Find Me in Manhattan (Finding #3) (15 page)

“We’re just playing a game of hard to get. Go find your own,” drunk guy fired back and reached for me again.

“She is mine!” Michael grabbed the guy forcing him to let me go. I moved behind Michael’s back to hide like a coward while he lifted the guy up and spoke closely to his face. “Next time a girl asks you to let her go, you take your hands off her. You understand?”

This was the first look I had at the guy. He was some frat guy who looked like he had ten too many. He was the epitome of the guy women needed to avoid. Before, I would have been able to avoid him. I wouldn’t have freaked out the second he pressed against my back. Before, I would have made some joke, grabbed the pitcher, and made my way back to my friends. But that was all before.
Before. Before. Before
. Now, the fear…it made me weak. There was nothing I hated more than feeling weak.

Suddenly, Seth and Tony were flanking Michael with Lana behind them. “What’s goin’ on?” my brother asked Michael.

“Nothing,” I tried, feeling embarrassed enough that Michael felt the need to involve himself.

“This guy had his hands on your sister,” Michael told him calmly without letting go of drunk guy’s shirt.

Seth’s face transformed into Angry Seth, and he was in the guy’s face in less than a second. “You had your hands on my sister, motherfucker!” Memories of the time Seth discovered that my high school boyfriend was cheating on me resurfaced. In the middle of a field party, Seth punched Beau in the face, breaking his nose and giving him double black eyes. Beau’s other girlfriend, the trashiest girl in Alabama, freaked out and started screaming before she attacked me. I gave her a swift elbow to the nose when she tried to pull my hair. Crazy bitch and the dirty, no-good, cheating son of a bitch had matching injuries. From that point on, everyone knew not to mess with the Grant twins.

If this kept up, I imagined we’d be in for another brawl, and I wasn’t up for it. I’d had enough. “Let’s just go,” I begged and put both palms on my brother’s chest. Even though we were twins, he was still several inches taller than I was. He could look right over my head to glare at drunken guy. I glanced at Michael, who was strung tight and ready to rumble. Things weren’t looking too good for Mr. Fratastic behind me.

Tony saw a fight brewing as well and put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Yeah, man. She’s safe. Let’s go.” He didn’t respond, so Tony patted his shoulder again and repeated himself.

This time Michael shook his head like he was snapping out of a daze. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah.” He looked over to me. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” I tried to smile, but it came out forced.

“Let’s get you home,” Michael said as his arm came around me.

My brother watched as Michael tucked me into his side then reluctantly turned and led us out of the bar. Tony and Lana stayed behind us. It seemed when we started moving to the door, the noise of the bar picked back up. I hadn’t even noticed it quieted down.

Back at the apartment, I sat on the couch still drinking the tea Lana insisted I needed while I watched Seth pace the room. “You need to come back home, Sarah. It isn’t safe here. Back home, they know how to treat women.”

I set the tea on the table and started pleading my case, feeling like I was a teenager in trouble with Daddy again instead of arguing with my brother. “That could happen anywhere, Seth. I’m fine now. I was being silly and panicked for a second. That’s all. I could have handled it myself.”

“He had his hands on you, Sarah,” Michael spat from the seat next to me.

“And I was handling it,” I responded in the same tone.

Michael shook his head. “I don’t know. Trouble seems to find you too easily.”

“You think I should go back to Alabama, too?” I cried incredulously. I thought we’d had a breakthrough earlier, but I must have been mistaken if he wanted me to go back to ‘Bama, too.

He sat there with his hands clasped between his knees and elbows on his thighs. When I asked him if he thought I should go home, he let out a breath and dropped his head. I looked over at Lana for help. She sat on Tony’s lap in the chair where he had his feet propped on the table. He looked confused and flicked his eyes around the room taking in the three of us. “Someone want to tell me what the fuck you’re freaking out about? Sarah’s fine.”

I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, but when I looked up, Lana, Michael, and Seth were glancing at each other.

“Her ex is after her,” Lana finally said.

“Lana!” I snapped.

“What? If he knows, then that’s another pair of eyes looking out for you. Besides, the bastard needs to quit showing up here.”

