Chapter 6 #2
A man who resembles Cash poses in one of the photos.
He’s decked out in some kind of military uniform standing in front of a bus.
His chocolate gaze speaks of strength, pride, and love.
My fingertip touches the glass that protects his face as I search his features more closely for signs of Cash.
There are so many stories in this hallway, but it’s the story of the man behind the glass that calls to me.
“Dinner’s ready, if you’re hungry,” he says from behind me.
“Yeah,” I say on an exhale. Tearing myself away from the picture, I turn to him. “I could eat a little something.”
Cash disappears into the kitchen, as if he’s running away from a past that is trapped in this hallway.
I glance at the photo one more time before following him.
I don’t say anything as I slowly take a seat at the small Formica table in the kitchen, hiding my forearms beneath it.
Luckily, most of the bruising is on my upper arms, but there are a few remaining on my forearms. Cash probably saw them while I was standing in the hallway, but I don’t want to bring any more attention to them than I have to.
Maybe I can talk him out of a long-sleeved shirt later.
My belly rumbles at the aroma filling the kitchen. I don’t know when the last time was that I ate. I think it was dinner last night. Hell, it could have been breakfast yesterday. Lately, it seems like I don’t have an appetite until food is placed in front of me.
Cash fills each plate before bringing them to the table and setting them down. The chicken, mashed potatoes, and sautéed veggies smell so good my stomach rumbles again, and my mouth waters.
He smiles when he hears it. “Dig in.”
I grab a fork and start devouring my food as he pours drinks.
When he returns to the table, he places a glass by my plate, and my bottle of painkillers next to it.
I stop chewing and stare at the bottle of pills that numbs the pain.
There are a few gone, but I only took one of them to make Cady happy.
The others were tossed in the trash when she wasn’t looking.
“I don’t want those,” I state, after washing my food down with the sweet tea. I go back to my meal and ignore the pill bottle on the table.
“They will make you feel better,” he counters.
“I feel fine.”
I shove a big piece of chicken into my mouth, hoping he’ll get the gist that I don’t want to talk about it.
I hate those pills. It doesn’t make anything feel better; it only masks the pain, which always seems to hurt worse when the shit wears off.
I’d have to take those pills for weeks in order to remain pain-free, and that’s not happening.
“Sure you do.” Sarcasm laces his words. “You make a face every time you turn your head too fast or sit down and stand up.”
“It’s fine, Cash,” I mumble around the mouthful of chicken. “Drop it.”
“We’ll talk about it later,” he says, and then starts on his meal.
“Speaking of talking about it later, you owe me the truth. All of it. Every fucking detail.”
Cash sighs. “Let’s finish eating, then we will talk.”
That’s exactly what we do. No more words are exchanged during our tense and quiet dinner.
He keeps his attention on his food and doesn’t look up at me once.
Probably getting all his lies straightened out in his head before trying to pass them off as truth.
I feel a bit guilty for thinking that. He supposedly carted me here to keep me safe.
Cash has been nothing but gentle since he brought his charade to an end.
He’s been careful and quiet, so as not to intimidate me.
He even brought me into his childhood home and made me dinner.
Unless this is some twisted form of death row, and this is my last meal…
. If that’s the case, I would’ve requested crab legs, steak, and a barrel of sweet red wine.
It wouldn’t really matter how he chose to end my life, so long as I could drink myself into oblivion first.
Once Cash clears the table and puts away the extra food in the fridge, he pours me a glass of wine and some whiskey for himself.
Guess he thinks we need liquid courage for this little chat.
I willingly accept it and follow him through a homey dining room into a large living room.
He flips on a lamp and takes a seat in an armchair, leaving the couch for me.
Cash takes a drink of his whiskey as he watches me settle onto the cushions. He raises a brow as I wince, and I quickly erase any discomfort from my face. Bastard.
“You sure you don’t want one of those pills?” he asks as I finally get situated.
“That bottle of wine will work just fine.” I take a large gulp, and then set it on the end table. “Now, talk.”
