A Safe Space (Someone Else's Fairytale Book 4) (15 page)

After work, I head straight for Devon’s place, even though I know it’s stupid and that Kyra is probably right. She’s got way more life experience than I do, but perhaps there are some things a person has to go through in order to learn the lesson. I just hope I’m not making a dangerous mistake.

Devon’s apartment is on stilts, with parking underneath it and his neighborhood is the kind with bars on the windows and cars up on blocks. Not the sort of place I spend a whole lot of time, and I shouldn’t be here now, but I can’t bring myself to turn back. The sun is still up and the sidewalk is empty. There’s a clear view of Devon’s door from the street. I park, hop out, then climb the stairs to his front door. My knock sounds flat against the flimsy wood.

His door opens inward and he leans against the frame, wearing a tight shirt that hugs his ever-so-perfect body. I remind myself to look at his face, which is also perfect. There’s a light in his eyes that I want, fervently, to believe means he’s happy I’m here.

“Can we talk?” I ask.

“Apparently not. Every time I tried, you blew me off.” His smile is gentle, not condemning.

“I’m sorry.”

“Whatever. It’s all good.” He shrugs.

“I heard you quit your job.”

“Yeah. Time for a change, I think.”

“It wasn’t to do with me?”

“Not entirely.” That smirk of his is back.

I bite my lip, unsure how to take that.

“What do you need, Veronica?” he asks.

I drop my gaze. “I need to know if what happened between us meant any more to you than your usual…stuff. With other girls.”

He lifts an eyebrow, and his stance is now uneasy, as if he’s ready to jump back and slam the door in my face. “How about I just say no and we leave it at that?” he suggests.

My heart sinks. “Okay…”

“Lizzie, look. You’re what? Nineteen. Obviously I shouldn’t have let that happen. It was a mistake.”

Tears prick my eyes, but I keep my chin up and my features blank. “You just have no self control around any female?”

He folds his arms across his chest. “Clearly. And I’m sorry. You deserve better. A lot better.”

Whatever his game is I can’t follow it. This isn’t the kind of thing he says to his other conquests, or maybe this is just not the kind of thing he says in public. Maybe he says nice stuff in private all the time, and that’s what keeps the women he hooks up with coming back for more. “Well,” I say, “I’m sorry I used you.”

“You have
nothing
to be sorry for,” he says with far more emotion than makes sense in this situation.
“Nothing
, okay? Not
ever.
”

All I can do is stare as his chest heaves and his fists clench. He shuts his eyes to regain control.

“Devon—”

“Don’t say that.”

“Um…okay.”

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m going to move back home to Montana. It’s time.”

So this is it, the last chance I’ll ever have to see him. Kyra will be thrilled, but I feel like I’ve started to watch a compelling movie only to have the film break and melt. I’ll never know how it ends, and right now I don’t care that Kyra thinks it’ll end badly. I want to keep watching.

Devon looks at me as if trying to memorize every last detail of my face—the way I stand, the way my hair falls past my shoulders.

Maybe he does this with all the women he kisses, but my heart doesn’t want to believe that.

“No hard feelings?” he asks.

I shrug. “Um…”

He steps forward and pulls me into a hug. Not a rough hug like the first time. This time, he holds me tight and buries his face in my hair.

The feel of his body against mine is heaven.

When he lets go, he doesn’t even look at me. “Bye, Lizzie Warner,” he says, and he shuts the door.

Since I don’t want to go to the gym right now and face all of its associations, I go home, where I find a package on our doorstep. When I open it, I find a stuffed parrot with a missing eye and a note from Cleo to say that she talked to the family of the girl who owned it, and she really did die in a homicide. Their letter is enclosed too, but I’m in no mood to read it.

I place the parrot with the other stuffed animals on my bed and lie down. Even though I know it’s bad for me to skip meals, I’m just not hungry. I’m emotionally worn out and more than a little depressed. Why couldn’t I have stayed the course and not put the moves on Devon?

The truth is, though, I only regret how that drove him away. The actual kiss, the time we spent behaving as if we’d fallen for each other, I can’t regret that. If I only get one first kiss in my life (and I refuse to count the one I did for my job), I think I’d choose that one again. And again. I
really
don’t want him to go.

It occurs to me that, if there were ever a time to have a weak moment to call him up and tell him how I feel, this is it. What do I have to lose? I suppose there’s a chance he could talk to the media and tell them what a pathetic wet blanket I am, but I’ve survived tabloid garbage before. If there’s
any
chance it might change his mind, I have to take it, even if Kyra would smack me upside the head. Once again, this feels like a life experience I have to go through rather than learn via conversation with my roommate.

