who could sit on being ticked about something for months. Clarisse figured she could do it even for years. Then she’d suddenly explode when it was least expected and it was never pretty. She didn’t only do that with Clarisse and No. When they were together, she did it to their Dad all the time.

So if their Dad was mad at one of them, he would say. And he wasn’t saying. And since Clarisse couldn’t talk to him about whatever was bothering him, she was doing the next best thing.

She was helping out.

On Monday, her Dad took a case that meant overtime. This meant for the last three days he didn’t get home before nine. Once they were in bed when he got home and she only knew he got home because he came in and kissed her temple like he always did when he got home way late.