2. Chapter 2 #3
Snapping around on her heel, she rushed past the soups and broths, and finally found the ramen, the cheapest stuff in the store.
Just add water and, since she didn’t have a microwave, hope it came out of the tap hot enough to soften the noodles.
She grabbed a case of chicken-flavored packets and threw it into her cart a little harder than was necessary.
All right, way harder than necessary. The shrink-wrapped box almost bounced right back out again.
“Gently,” Jeff sang from where he was perusing the soup shelves.
“Stop acting like I’m trying to rob the place!” she blew up, and yet her tone remained every bit as soft as his. He was whispering at her, so she whisper-screamed back. “Admit it! You’ve been following me, giving me the stink eye ever since I got here. And you’ve been mean every time!”
“Mean?” He arched both eyebrows behind the mirror reflections of his sunglasses. She wished she hadn’t said that. Hell, she wished could see his eyes, but they were hidden from her. “I have been anything but mean,” he countered.
“You gave me a ticket!” She ripped it from her back pocket, showing it to him so he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t. “That’s not being nice.”
“In my defense,” he said, “I have had to deal with every single person to step off that prison bus in the last seven years. Some were great people who stepped off that bus. You aren’t the only lady, or fellow, newly deposited here who did, in fact, rob this place blind.
Not everyone acclimatizes to life in Starvation without problems.”
“I blame the local sheriff,” she returned, giving the stitched label on his chest a sneer. She dumped another orange box of noodle bricks into her.
“I’m trying really hard not to say how bad for you those things are,” he commented. “The sodium content alone…”
If she weren’t so angry, she’d have recognized his tone was gentle rather than critical, but it set her temper off anyway.
“It’s what I can pay for!” she hissed, and out of spite, grabbed the last box of beef ramen, since she’d already grabbed all the chicken.
There was no telling how long she’d have to go before she got her first full paycheck.
She fully expected Travis to take everything she’d earned so far on Friday, and the last thing she could handle was having to deal with her new life on a constantly empty stomach.
No, ramen wasn’t the most nutritious thing she could eat, but it was the cheapest and it would keep her from going hungry.
And what business of his was it anyways?
She snapped around on her heel. Angry as she was, she hadn’t even noticed that the sheriff was trying to go around her until she smashed her cart into his. Her finger got pinched.
Yelping, she snatched her hand back from the sharp pain and accidentally elbowed him in the chest. She jumped to get a safe distance between them again, tripped, and down she went.
Her wildly windmilling arms grabbed for anything strong enough to arrest her fall, but he grabbed her instead. For just a moment, she was grateful. Then she remembered who he was.
“Get off me!” Rearing back, she ripped her arm out of his grip, the force of it knocking them both off balance.
Stumbling, Jeff caught himself before he fell; Tabby didn’t.
Her back cracked against the sharp edge of a shelf behind her right before the whole thing collapsed, and down she went, crashing to the floor along with about sixteen feet of industry shelving, a hundred disposable tubs of instant noodles, and fish sauce.
“Are you all right?” Bending to help her up, Jeff shoved her cart out of the way, and the next thing she felt was the heavy wheel going right over the top of her right ankle.
She yelled, the pain sharper than her ability to keep quiet, but it was too late. Already Jeff had her by the wrist and in a single heave, he hauled her up off the floor and back onto her own feet.
“Oh my god.” She grabbed onto his arm, hopping to keep the weight off her injured ankle. “Ow, that hurts!”
She immediately locked her jaw, refusing to say that again. Her leg wasn’t really hurt. It was overreacting, and she refused to allow it to be injured. This one-horse town didn’t have a medical clinic and for sure she didn’t have money to throw away on anything less than certain death.
“Can you put your weight on it?”
Tabitha yanked her arm out of his grasp, turned and shoved him away with all her might. He obligingly took a step back; she didn’t even knock him off balance this time.
So angry she could barely keep from screaming, she blinked back the involuntary flood of tears that her pain and frustration had conjured.
“I’m fine,” she managed, half hopping and half limping through the scattered mess of noodles and broken bottles of soy and fish sauce, and specialty oils now spilled all over the tiles.
Her cart had tracked right through the mess. So had his.
And now she had no choice but to walk right through it too, this colossal, horrible, embarrassing mess she’d just made.
“Are you hurt?” Jeff asked, bending to get a better look at her ankle.
There might have been a tinge of concern in his tone, but if there was, she couldn’t see so much as a hint of it behind his sunglasses.
Which was probably the best thing for both of them.
She already wanted to punch him in the face.
She didn’t need to spend any more time in jail than she already had.
“Leave me alone.” She limped away from him, desperately wishing a hole would open up right here and just swallow her off the earth.
She was so done with this. She was done with the shopping, she was done with the small town, and she was more than done with the sheriff who seemed put in her way just to make this all as hard as he possibly could.
People were coming into the aisle, investigating the noise and the god-awful mess she’d made.
She couldn’t limp away from it fast enough, and yet the entire floor in front of her was a lake of Asian oils and sauces, broken glass and the second she stepped in it, she just knew she would go down on her ass again.
She was going to have to walk back to the hotel covered in that stuff, in the only pair of real clothes she had.