I pull out my phone.
When he laughs and hangs up on me
, I think,
then maybe that’ll help me get over him
. I dial his number and put the phone to my ear. It rings once, twice, three times. Then:

“Hey. You’ve reached Devon Schaller. Leave a message.”

Presumably the beep sounds, but I wouldn’t know. I freeze with the phone still pressed to my ear. Devon
Schaller?
I have got to find out how that’s spelled. I turn to look at the picture on my nightstand, the one of me, Mackenzie Schaller, and her older brother.

I
REMEMBER TO
end the call and toss the phone aside so that I can grab the picture of Mackenzie and switch on the lamp. Her older brother is a little out of focus and lit from behind. All these years, I’ve thought of him as stick thin and painfully shy, but now that I look more closely, a storm of emotion builds inside me. Those eyes are hazel but piercing as they look right at the camera. There’s something else I should have noticed too, now that I think of it. His chuckle. Personal-trainer-Devon doesn’t laugh often, but when he does it’s low and throaty. Mackenzie’s brother laughed only for her and it sounded exactly the same.

I get up, power up my laptop, and log into Facebook. When I type “Devon Schaller” into the search box, his is the first name that pops up. He’s friends with Kyra. I click over to his page and click on his photos. The only album it’ll let me see are his profile pictures, and there are none that show him in that hospital or with a sister. They’re all recent and show him flexing and posing. Still, the name with that spelling can’t be a coincidence. —

I slam the laptop shut and realize that I’m hyperventilating. My hands are shaking. The world around me grays out and goes surreal. All this time, I’ve been wondering about Mackenzie and her sweet older brother and I could have been mocking said brother every single morning. My first kiss might have been with him
.

When I try to get to my feet, I stumble and catch myself against the wall.
Lizzie
, I think,
pull yourself together
. I square my shoulders, grab the picture of Mackenzie, and force myself to walk slowly to my door to let myself out.

It’s dark when I reach his apartment again, and he doesn’t have his porch light on. The light’s on inside though; its illumination leaks out the edges of his window blinds. I knock, wait, then knock again.

“Devon?” I call out.

The door opens, letting the light spill out onto the porch, and he scowls at me. “Yeah?”

I hold up the picture from my nightstand.

All the color drains from his face and is eyes widen. “Where’d you find that?”

His reaction is like a punch in the gut, and I wince before I say, “I keep it by my bed. I look at it every night. I just never noticed that you were in it.”

For a moment, he stares at me as if weighing options. Then he rubs his forehead, and when he lifts his gaze again, the look he gives me is deeply unhappy.

I bite my lip. “Sorry… Did you not want me to know?”

He leans against the doorframe and stares past me into the darkness. “No, I really didn’t.” Those mannerisms. I recognize them at once. He doesn’t slouch his shoulders as much anymore, but there’s that same self-conscious air. He even starts to fidget.

“What happened to her? Did she… Is she gone?”

His gaze returns to my face. “Yeah…”

Tears flood my eyes. “What happened?”

“Just, come in. It’s a dump in here, but…anyway.”

I walk in, and his apartment is, indeed, a dump. From the look of it, it’s a single room. The one piece of furniture to sit on is a futon, folded into a couch with a comforter piled at one end, and the floor is littered with dirty laundry and dishes. Bare walls with no pictures or art are scuffed up and filthy, and the ceiling is yellowed.

Devon grabs the comforter off the futon and gestures for me to sit, which I do, perching on the edge.

He trudges to the far end, as far as he can get from me, and sits down himself.

I have a flashback to seven years ago, the first time I sat across from him. Mackenzie was asleep in her hospital bed between us. Then, as now, he looked down at his hands, only now his hair isn’t long enough to flop into his eyes.

I cross my legs at the ankles and stare at him. His shyness is gone, though maybe his brashness is just how he deals with being all alone in the world with no little sister to whisper to and laugh with anymore.

He looks me up and down. He didn’t used to do that. “How much do you remember?” he asks.

“I remember that, when I arrived at the hospital, she was asleep and you were sitting by her bed. I offered to come back later and you wanted to wake her up, which I didn’t want, so I sat down opposite you and we talked about how sick she was and how your parents weren’t there and—”

His eyes widen with surprise. “Wait… You remember a
lot.”

“Yeah, of course I do.”

He rubs his face and sighs, and I feel more chills of recognition. “I was kind of hoping that you had that picture and remembered her name and that was it,” he says.