Conviction (10 page)

“How did you guys come up with that?”

“Well, actually, it was Bryan’s idea.” She hiccupped. “My boyfriend. He didn’t like us girls living together without security. And I’m like, what am I supposed to do, get a doorman?”

I smiled. Charlie had similar concerns about the dorm. “At least he cares.”

She scoffed. “I guess. He wanted Kenzie and me to adopt a dog, but then I would have to take care of it! I’m all like, ‘I can take care of myself.’ And he’s all like; ‘you always forget to lock the door.’”

Melinda nudged me but we both laughed.

“He wanted me to get a gun, but I ended that conversation real quick.” She groaned into her cup.

“What did you do?”

“Compromised.” She shrugged. “Took a self-defense course.”

Cora’s version of compromise made me think Charlie’s decision not to include me in certain factors of his business life. Though he knew it might anger me, he still decided to exclude me from information he deemed could be hazardous. And while logically, I knew he did it for my protection, other parts of me felt angry for impractical reasons. Why did he get to make all of the decisions about my safety? Weren’t we supposed to be partners in this relationship?

“W-what would you do if he wasn’t willing to compromise?”

“Hmm?”

“If things had to be a certain way, and you couldn’t avoid it?”

She paused and seemed to consider what I had asked, her face serious, but then she shrugged again. “I’m not sure. We’ve been together for almost a year, but if someone,
anyone
tried to control my life, especially with an issue I care about, I’d probably ditch them.”

We were quiet for the rest of the walk, but it was an awkward sort of quiet that I hated. I disliked how simple it all seemed, how easy. My parents had met when they were in college. And this was supposed to be the time of my life, the time for dating and exploring and doing stupid things that I could laugh about later. But I couldn’t picture myself doing any of that, at least not without Charlie. I shook my head to make the thoughts go away.

I thought about that condemnation as I half-dragged myself up the stairwell. Loving Charlie was the greatest thing I had felt in my life, but I was even more aware than usual, looking at potential hazards that could endanger him, me.
Us
. And if I could prevent them, I knew I would do everything in my power to do so. At the same time, I hated the fear; it was controlling and damning, and I wanted it gone.

I wanted to be in the middle of the ocean where no one could ever touch us.

Chapter 7

I have never been afraid of the dark.

Robbie had night lights, cried during thunderstorms and after scary movies, or tried to hide under the bed, but I told him with my inalienable 8 year old wisdom that if you were good enough at pretending, you could make it feel like the daytime.

After all, the only reason people are afraid of the dark is because they can’t see what’s there.

But just when I needed it the most, my imagination was failing me, and I couldn’t find a scrap of light if my life depended on it. And though I had no proof, instinct told me my life did depend on it.

I roamed on pits of rocky ground with bare feet, hot, unbearable to touch with my soft hands as I stumbled and tried to get back up again. I could have been anywhere, but there was only a deep dark surrounding me, and it seemed the more time I tried to let my senses adjust, the darker it became. I called out but there was only an echo. I walked further on, stumbled still again, the pain becoming a sort of black along with the rest of the dark. And as the terror of this oblivious world came settling in, I realized I was a part of it, the dark, not anything, the nonentity, nobody.

I screamed, and the dark absorbed it all.

The yelling was what woke me up.

“Get the hell out of here!” It was Melinda’s voice, though drunk and slurred, I knew it from our time together. I was a little startled by the hardness in it, but maybe that was a good thing. It woke me up from a dream I couldn’t piece together. Heart pounding, my ears ringing, I tumbled from my bed at the same time she slammed the door shut behind her.

“Holy crap!”

“What? Melinda? Are you okay?”

I was still reeling from my nightmare, limbs shaking, and plenty grateful that Melinda was a bigger mess than I was, tripping over something in the dark and cursing. From our windows, the early signs of day were beginning to rise. I heard her hand grope for the switch on the wall, fumbling through the wreckage of our room.

“Addie.”

She found the light and I blinked it away. “Melinda? What’s—”

“There is some jerk out there looking for you.”

My heart stopped. Could it be Charlie? Or maybe not. Maybe it was something bad, something much worse.

“Who?”

Melinda fumbled for something in the mini-fridge, throwing her bracelets off in frustration when she couldn’t get it. But I didn’t wait for her to respond. I ran from the bed and practically leaped into the hall, half-dressed and everything. There was only one jerk I wanted looking for me.

But the one that was there wasn’t the one I wanted.

