Twenty-Four
B y the time they let me out of the infirmary I was pissed. Monumentally pissed. Reacher had disappeared for a while, and when he returned, it was to ‘escort me’ to my room, where I was gonna be under fucking house arrest. The way they did with Ryder back when he was so fucked up after his lady drugged and assaulted him.
“So this is how it’s gonna be? Now I’m a fucking prisoner?”
Reacher shoved me into my room, and slammed the door.
“Act up all you want. Trust me, brother. I’ve got bigger shit on my plate, but here I am, fucking babysitting you.”
I watched him drop heavily onto my sofa.
“You want a coffee?”
He sighed, and then he cursed.
“Better not. Fuck, do I want one though.”
I sat down. “Something’s going on, isn’t it? This isn’t just a caffeine free diet.”
“Ice, it’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just that there’s stuff going on, and you’re unpredictable right now. Someone pisses you off, and you’ll blurt stuff out that we’re trying to keep quiet. Normally you’d be in the know, you know that, but I can’t give you ammunition to use against me, or Stitch, if you turn on us right now.”
Well, that felt like a punch in the face. Another punch, I mean.
“Pres, I’d never tell anything you shared in confidence. You know that. You trusted me before. Hell, you trusted me when I was high more often than I wasn’t. Why then and not now?”
He heaved a sigh so heavy I practically felt it.
“Because you’re gonna hate me for what I did, and Jesus, I’m hating myself enough for it already. I was angry, and I was freaked out. Scared. Scared of losing you.”
I ran a hand over my hair, hating the way it felt against my palm. Why did my hair feel so wrong lately? It didn’t feel like my hair anymore, but there was something more important to worry about right now.
“It’s Lissa, isn’t it? What did you do?”
He rubbed at his piercings, cursed quietly.
“You’re gonna want to return that punch, and you know what? I’ll let you. I’ll give you a freebie, because I’m a fucking idiot.”
“Pres?”
My heart was thudding in my chest, because I knew it was big. I knew it was gonna piss me off, and make me desperate to fix whatever it was. It was going to make me want to hit him, just like he’d suggested.
“I reported her.”
“Fuck! What did you do that for? She’ll lose her job!”
I was standing, pacing, standing again. The poor fucking woman. She’d hate me for this. She’d be heartbroken. Angry as all hell too. I pulled at my hair again.
“Did she get fired? Dammit, Reacher. Tell me!”
He stood up too, shoving his hands in his pockets, almost like he was giving me a clear target.
“Reacher?!”
He shrugged finally, meeting my eyes.
“I don’t know, but I reported everything. The drinking and driving, breaching rules or whatever with you, and your relapse.”
“FUCK! How could you do this?!” I was pulling at my hair again. He’d effectively destroyed the woman, and in doing so, he’d destroyed whatever version of us we’d been working toward. If she wasn’t driven away by my fucking spontaneously jizzing dick.
“You asshole!”
He nodded grimly. “I am, I know, Ally’s gonna kill me too. Seriously, take the hit. Right on my chin. I deserve it. I wish I could undo it. I wish I could go back a few hours and not fuck up her career. I was desperate to take some kind of action. Any kind. I’m so fucking helpless with you. I don’t know what to do, but whatever she did, it was the wrong kind of action. It was harmful, because you ended up using again, and Jesus, Ice. You nearly fucking killed yourself. You can’t go right back to snorting lines and lines of fucking coke, like you’re a seasoned addict. You were in recovery. You’d have felt a fraction of the amount you took.”
I dropped heavily into the nearest seat.
“Wish it had fucking killed me. You’ve ruined everything, Reacher. You’ve destroyed a good woman. A decent woman. And through that, you’ve fucking destroyed me too. She was all I wanted. Like I’d finally found someone who understood me. Who could see me, through all of this shit! And you… you took her away from me.”
Lissa
H as-Been offered to come in when we got to my house, but it would have been too weird. Too… something, I don’t know. He was a nice guy, and clearly he cared for his brother, even though they didn’t get on, but there was one big problem. He wasn’t Ice , and I missed Ice. I missed him like I’d known him years, and been separated from him after months together, rather than one night.
My car wasn’t outside my house, because it had been towed after my incident the other night, and I couldn’t even seem to care about where it might be, because I couldn’t drive it anyway, and it truly felt like it didn’t matter. Most things felt like they didn’t matter right now. It wasn’t even the middle of the day, and I was home already. Just a few days ago, I was worrying about spending my limited personal time on Ice, and now I had unlimited free time, and was banned from seeing him. I had nothing. I curled up on my sofa, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.
What were my options? Go home? Go back to my family and declare my life, that they already didn’t approve of, a complete disaster? Wait and see if the clinic would have me back? Try and speak to Ice? Why bother? I was starting to feel that he wasn’t all that interested in hearing from me, because he wasn’t even trying.
I got up and dug my phone out of my bag. That night he’d said he sent a message, when I never received one. I rechecked our message history. Definitely nothing.
I hovered my finger over the button, wanting to try contacting him, but Reacher had warned me off. I sagged in my seat, and moped for mere seconds, before I realised something. His threat had been to ruin me if I tried to reach Ice, but he’d already done that. There was nothing more he could do to me, so didn’t that leave me free to reach out? Didn’t that mean I could call him? Just to hear his voice? Just to know he was alive and well?
I got as far as hovering my finger over the button to connect the call, before it hit me again. Why wasn’t he trying to contact me?