“He’s been here again?” Seth snapped and his pacing picked up speed. He was gripping his cell phone, and I knew he was seconds away from calling Daddy.

“Oh, good gravy,” I groaned as I fell back against the couch. I really was a teenager again.

“Not lately, but she had to stay at Michael’s the night it all happened because he wouldn’t leave.”

“She stayed with you?” Seth was on a roll.

Michael glanced over at Seth. “Guest room, dude. Chill out.”

“And it wouldn’t matter either way seeing as I am an adult, not that any of you noticed.” I was so frustrated with everyone in the room that I would have done anything to make them all leave the apartment and let me be. I knew it wasn’t going to happen though, so I decided to go to bed…alone. “Now, if y’all will excuse me, I’m going to bed. I’ve seriously had enough for one day.” I stepped around Michael and headed down the small hallway to my bedroom.

I closed the door and went to my dresser to pull out clothes. Just as I pulled off my top, I heard a quick knock then the door opened. “Oh shit. Sorry,” Michael said.

I looked over my shoulder then quickly turned and pulled on my light pink tank to match my pink and white striped pants. “What do you want?”

“I wanted to check on you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You said that.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the door.

“I meant it.”

“You didn’t look fine. I saw your face, Sarah. You were scared.”

“It was all in my head. I felt trapped. It was crowded, and he was holding me. I couldn’t breathe, but like I said, it was all in my head.”
It’s because of that son of a gun, Jameson.
He ruined me.

Michael pushed off the wall and came to stand toe-to-toe with me. “I don’t want you to be afraid. I want to know your ex isn’t going to hurt you. I don’t want you to wake up afraid of the memories inside your head. I want you to be able to go out and have fun without feeling the fear that it will all happen again.”

“You sound like you know what this feels like.”

“Maybe I do.”

Suddenly, I felt silly. Michael went through therapy because he watched his friends lose their lives from an IED explosion. I am freaking out over a being hit once or twice and some threatening messages. It was nothing compared to what Michael went through.

I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, God. I’m such a baby. There I was flippin’ out over some jerk grabbing me when it’s so stupid in the grand scheme of things. Ugh. I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” Michael said quietly as he tugged my hands from his face. “You’ve been through some shit, and you’re handling it the best way you can. We would have stepped in had it been any woman, but no one is going to mess with you while I’m around.”

“What is it with you worrying about my safety?” I asked as gently as I could. “I’m not helpless, you know. It was a momentary freak-out. No need for all this fanfare.”

“I know you’re not helpless.” He moved to sit on the edge of my bed before moving his elbows to his typical position on his knees. “I don’t know what it is about you. From the moment I saw you, I knew you had something going on. Then I saw him grab you. You looked so scared. All I wanted was to make that look disappear. Yeah, it feels good to protect you, like I have that purpose again, but I know there’s more than that. I just don’t know how much more I can take. I have let down every person who has ever mattered to me. I couldn’t handle letting you down, too.”

And there it was, the reason we had both attempted to place limitations on our relationship even though we couldn’t get enough of each other. Now, I couldn’t decide if it was a good idea for him to be around. Friendship would only lead to heartbreak, and that pain would be far worse than anything Jameson could ever do to me. I was a girl who fell in love a lot, and in the short time I had known Michael, I felt more for him than I had ever felt for any of the other jerks who made my heart flutter. For some reason, I already knew he was the trump card, the one from whom I’d never recover. The question was—would I be willing to risk it all for the chance that he’d never allow himself to heal?

I looked up at his face ready to tell him to go home. His eyes were sad and worried, his stubble-covered jaw was tense, and he was staring at me as if I held the future in my hands. Instinct told me to say goodbye, but my heart…it spoke an entirely different kind of poetry.

I stepped forward and snaked my arms around him. With my head resting on his chest, I said, “Let’s take it one day at a time, Sergeant Pearson.”

His arms wrapped around me and held my body against his. Then he spoke into my hair. “I look forward to it, Miss Grant.”