Cash takes a deep breath, and on the exhale, words start rushing out of his mouth.
I learn quickly who Dale and Joseph actually are, how Snap came to be, and why they started selling it.
It doesn’t take long before Phil’s name is spat from his lips.
Around the time Phil and I saw each other, he attempted to break into RCC.
Well, at least Cash seems to think so. That’s one of the reasons they started following him.
The other being the amount of Snap Phil was quickly going through.
“A couple of our guys went to Trinity for a week and sniffed around. They weren’t able to find much.
Just that Phil had a girlfriend, and that he spent time with Dustin.
The couple of times Phil and Dustin left, they always lost him in traffic.
With the lack of information our guys brought back, I worried that Phil had caught them, or at least one of them, and paid them off.
I know that one of them makes deliveries to the guy Phil buys from, so they could’ve very easily bumped into one another and struck up a deal.
There are a lot of things that just came to light recently, that being one of them. ”
“I’m assuming that I’m the girlfriend in question,” I say, interrupting his confession.
“Yes.”
“Exactly how long were you watching us before I saw you at Maggie’s?”
He drops his head and swishes his drink around for a moment before answering. “Weeks.”
“Weeks?” His eyes meet mine, and he nods reluctantly. “How have you not stopped Phil sooner?”
“That’s the thing. Phil was very smart when it came to his drug dealings. Not so much when it came to stalking you.”
“I assumed he followed me around some.”
Cash’s eyebrows jerk up, and a strangled noise sounds in his throat.
“Some is an understatement. It was daily. I watched him watch you so much it scared me. I didn’t think you had anything to do with it.
Your body language proved that when he approached you several times.
I saw your fear, so I know he did too. The more you showed it, the braver he got. ”
“Is that why you were in Maggie’s that night?” I already know the answer, but I might as well hear it straight from him.
He nods again. “My worry grew so much that many times, instead of following Phil, I stuck with you in case he came back.”
My stomach tightens from his words. I knew Cash and I would never become anything serious, but it hurts that he was only with me to get closer to Phil. “Well, I’m glad you were there. It only ended up delaying the inevitable, but it gave me time to figure out some of what was going on.”
“I wanted to talk to you that night,” Cash quietly admits. “After watching you for so long, and learning so much about you, I felt like I knew you.”
My heart skips a beat, and I have to remind myself that he was just worried about me. “Why didn’t you?”
He shrugs his shoulders. “I wasn’t supposed to get involved.”
Although I told myself to let Cash go, and attempted to sever the few ties I had with him, it didn’t happen.
My heart clung to the notion that what happened between us would grow into something greater.
It was a chance in hell, literally. Through all the mental anguish, he lingered in the back of my mind, protecting me from myself as much as he protected me from Phil.
When the torment became too much, I would remember the night we spent together, and how he made it all disappear.
It wasn’t so much the sex that I thought of.
It was having someone who, on some level, understood my pain, and allowed me to feel it without judgment.
He consoled me, which in turn made me feel loved as the person I had become.
Even though I denied it, I had changed, but Cash has only ever known me like this.
He walked a tight line, balancing atop the wall he had created around his own heart, in order to rescue my sanity.
“Did you get involved with that other woman too?” I ask, recalling the picture he showed me.
“No,” he says sternly. Cash rubs a hand over his face and looks up at the ceiling, as if seeing her all over again. “She came stumbling out of Dustin’s house one night after Phil left. Scared the shit out of me. I thought it was you.”
“You didn’t help her?”
“I couldn’t. My name would have been on the police report. If Phil was the one who tried to break into RCC and saw my name on that file, he would’ve put two and two together. It could have ended ugly for everyone.”
My heart is waging a war with my brain over how I should feel.
I’ve had enough of trying to reason shit lately.
Everything has always been black or white to me.
The varying degrees of wrong versus right.
If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Doesn’t matter what caused it to happen.
Life isn’t a math equation—two negatives do not make a positive in day-to-day situations.
The colors decorating my flesh beg to differ.
There are shades of gray, and it’s easy to get lost in the multitude of meanings in each one.