“Where in the hell have you been?”

Reid’s voice came at me from out of nowhere, but my brain acknowledged it the instant I heard it; and knew that with him, there would be an infinite amount of trouble.

“Reid?”

He came from around the corner, two rooms away from my own. I saw how dark his eyes were and saw the rage, a monster barreling down at me as he slammed me into the wall.

I kneed him as hard as I could in the gut, surprised that I was even flexible enough to get my knee that high, let alone make him wince. Later on, I told myself it was instinct, but I think I enjoyed it way more than I should have.

“Addie?”

Reid doubled over in pain around the same second Melinda made her attempt to rescue me. She leaned in the doorway, staring Reid down with a glare that I had only seen equal in his own deadly stare. “You want me to call the cops?”

“No!” I took her phone from her ear and tossed it on her bed. “It’s fine, he’s a friend. Everything is fine. Just go back inside.”

She looked skeptical.

“Really,” I insisted. “its fine.”

She closed the door behind her slowly, but the second she did Reid was back on me, accusations flying.

“Where were you?”

“I—was out. Just a party.”

“A party? Your boy is laying up with hurt for you and you’re at a party?” The anger there was sharp, and for an instant, Charlie’s face flashed in my mind’s eye.

“W-wait, what happened?” The hall was closing in like hands around my neck. Images from my nightmare came back, but I couldn’t remember them so well all of a sudden. I struggled to keep control, my breath ragged and wheezing at the possibility of seeing something unreal.

“Like you care.”

It must have been the way I reacted, but I took him by surprise, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt with everything I had, willing my worry into him. I envisioned handcuffs and orange jumpsuits, concrete walls and isolation. In my head I saw blood and decay, tears and fire. And above it all, Charlie in pain, the least tolerable of the tolerable.

“Enough of your crap, Reid. Tell me!” I demanded. “Is he okay? What happened?”

He shook me off, though it was probably the lack of sleep; I thought I saw something soften in his eyes. “Come on.”

I grabbed the first jacket by the doorway and slipped on a pair of shoes, eager to follow Reid, who was already making flighty steps down the hall. I whispered at him to slow down but it fell on deaf ears, so I gave up and just tried my best to keep up.

It was almost an entire block before the bus stop that I saw the car parked beneath a street lamp in a sector specifically marked for instructor parking. There was an instant I just really,
really
hoped a professor had splurged on themselves. I would have loved to continue to hope that, except that I saw the familiar figure of a man appearing from behind one of the science labs towards the convertible. He was making long, eager strides toward the vehicle, his phone fastened to his ear.

My eyes began to scan for any obvious trouble. I originally lifted my hand to wave to him, but immediately stopped myself, fearing it would cause unnecessary attention. Why was Charlie here? Could something have happened to him or one of the guys? I cursed myself for not having my phone on me earlier in the night—what if it was Dad or Robbie? Were Elise and Tyler all right? I pictured the police swarming the house, helicopters landing in the orchards while Charlie’s bike and the SUVs were towed away as evidence…

At last, Charlie’s voice reached my ears. By then I could feel the clobber of my pulse as my heart tried to escape. I was only three yards away from the car when he began yelling,

“Are you sure?” He cursed on the phone. “You think I’d be talking to ya if I had?”

I could see by the way his shoulders shook that he was positively furious. And while it was slightly dangerous to approach him from behind, I was afraid of the rising tone of his voice and the violent repercussions if I left him unattended. Still, there he was, two legs, two arms, and other than a swollen cheekbone, he was the same as he ever was: perfect nose, kaleidoscope eyes and all.

I put my hands to my mouth and called out. “Charlie?”

He turned so fast that he almost dropped his phone. And though Charlie paled at the sight of me, his face broke out in his patent Charlie grin. He hung up his phone without another word, running from the car and down the sidewalk, gathering me in his arms. He squeezed me so tight I could feel the ache in my ribcage and a mysterious grief of his own sprouting from his shaky hands.

The streetlights faded out. Something awful was going on with someone I loved. My diaphragm was too tight. I couldn’t breathe.

“Just tell me,” I choked out.

He wouldn’t. Or maybe just couldn’t, he hadn’t even let me go yet.

I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could and shoved him from me. It was like trying to haul away cinderblocks with broken fingers, move a dump truck full of rocks, lift an elephant one handed. And though he didn’t even budge, my efforts at least got his attention.

