Meeting Miss Mystic (2 page)

Her words made Jenny’s face flash before him for a moment and he looked away, anxious that Maggie not see the pain that lingered there. She reached out, covering his hand with hers.

“It’s been two years,” she said softly.

“Just because she got married doesn’t mean—”

“Yes, Paul, it does. It’s time to give up and move on.”

Maggie took another deep breath, withdrawing her hand and propping her elbows up on the bar and her chin in her hands as she looked at Paul.

“The feelings don’t just go away,” he confessed softly.
Nor the hopes and yearnings.

“Jen wasn’t right for you, Paul.”

“So she said.”

“You have all this bonnie romantic energy,” Maggie cajoled. “I hate to see it go to waste.”

She smiled at him gently and he realized she was either stalling or buttering him up.

“Time for confessions, Maggie. What’d you do?”

“Right.” Maggie pushed off from the counter, scratching at a hardened drop of cream with one fingernail. “Well…”

“Stop stalling.”

“I signed you up for…” She mumbled the rest staring with rapt fascination at the counter.

“You signed me up for what?”

“Internet dating,” she mumbled again, a little louder, peeking up at him, then quickly back down again at the little spot she was scratching.

“
You did what
?”

She cringed. “I just want you to be happy!”

“So you signed me up for
internet dating? INTERNET DATING
? Are you crazy?” He knew he was yelling, but there was no one left in the café to hear and goddamn it, Maggie had no right to meddle in his life like this! “Do you know the kind of women who go on the internet to find someone? Haven’t you ever watched
Dateline
?” He slipped off the barstool, shaking a finger at her. “You, you stay away from me—you’re certifiable!”

“You canna seem to get over Jenny and all the dates I set up for you are disasters and then I started thinkin’ that’s because there’s no one for you to date here in Gardiner, so why not cast a wider net and maybe I could find you someone nice!” Her words tumbled out louder and louder in a nervous stream.

Paul was furious. Part of the reason he’d left Maine was to get away from meddling family, and now here he was, thousands of miles away, saddled with a surrogate sister who was making him crazy.

“I never asked you to find me
someone nice
! You had no right to do that, Maggie! No right.” He leaned forward, picking up his wallet from the bar and jamming it into his back pocket. “You think
I
need to meet someone? How about
you
? Mooning over Nils Lindstrom for—what’s it been now? Five
years
?”

Maggie’s chin bobbed as she swallowed and her eyes suddenly glistened like he’d smacked her. Paul knew full and well that Maggie and Nils had had a recent falling out.

Paul looked down, shaking his head back and forth. Bringing up Nils was a low blow and he felt bad about hurting her, but damn…just
damn
. He took a deep breath and exhaled loudly, trying to calm down.

“I’m sorry, Paul,” Maggie began in a small voice. “I just—”

As her voice broke off, his shoulders slumped and he sighed. For all Maggie’s blundering, he knew she wanted to help, and he loved her like a sister.

“Aw, Mags. Your good intentions are killing me,” he said gently. “It’s—it’s okay. Just cancel it, okay? Or whatever you have to do. Deactivate it.”

She bit her lip and he saw hesitation in her face.

“
What
?” he demanded, a warning in his voice, hackles rising again.

“Well, I wanted to give you a wee head start, so I looked over a bunch of different profiles to find someone nice,” she said, picking up the dishtowel again and worrying it between her fingers. “I did a good job. I—I sorted through the girls and I sort of exchanged a few e-mails with one and…”

“And what?” he prompted. “
Just undo it
!”

She put down the dishtowel and turned to the back shelf, unplugging her laptop and setting it gently on the counter before him. She looked up at him with a hopeful smile as she opened it up and tapped twice on the space bar. “I will. I promise you I will…but first, meet Miss Mystic.”

***

Zoë Flannigan pulled on the collar of her black t-shirt and twisted her neck, trying to get a look at whatever was throbbing painfully on her left shoulder. She sat up in bed, taking off the shirt gingerly, wincing at the brightness of the morning sun streaming in through her bedroom windows. Twisting her neck and waist, she had no luck seeing anything despite the sharp, stabbing pain. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and groaned as the room started spinning, making the remnants of last night’s partying swirl a warning in her belly. Closing her eyes and holding onto the sheets with fists, she waited until the spins stopped and her stomach settled then she opened her eyes.