She started into the lake, and this time when the sheriff grabbed her arm, she didn’t pull away.
“Be careful,” he cautioned.
Her foot slipped out from under her, and to her surprise, his arm slung around her waist, yanking her securely into his side.
She’d have thought he’d be more than happy to drop her and make her humiliation complete, but no.
He held her up, pinned against his hard and muscular body.
He felt warm. For just a second he even felt comforting, and his cologne was enough to make her panties melt.
She yanked her wayward libido back under swift control. She hadn’t made the best life choices, obviously, but nor was she about to let herself be drawn to a man who’d done nothing but harass her since they’d met.
Not that she wanted to fall, either.
She let him hold her as they navigated the minor lake of spilled sauces, but just as soon as they were through it and she’d scuffed the worst of the stuff off the bottom of her shoes, she said stiffly, “You can let go now.”
He did, albeit slowly. As if making sure she was steady first.
“Are you okay?” he asked, taking a proper step back.
He was still too close. He was too tall, too, and the very size of him seemed to be heating the air between them. His cologne was still in her nose, tainting her angry breaths.
“Fine,” she said, clipped and short. “I’ll be even better if I never see you again.”
Drawn by the sounds of the crash, an elderly couple had ventured into the aisle behind them. Directly in front of her, a store employee was hurrying to meet them with two bright yellow caution signs.
“That stupid shelf,” she declared. “I thought we got it fixed.” She tsked. “Come on, honey. Do you want the key to the ladies’ room so you can clean up?”
“No.” Her temper mollifying against her will, Tabby shook her head. “I just want to check out.”
“I’ll help you, hun. Right this way.”
Casting the sheriff a grudging scowl, Tabby grabbed her cart and followed the other woman to the checkout. Already her ankle was starting to feel better, that sting of momentary pain already fading away to nothing by the time she got there.
She unpacked her peanut butter, her apples, and ramen from the cart, loading them onto the conveyor belt. God, carrying all this back to the little Bates motel she’d been sent to was going to be a bitch.
“That’s $12.38,” the clerk cheerfully announced.
…and only fourteen dollars to pay for it all. Sighing, she reached for her back pocket and the pink plastic wallet she’d stuffed into it after her fiasco with that damn ticket.
Except, her wallet wasn’t there. Tabitha paused, feeling nothing but denim under her hand. Flat denim, with her butt cheek underneath.
She patted her front pockets and even checked the floor around her cart. Shit . It was gone. Somewhere between here and where the sheriff had ticketed her, she’d lost it.
She looked up at the clerk and her expression must have said it all.
“Don’t have your wallet?” the kind lady asked.
“I’ll pay for it,” the sheriff said from behind her, because of course he was behind her. Where else would he be?
“No, you won’t!” Tabitha snapped, turning on him angrily. “I don’t need your help. Leave me alone!”
“Hey now, hold on,” he censured.
“I’ll bet it’s on the floor under all that mess in aisle eleven,” the clerk offered, her smile morphing into a slight cringe as she glanced back and forth between them. “I’ll just set your groceries aside, and you can come back for them when you find it.”
Her eyes said she didn’t expect to see Tabby coming back anytime soon.
She’d had her wallet, though. In her pocket, then in her hand, then in her cart…
Where in the store had she stopped long enough for someone to sneak in and grab it away from her?
With the sheriff standing over her damn near the entire time.
She hurried back down the destroyed aisle where two store employees had already repaired the shelf and were now loading it up again with the fallen food boxes.
“Did you guys find a pink wallet?” she asked.
The employees paused in picking up to look at one another, then her.
“Nope,” the woman told her. “Sorry, not yet.”
“Are you sure this is where you left it?” the freckled teenaged boy added.
An elderly couple drifted into the aisle behind them, looking everywhere but at her as they eavesdropped on what was going on, but Tabby wasn’t fooled.
“It’s here. It has to be right here.”
The two employees picked up the floor, cleaning up her mess while she watched, the fear growing ever more pronounced the more they cleared off the white-speckled tiles with no wallet appearing anywhere around them.
She couldn’t handle just waiting. Getting down on all fours, she scrambled to pick up the scattered boxed dinners too.
“We’ve got it,” the boy assured her. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”
“Did you take my wallet?” Tabby accused. “Where is it?”
How the hell was she going to replace her ID and her social security card without a car or her birth certificate, and all while stranded in the middle of Starvation?
The two workers looked at one another and then went back to rummage through the boxes in search of it.
It was gone. It wasn’t here anywhere.
Clambering painfully to her feet, she retraced her steps through the store, but she could find it.
It wasn’t on the floor, on the shelves, near the apple display or the discount rack…
it wasn’t anywhere. She ended up back at the register, checking through her cart desperately one more time, but hope died hard.
She’d lost everything. Her father, her friends, her home, her life… and now her wallet and money too. Almost in tears, she threw her hands up in defeat and limped out of the store.
“Hey,” someone called after her.
Tabby didn’t care. She didn’t stop, pause, or look back. This was all just another page in the nightmare story that had become her life. And to think, for the last three years she’d thought that just getting out of prison would make everything all right again.