“Just tell me, Charlie! Is it Elise or Tyler? My Dad? Are you okay?”

He let me go just enough so I could see his face.

“It’s fine.” He smiled. “Everything is perfect now.”

With rush hour traffic going in the opposite direction, we made it to Healdsburg in record time. Reid wouldn’t say anything to me and Charlie was making a lot of phone calls, answering a lot of texts. Of course the more I inquired, the more I worried. The more I worried, the more I was reminded of the last time I was in a car with Reid.

Then he had been taking me away from Charlie.

At least I didn’t have to worry about that.

“How bad is it?” I begged. “On a scale from 1 to 10.”

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know,” Reid snarled at me. I noticed he made sure Charlie was focused on something else. “Elise has been calling you for hours.”

My phone. I probably left it in my bag and forgot to charge it pre-party, post-rehearsal. Vaguely I was reminded of something from my sleep but it faded before I could catch up, and I was left thinking about how irresponsible I had been to leave my phone behind in the first place. If Elise had been calling me, I could have answered the first time and known what I wanted to right then and there. I loathed thinking that I had been learning about beer pong when Charlie was in trouble. Nausea rose up. Had I been making friends while disaster was just around the bend?

The first thing I saw was one of the SUVs. Normally, they were indistinguishable from one another, but this one was in the middle of the driveway by itself. If it wasn’t for that and the dried blood smeared on the open backdoor, I might never have been able to tell it apart from the other SUVs. Yet instantly I could, and I barely stopped long enough to acknowledge it, running straight into the house, my heart threatening to seize at any second.

The veranda door was open, which didn’t surprise me in the least. What did surprise me slightly was the disoriented living area that Elise normally kept so tidy—was slightly discombobulated: a drooled on magazine and some of Tyler’s toys on the floor, the blaring television with no one to watch, groceries and open pantry doors, suggesting someone had been interrupted. Needless to say, it did nothing to soothe me.

“Elise? Guys?” Charlie was only steps behind me, the clutch of his strong forearm bracing me just as the panic was about to set in.

“Its okay, Vicious. Everybody is ‘lright.”

I told myself to breathe again. “The b-blood?”

“Polo cut his hand up pretty bad, but it looks worse than it is.”

I sighed, nuzzling my nose against his arm. When the coarse hair there made me sneeze, he laughed and pulled me tighter.

“You’re supposed to say ‘bless you,’” I sniffed.

He kept laughing. “Bless you.”

And though my heart trusted his word, my eyes were still somewhat skeptical. I zipped up the remaining inches of my jacket, and tried to straighten my hair, now beyond grateful that I didn’t see anyone with guns and badges around. It was only when I heard Tyler’s gentle giggling that things seemed to spin back into focus. I pulled up on the shade of the kitchen window and sure enough, sitting poolside on freshly uncovered patio furniture, were the guys and Elise.

As we walked out there, I intertwined Charlie’s arm with my own. I wanted to keep him close, if possible, never let him out of my sight.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” His face was tired but not entirely grim.

“
I’m
okay? Are you okay?”

He pulled me into his arms and I thought of my dream—how many of them had taken place without me even knowing it? Charlie mumbled into my hair, every other word falling behind, but I didn’t care.

“Where were you?” he asked.

“I was at school.” I laughed, but none of it was right. “Was I supposed to be somewhere else?”

Before I could say anything else, he broke out laughing, though what was so hilarious about the situation I have no idea.

“What’s so funny? What’s the emergency?”

“See, Charlie Boy, I told you she was fine.”

I heard Ben Walden’s voice beyond the muscles of Charlie’s arms. From somewhere close behind, Polo and Tyler laughed about a joke of their own.

He sighed and let me go enough to pull away, “A run we made went bad.”

“
Bad
? What does that mean? Are you okay? Is
everybody
okay?”

He sighed, pulling me to his chest. I wrapped my arms around him, taking in the smell of him and everything else. In those moments he was silent, and I knew well enough not to ask for answers. They would come later, but for right now, he needed me, and I was more than willing to be needed by him.

And though he held me, his body tensed up again, telling me that the moment of indefinable anger brewing beneath the surface was about to seep. So I held him tighter, silently trying to quash those feelings.

“We were doing a run at an airport terminal…something, someone told the cops that we’d be there.”

“Oh Charlie—”

He spoke through a clenched jaw, and though I couldn’t hear it, I could imagine his teeth grinding together, unintentionally ruining the enamel.