the risks a bad guy brought. Or maybe I was just so down on myself, I needed the bad guys to mess me up. Declan had messed me up. But when I’d got with him it had been exciting, he’d made my heart race with adrenaline. I’d been flattered and thrilled by his domineering, debauched ways. By the end, he’d just made me feel sick. Declan was shallow, cruel and arrogant like the rest. Jason Macinlay had hidden depths, like the shifting water I’d looked down at last night. There was so much I didn’t know.
Perhaps I really ought to try a nice guy.
But not this one; this one had a perfect girl, Lindy, to go with his perfect self.
Maybe he had a nice guy friend he could hook me up with.
But then I’d feel guilty when it reached the point it all went horribly wrong, and I’d lose Jason Macinlay’s respect.
All my relationships went horribly wrong at some point. There wasn’t really any reason in trying to make them work. They all crumbled in the end.
I felt tears on my cheeks. I wiped them away, forgetting my bad hand. A sharp pain caught in my palm where the wound was healing beneath the bandage.
All I wished to do was curl up in a ball and shut the world out today. I was too deep in a dark tunnel; the room was only a pinprick at the end of it, but it was there to remind me there was something outside to reach for.
This was the sort of day which made me avoid nice guys, when I was in a black melancholy mood. They’d just piss me off, trying to cheer me up. At least bad guys wouldn’t annoy me with any misdirected kindness when I felt like this.
I rolled onto my stomach and lay as he’d lain in this space, smelling his scent and crying, like a child. I was so tired of life.
I’d been nervous about coming home all day. I was nervous about opening the door. My key seemed heavier, as it turned the lock.
A part of me wondered if she’d still be here.
I’d told the only person I’d call anything near a friend at work, about the woman I’d found on Manhattan Bridge. Justin’s response had been to tell half the office, and start them laying odds on whether or not, when I got back, my Xbox, my TV, and Rachel, would be gone. Someone else had implied she might’ve simply changed all the locks and shut me out.
I didn’t think she’d do either, but now I was opening the door, the air stuck in my lungs.
The noise hit me first. She was playing my Need for Speed game. There was a screech of wheels as she turned the car. She didn’t look up.
I’d forgotten just how stunning her figure was though, her long pale legs were stretched out in front her, bent up a little, and she was wearing a pair of my socks, with one of my shirts covering her upper body to the top of her thighs.
I remembered seeing her naked in the bath last night, lying in the water like some sultry model striking a pose. She hadn’t even seemed to care that I looked.
Lindy hated me looking. She always covered herself up whenever she could.
But I shouldn’t have been looking. I had a girl. And Rachel needed me to help her, not lust after her.
She still hadn’t looked up from the game. She was concentrating over-hard. Her knuckles were white as they gripped the controller.
I wondered if she even knew I was there, she seemed to have screened my presence out as she’d done last night on the bridge.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
“Hey.”
She did know I was there then, just hadn’t been willing to speak.
“Did you have a good day?”
She glanced up. The car crashed. “Shit.”
“Have you been playing that all day?” I walked over to the counter and put my keys down then went to the fridge and took out a bottle of beer. “Do you want one?” I held it up as she looked at me.
Her eyes were bloodshot, swollen and red. She’d been crying, probably most of the day. She’d not cried last night.
She shook her head.
I popped the top off my beer then left it on the counter as I took off my scarf and coat and went to hang them on the hook beside the door.
She hadn’t got up, or restarted the game.
I walked back over to the counter to collect my beer, and loosened off my tie. “I’ll take you out for dinner, where’d you like to eat?”
“I can’t go out. I’ve got nothing to wear.”
Right, duh, of course she hadn’t. I knew what she’d been wearing. I’d put her stuff in the washer-drier before I’d gone to work. There had been one thing lacking though. There had been no underwear among the clothes she’d stripped off. But I didn’t want to think of that right now, not when she was sitting there wearing one of my shirts, which barely covered anything.
I’d been physically aware of her in bed, all last night. I didn’t need my mind heading in that direction again. “The mall will still be open. Let’s go and get you something then.”
“I haven’t any money either.”
“No, but I have. So we’ll get you some stuff and something to eat. No point sitting here moping about what you can’t fix, let’s fix what you can.”
“You don’t know I can’t fix things?”
She was strange. I’d never met anyone quite so guarded before.
Her lips compressed in a thin line, like they’d kept doing every time she’d clammed up last night.
City folk. That’s what Mom had said when I’d called her on the way to work. Like no one had ever got into trouble and needed help back home. And our town wasn’t even that far from the city in Oregon. Portland was only a short drive away.
Mom hadn’t liked the idea of Rachel Shears being in my apartment any more than Lindy. But she was the one who’d taught me to help people and look for the best in them. I didn’t know Rachel, but I did know she’d got herself in a mess, somehow, and she needed help. I was going to give her the chance to prove Mom, Lindy, and everyone at work, wrong.
“You going to get dressed then, and let me help you out? Whether you can fix whatever led you to Manhattan Bridge or not, you need some clothes to do it.”
“And what am I gonna wear to the shops?”
“What you wore last night. I put your stuff in the washer-drier. Did you not think to check?”
“God, you’re so domesticated,” she mocked as she stood.
I held her gaze for a moment, that oddly deceptive green, and then turned to collect her stuff from the machine. “We can walk down to Fulton Street.”
When I turned back, she was behind me.
I held her