The bathroom, about five feet away from where she sat, looked about a million miles away in her present, deeply hung-over condition.

Finally, she hefted herself off the bed and walked haltingly to the bathroom, her gait less a result of last night’s debauchery than the fact that her leg was covered in scarred, twisted flesh. The bathroom light buzzed to life and Zoë backed up again the sink to look at her back in the mirror.

Holy shit.

A piece of saran wrap affixed with white surgical tape, covered with once-seepy, now-dried brown blood covered a small area of her lower left shoulder blade. A tattoo of a small black lamb with a date underneath sat in the middle of a patch of red, raw, angry skin. She’d gotten a tattoo last night.
Great.

She winced, wishing she could remember the events that led up to the new acquisition, but last night was a blur. She’d left the house with Sandy and Rob around ten and had a vague recollection of the clock reading three when she finally fell into bed, but other than those two details, her memories were foggy at best. She switched her glance to her right shoulder which held a similar tattoo: a small cross with a date underneath in a soft, elegant cursive. Running her fingers over the older tattoo, she felt tears gather and closed her eyes against the unwelcome sorrow that had been her constant companion for almost two years. She was so goddamn sick of feeling sorry and sad.

Her stomach gurgled uncomfortably and she took a shaky breath, turning to survey herself in the mirror. Her dyed, jet-black, bobbed hair spiked out in ten different directions after sleeping on it funny, and her eyes had dark black rings from a night spent sleeping in mascara. She had dyed her hair black last year as it grew back in and she’d gotten used to the darkness, wryly believing that it matched her low spirits better than her natural blonde.

The twelve-inch scar that ran from her hairline over her right eyebrow down the side of her face was more pronounced than usual because her makeup had gotten stuck in the jagged, lavender crevasse in her sleep. It would take one more round of plastic surgery before it could heal completely into a thin line of translucent white. She had another scar, three times as long, on her right leg running from mid-thigh to ankle that, despite the doctors’ best efforts, would never heal completely. The leg had been mangled too badly to repair, leaving her permanently disfigured and causing a mild limp they promised would improve over time with regular physical therapy.

She took out the dark brown contacts she’d started wearing last year and noted that her blue eyes, which used to be so bright and open, were flat and bloodshot, accusing her from their cerulean depths.

Her gaze dropped lower and she smirked, unable to keep from admiring her full breasts in a black, satin push-up bra, the black a harsh contrast against the white of her chest. Despite the twenty-five pounds she’d packed on her small frame over the past two years—or maybe because of it—they had a real va-va-voom effect that she sort of liked. She squinted, looking more closely in the mirror, and noted a fairly obnoxious hickey taking up a good bit of real estate over her left breast. She shook her head in disgust, unable to even conjure one detail of the face attached to the lips that had given it to her.
Great, Zoë. Real classy.

The mirror cut off the lower half of her five-foot-four-inch figure but she knew what was there: a smallish waist and a biggish ass. With her short, voluptuous stature and black bob, she was practically a life-sized Betty Boop.

“Zo! You awake?”

Her Aunt Sandy, who was only ten years her senior, called from the top of the stairs. Zoë rented the apartment over Sandy’s garage and pop-in visits from her aunt were often and welcome.

“Here,” she grated out in a gravelly voice.

Sandy stuck her head into the bedroom just as Zoë peeked her head out of the bathroom door, leaning against the doorframe as the room spun for a moment.

“Hey, Sand,” she moaned uneasily, steadying herself. She flicked off the light and limped to the bed, sitting down carefully with a soft groan. “Refresh my memory…”

“The tattoo or the hickey?” asked Sandy, arms crossed, gesturing to Zoë’s chest with a derisive flick of her eyes.

“Let’s start with the hickey.”

“Some friend of Rob’s. He was all over you at the bar and you seemed okay with it at first, but then he asked about your face and you pushed him away yelling that your boyfriend in Montana would kick his ass if he asked you about it again. I don’t know why you’re so touchy. You can barely see it anymore, Zo. I mean it. It’s really fading.”

She’d just stared at it in the mirror. It was far from faded.