Michael

It had been a week since Seth left, and Sarah hadn’t had any trouble—none that I knew of anyway. She was always in good spirits and seemed to be back to the tough girly girl that she had been claiming to be. If I thought I felt something for the girl I met a few weeks ago, it was nothing compared to what was going on inside me now, and she, without a doubt, felt the same.

When she wasn’t in class or at the VA, she was with me. She came to the track while I worked on a 1970 Porche 911T Targa. I had to take the engine completely apart, and I didn’t mind having a pretty blonde keep me company while doing it. She told me all about life on the farm while she handed me tools, and I told her stories about growing up with Phil and Joe. I liked having her in the garage; especially after I found out she knew her way around a tool box.

“Hand me the wrench that’s next to you,” I had asked her while I kept my head under the car.

“Which one is that?” she asked as she lifted up the tools as if they were going to bite her.

I rolled out from under the car and was about to describe it to her when she came and stood right above me dangling the torque wrench. Between the grin on her face, the short skirt that would give me a show if the wind blew just right, and the way the light bounced off her hair, she could have been posing for a magazine. My body reacted to her without the help of the stimulating visual, but seeing her in the garage like that almost killed me.

“Don’t underestimate a girl who can drive a tractor.”

“She shoots guns, knows her tools, and can drive a tractor. Why would a girl like you ever need a man?”

“I can think of a few reasons,” she sang.

“I’m sure you can.” I could think of a few reasons, but those were not the thoughts I needed running through my head. I was having a hard enough time keeping my hands off her as it was.

“I can,” she said then leaned down closer to me with a playful grin, “but I appreciate your misogynistic view on gender roles.”

I rolled my eyes and rolled back under the car on my back. “You know I was kidding. I was just saying you are a renaissance woman. There’s nothing you can’t do.” I snuck a peek from under the car when she didn’t respond right away. I saw that the compliment made her blush, and I felt like a hero again.

“I can’t fly,” she mused, reminding me of her sass that I enjoyed so much. “Or read minds.”

“I don’t know about that second one being true. The flying thing, we’ll see what we can do about that one, but the mind reading? I think you’ve already figured that one out.”

She laughed and went on to ask me what power I would want if I were a superhero. Like any guy who grew up reading comics would do, I explained to her the pros and cons of each superhero and never actually answered her question. There were too many variables to consider when only picking one power, but I enjoyed discussing it with her for longer than we probably should have.

That Thursday we went to poker night. What started out originally as guys’ night had morphed into some kind of weird couples’ night even though Sarah and I weren’t technically together, and Jay never brought a woman around. According to Tony, he and Lana were just screwing, but I doubted it when he followed her into the house like a puppy carrying a case of Corona.  Sarah showed up with two kinds of delicious Mexican dip, and I couldn’t figure out how she had time to put it together considering she was at the VA all day. It was a good thing she was prepared since Phil had stopped letting Amy cook two weeks ago when she almost burned her belly on the gas stove.

It was happening again. I felt a little like I was in an alternate universe where this could be my life…with Sarah.

“So, what?” Moretti asked as we sat around the table shuffling cards and devouring some kind of layered dip Sarah had brought. “You two together now?”

“Nah. It’s not like that,” I explained hoping that was enough. My friends were nosy bastards, but I never freely gave them the information they requested.

“She’s been up at the track with you a few times,” Phil challenged.

“And you haven’t picked up a woman since you met her,” Jay added. I wanted to give them all the bird.
Fucking nosy bastards
.

“I say we ask Sarah,” Moretti said through a mouthful of chips.

“Go ahead.” I shrugged hoping they would let it go if I acted like I didn’t care. “She knows the score.”

“Who knows what score?” Amy asked as the girls filed in carrying drinks and more food. Sarah sat next to me and handed me another beer with a smile.

“Michael’s trying to tell us that he and Sarah are only friends,” Phil told the girls. I decided that I wanted the superpower that controlled what came out of my friends’ mouths or the power to cause incredible pain with one look.

“We
are
only friends,” Sarah confirmed nonchalantly. “Why’s that so hard to believe?” I hated the pain that shot through my chest the second she agreed with me without a second thought.

“Umm…have you seen you?” Moretti asked like it was obvious.

