Chapter 42 Deep Inside, We Always Hope #2
“Where’s Paisley?” he asks, still typing into his phone.
“I don’t know.” Saying the words makes me feel sick. I don’t know where she is, and her psycho trainer is in town. My body is ice cold.
Dad looks at me. “You don’t know where she is?”
“No.”
“You always know where she is.”
“Not now,” I say while pulling my jacket out of the closet. “But I’m going to find her. No idea what that dude is looking for here, Dad, but it can’t be anything good. We’ve got to get rid of him.”
He raises his phone and casts me a glance as if I were slow. “What do you think I’m doing?”
Paisley doesn’t see me as I walk into The Old-Timer. She’s sitting in a green cord chair from the 70s with a wool blanket around her legs and a pair of old, retro headphones over her ears that’s connected to the record player next to her. Her eyes are closed, and her head is leaning back.
I close the door. William’s face peeks out from behind a bookshelf in the middle of the room.
“How long has she been there?”
“Hours. She’s been listening to one record after another and doesn’t want to talk. I even tried offering her a cheese sandwich.”
“She doesn’t like cheese, William.”
“That explains why she always looks so sad. She should eat some. Cheese makes you happy.”
“I’m going to go talk to her.”
“About the cheese?”
“No.”
He looks disappointed. “Okay. But I’m closing up in fifteen minutes. Remember. If I’m not in bed on time, my stress levels go up. My acid-base balance gets all mixed up, I start to get tense, can’t look after my horses, and…”
“We’ll be out of here on time, Will.”
I walk over to Paisley, sit down on the arm of the chair, and take the headphones off her ears. She starts as if she’d seen a ghost, but then sinks back down in relief. “It’s you.”
“Yeah. What are you listening to?” I put the headphones on, smile, then take them back off. “Simon and Garfunkel. Of course.”
“What are you doing here?”
I put the headphones to the side and tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear. Her hair is so soft. “I wanted to ask you the same thing, Paisley.”
“I’m listening to music.”
“For hours,” I add.
“Yeah. Nothing wrong with that, right?”
“No.” I sigh and take her hand. “Come here.”
Her hand is so small. So delicate. Her fingers slip through mine if I don’t hold them tight enough. She is cold, as if she’d been standing out in the snow for hours and not under a blanket next to a crackling fire.
We sit down on the couch, me cross-legged, she with one leg tucked beneath her.
There are dark shadows below her eyes, which stand out strongly from her light skin.
She hasn’t slept well over the last few days.
I could hear her footsteps above me, almost the whole night long, moving back and forth across the creaking wooden floor. And it was all my fault.
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry, Paisley.”
She looks at her fingernails. The one by her ring finger has two white flecks. She scratches them. “I’m angry at you, Knox.”
“I know.”
“You hurt me.”
“I know.”
She looks at me. Her stare goes deep. My stomach contracts.
“How could you think that I would ever do something like that to you?”
“No idea. I don’t think I thought at all. It surprised me. From one moment to the next, my life was packed up as if it were a box full of odds and ends and turned upside down. I couldn’t find anything anymore. Everything was all over the place. Absolute chaos in my head.”
She nods. “I know something about that.”
Silence envelops us. I cast my eyes through the store, considering the best way to bring up the topic.
William peeps out from behind another shelf.
He points his finger at his watch. Then he performs a pantomime, first contorting his face, then making waving movements with his hand, and, in the end, pretending to vacuum.
Acid-base balance. I roll my eyes and turn back to Paisley.
“Listen, Paisley.” Once again I reach for her hand, trace the lines on her knuckles. “Ivan Petrov is in Aspen.”
She doesn’t react. Her fingers become rigid, her whole body, I think, but not a single word crosses her lips. She stares at her lap.
She knows, I think. She already knows.
And that means that she must have seen him. I feel sick. Her fingers slide away from mine. They land on the cushions. “He found you.” She still doesn’t say anything. I start to panic. “What did he do, Paisley? What did he do?”
This is the moment her dam breaks and the waters flood her center. She doesn’t simply cry, she completely collapses. I hold onto her, her delicate body pressed close to mine, her tears damp, salty tracks on my throat.
I want to kill him. Right now. I want to find him and kill him for hurting her like this.
It takes forever for her to quiet down. William’s no longer there. Only in passing did I notice him place the keys on the counter next to the popcorn machine before softly closing the door behind him.
At some point Paisley moves away and looks at me. Her face is spotted red, her blue eyes swimming in tears. “I have to go back to him, Knox.”
There are things in life you hear but that are so absurd they don’t want to reach you. This is one of them. She says it and I hear it, but, somehow, it just doesn’t reach me.
“No,” I say. “Why should you?”
She grabs her throat. The lump is most likely stuck. “I have no choice. I have to go back to Minneapolis.”
“You most definitely do not. Listen, Paisley. Dad’s going to take care of him. That pig is going to leave Aspen and never bother you again. You don’t need to be afraid, okay? My dad has clout and knows the right people. He’s going to take care of this.”
“He can’t take care of it.” Her voice is broken by sobs. It’s hard for me to understand her, she’s crying so hard. “He may have clout, but he’s not above the law.”
I blink. “Above the law?”
She takes a deep breath as if what she’s about to say will demand everything of her. Everything.
“I am bound to him by contract. I simply took off and signed myself up at iSkate, although I’m still under contract with Ivan.”
Her words slam into my solar plexus with the strength of steel. I can hardly breathe.
“I was so dumb,” she sobs. “It was so dumb of me to come here. I messed up my whole life, yours, too, although I knew from the beginning that it wouldn’t work out.”
I have no idea what to do. I’d like to tell her that we’ll figure it out, that everything will turn out okay, but I’d be lying.
I desperately look for a way out in my head, but there aren’t any, not a single one.
My lungs are burning. They need oxygen. I breathe in but it doesn’t feel like I’m getting any air. I feel like I’m suffocating.
“Okay,” I stammer. “You’re under contract with him. But that doesn’t mean anything, Paisley. If you go back, I’m coming with you. I’ll protect you from that motherfucker until your contract is up and we can come back to Aspen.”
She shakes her head. “Your life is here, Knox.”
“You are a part of my life now.”
Whoops. I shouldn’t have said that because she just starts to cry even more.
I stand up, take her hand, and pull her up.
She’s wobbly, as if she’s just run a marathon.
“Come on. Let’s go home.” She’s still looking at the floor.
I lift up her chin and look into her eyes.
“You know what, Paisley? I want you so bad it scares the shit out of me. But here I am, freaked, maybe a bit cracked, and I want you all the same. That means that I’m behind you no matter what happens.
All you have to do is turn around and you’ll see me.
All you have to do is say a word and I’ll listen. I’m not going away, got it?”
She nods, and I think she really understands how much she means to me. But I also think that she thinks that her past is something she needs to sort out on her own. Something that she doesn’t want to do to me because it hurt her.
And that scares me more than everything else—it means that I could lose her.