Zoë rolled her eyes at her cousin and Sandy continued. “After I finally convinced you that you didn’t actually have a boyfriend in Montana to kick anyone’s ass for you, you stormed out of O’Byrne’s and informed me that you were getting a tattoo and screw me if I didn’t like it.”

“Sounds like I was pretty charming.”

“You were something, all right. So Rob and I followed you to Shenanigan’s and you pushed your way in front of two people and insisted your turn was next. Rob talked Max
out
of calling the police and
into
taking care of you.”

“Rob could talk a bee into buying honey.”

Sandy’s face softened at the mention of her husband. “Yeah. He’s smooth, that guy.”

“And then?” Zoë crossed her arms over her chest protectively, ignoring the way her boobs were about to spill over the barely-there cups of her black bra.

“Max did the little lambie on your shoulder while you lay face-down on the table telling me all about your make-believe Montana boyfriend, Paul. Then you started crying, threw up on my shoes, and Rob drove us home.” Sandy’s face soured and she wrinkled her nose. “Tossed the shoes in the trash. You owe me fifty bucks.”

“Sorry, Sand.”

Sandy, who’d been a surrogate parent to Zoë since her teenage years, sat down on the bed next to her niece. Zoë put her head on Sandy’s shoulder.

“You’re outta control, Zo.”

“Yeah,” murmured Zoë heavily, fresh tears stinging her eyes as she swallowed back some latent nausea. She was a mess and she knew it.

“I promised my sister I’d look out for you, but you’re making it hard.”

Zoë loved the way Sandy pronounced “hard,” with a strong New England accent, dropping the “r,” just as Zoë’s mother had.

Zoë’s mother had passed away when Zoë was only sixteen years old, leaving her under the guardianship of her—at the time—twenty-six-year-old aunt. Sandy had stepped up to the plate with love and sympathy and spirit, never resenting the grieving teenager.

“Don’t give up on me, Sand.”

“Zoë, you gotta move on. Brandon and the accident? That was almost two years ago.”

Zoë lifted her head, clenching her eyes shut.

“I can’t—”

“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” said Sandy gently. “But you can’t keep doing this either. Hooking up with random guys? Blacking out? Getting tattoos when you’re wasted? I barely recognize you anymore. You’re losing yourself, Zoë. You’re losing everything good about yourself.”

Zoë looked at her hands. She still wore her mother’s silver Claddagh ring on the fourth finger of her left hand with the heart out, which meant that her heart was available. What a joke. Something that was broken wasn’t available. Not to her. Not to anyone. Which was just fine, because who would want some physically and emotionally damaged girl anyway?

“You didn’t mean to hurt anyone that day, Zoë. It was an accident, hon. You’re too hard on yourself. You’re both still alive, right? That’s all that matters. When are you going to stop punishing yourself?”

Sandy meant well, but she conveniently sidestepped important details pertaining to the accident, wanting to help Zoë move past it. Details Zoë couldn’t forget, not for one second or one moment every day. Zoë had done something wrong—so very, very wrong. And she would never, ever forgive herself for it. Not as long as she lived.

Zoë swallowed, rubbing her hands together, wishing Sandy would stop talking and leave her alone, but after what she’d put Sandy through last night she could hardly kick her aunt out of the apartment she rented from her.

“I’m sorry about making a scene. And your shoes.” Zoë stood up and walked to her bureau, to fish some bills out of the messy depths of her purse. She had a sudden flashback to a bright, lovely, hot pink floral handbag, perfectly neat and tidy, right down to the matching grosgrain wallet and sunglasses case. It felt like a lifetime ago. She shook her head and turned around, offering the bills to Sandy. “Here’s sixty.”

“You have to get yourself together, Zoë Holly Flannigan. Enough is enough,” said Sandy, taking the bills and folding them in her hands. “How about seeing that therapist again?”

Therapy wouldn’t help. Nothing would help. Nothing would take her back in time to that day to make better decisions. Nothing would change her face back to the way it was. Nothing would bring Brandon’s legs back, and her sister Thea would never forgive Zoë for their loss. That was the heartbreaking truth, the root of her guilt and shame.

Zoë shrugged, giving Sandy a sad smile. “I should take a shower. Got to get to work.”