Mine Always (One Night with You)

8. Ryan

I can’t find Lacey.I search through the whole masquerade, feeling more desperate with every passing moment. She wouldn’t have left.

As soon as I think it, my gut tightens. Of course, she would. This is exactly what Eric was trying to tell me.

I yank my cell from my suit and dial her number. But after two unanswered calls, I have my answer.

When we were in the bathroom, I knew something was wrong. I should have insisted she talk it out. I should have taken the time to slow down and listen.

Now all I can do is get to her before she runs again. I don’t even know where she’d go or how to look for her.

On my way to the apartment, I call Eric.

“Where is she?” I growl as soon as he answers. I feel like I’m going out of my mind. I can’t lose her. I can’t have it be over. Not after what we just shared, the way we were together.

He sighs into the line. “She’s gone.”

“Where?” During my time in the military, I spent months in blazing hot deserts, humid jungles, and overgrown forests. Now, I can endure any environment…if I have Lacey by my side.

“Damn if I know.” He pauses. “This is what I was warning you about.”

I’m trying to find the woman I love, and he wants to turn it into a lecture. “Think about it. Where would Lacey go if she were truly upset?”

“You think she lets me in any more than she’s let you in? I don’t know a fucking thing about her!” It’s the first time I’ve heard him express strong emotion about Lacey.

“Whose fault is that, asshole?” I shout the words into the phone. “You barely made an effort with her. As usual, your weak ass was afraid to get hurt.” I’m not sure which one of us I’m more pissed off with. Me for losing Lacey or him for never even trying with her in the first place.

“I’ll let you know when I hear from her again.” With that, Eric ends the call.

I know what he was refusing to say. It could be months or even years before she resurfaces. Who knows where her head and her heart will be then?

She’ll have found someone new by then, someone who gets to satisfy her in hotel bathrooms and sits up late watching TV with her.

And that lucky bastard won’t be me.

I shout her name into the apartment as soon as I’m inside but there is no answer. I barrel into her room. The bed is made which is unusual. She normally leaves all the sheets rumpled.

Every surface is wiped clean and there are no piles of wet laundry in the floor. In fact, there’s no trace that she was here at all.

My shoulders slump when I see the evidence that she’s left again. My heart aches from the force of trying to keep beating. It’s been ripped in two. She took half and left me with broken pieces.

In a daze, I check the rest of the apartment. I know she’s already gone. It doesn’t stop me from calling her name.

When I get to my bedroom and see the canvas, I freeze. On it, there’s a painting of a Marine. He’s bloodied and beaten, bruises cover his body. But underneath his image is a single word. Unbroken.

It hits me in the gut.

She left this for me.

Even after seeing the scars tonight, she didn’t flinch.

I wish more than anything, I’d done it differently. Maybe if we hadn’t had sex, she wouldn’t have run. Maybe if I’d been willing to go slower, she would have felt safe enough to stay.

But none of those thoughts ring true to me.

Something tells me she would have run either way.

Because that’s who Lacey is. She’s a runner and an escape artist. The kind of woman who’s hard to hold.

Still staring at the painting, I reach out and trace the soldier’s features. I yank my phone from my pocket and dial her number.

My heart skips a beat when she answers on the third ring.

She doesn’t say anything and neither do I. We’re just two people frozen in the middle of uncertainty.

“You don’t have to run, kitten,” I whisper the words. Now I’m the one in the abandoned parking lot, trying desperately to hold onto someone that’s too scarred to hope for love.

“Tonight was a beautiful night but let’s leave it at that,” she says. Her voice shakes and she sniffs as if she’s been crying.

Grief claws at my heart that she’s hurting. Even if her wounds are self-inflicted, it doesn’t ease my pain. We became joined today, a bond was formed and now, I’ll forever feel her joy and heartache and disappointments as my own.

“Tell me where you are.” I close my eyes and focus on the sound of the call, hoping I can hear enough background noise to discern where she is.

“Somewhere safe,” she answers.

“I’ll find you,” I promise. “If I have to search the whole damn world and give up everything I own, I’ll do that. I’ll keep searching until you’re in my arms again.”

“Let me go, Ryan. You’ll be better that way,” she says before the line goes dead.

What little remains of my heart shatters all over again. I wander through the apartment, looking for anything she may have left behind.

At first, all I find is an old bottle of purple nail polish and receipts for grape slushies at the gas station.

Then I check her closet and discover the canvases.

Her other work was based on her life. Maybe these ones are too. I stare and stare at them, looking for a clue as to where she went. But it’s always the same theme in her paintings…a lost little girl looking for a home.

I shake my head at the girl in the painting who is staring longingly at a red house with a happy family inside. “Don’t you know I would have been your home, Lacey?”