Sarah looked down at herself and frowned. “And?”

“He’s trying to say you’re too pretty to be friends with a guy,” I explained to her.

“Pretty, my ass. Sarah’s hot.” That earned Moretti punch in the shoulder from Lana. “Not as hot as you, baby. No one is,” he placated her then proceeded to swallow her face while the rest of us cringed from the show. I didn’t believe for one second that they were only fuck buddies.

“So you’re available then, Sarah?” Jay asked.

“Oh, um, I guess.” Her eyes flicked to me. “I’m not really looking for anything, but technically I’m not seeing anyone.”
Damn right, she’s not seeing anyone.
She was too busy getting under my skin and digging deeper every day.  

“How about you and I go to dinner one night?” Jay asked her while all of us watched and waited. It was everything I could do to keep the anger off my face when Sarah looked at me for permission. I didn’t want her to go—but what could I say? I hadn’t offered her anything more than one day at a time, and Jay was a good guy. I didn’t have an excuse to stop it, which pissed me off even though I was the one to blame.

All of their eyes were on me. Instead of giving into their hunger for drama, I shrugged letting them all think I didn’t care what she did. I saw the disappointment in her eyes, and that hurt more than I wanted to admit, even to myself.

She agreed to dinner with Jay, and he shot a knowing smile my way. I took a sip of my beer to keep myself from lunging across the table at him. The rest of the night dragged on for a lifetime. Amy kept the conversation flowing while Sarah remained quiet next to me. I knew she was hurt, but now wasn’t the time to discuss it. I had a feeling what we needed to say would be a discussion. She checked her phone a few times and frowned every time. When I tried to get her to speak to me again, I asked if she was okay. She blandly replied, “Fine,” every single time. I was really starting to hate that word.

Finally, when everyone started to head home, I stupidly assumed Sarah would leave with me. But she told me to go without her, that she would just get a cab. She didn’t have to, though. Jay offered to take her home instead, which was how I ended up following his black BMW over the bridge back to the city then heading straight to the gym. By the time I was done with the punching bag, I had split my fingers open and the tape on my hands was a nice shade of red. My back was in such bad shape that I couldn’t even work out the next morning in the gym with Moretti, even after taking the pain pills I typically avoided.

He took one look at my hands and laughed. “Why don’t you just admit you like her, dumbass?” He, of all people, did not need to judge the way I handled a woman.

“We’re friends,” I grunted.

Moretti leaned over the leg press while I did my first set of reps. “Yeah, you said that last night, but why? You like her. She obviously has a hard-on for you. The only reason Jay asked her out was to get a rise out of you, and you sat there like a sack of shit. Lana thinks Sarah was probably embarrassed, so she had no choice to agree to dinner with Jay. You’re lucky I distracted her. She was ready to slit your throat after the shit you pulled. She’s protective of Sarah.”

“Why would Sarah be embarrassed?” I asked ignoring everything else about Lana. I never doubted Moretti would end up with a wild one.

“Uhh…because the guy she hangs out with all the time acted like he didn’t give a rat’s ass about her.”

“Whatever, dude. You don’t know anything about her.”

“Maybe not, but her roommate probably knows a little something. Lana went home last night, and I was forced to sleep alone because you’re too chicken shit to take a chance on a girl you may actually like spending time with.”

“So, you’re pissed because you didn’t get laid. That’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Oh, I got laid. That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then make your point because I’m done discussing it.”

“Fine, but one day you’re gonna wake up and realize we all moved on without you. Even Sarah. Then what are you gonna do?” Moretti walked over to the treadmills leaving me leaning against the mirrors wondering when he started caring about anything other than getting between a girl’s legs.

Sarah

Ever since poker night, Michael’s been a little distant. Or maybe I have. I couldn’t really tell. I threw myself into work, had a so-so dinner with Jay, and tried my best to pretend things weren’t weird with Michael. I was doing fine if by fine that meant I was lonely and confused and a little bit broken. So, yes, I was
fine
until I checked my email.

Sender: Unknown Address

To: [email protected]

Red Rover. Red Rover. Send Sarah right over.

I deleted it immediately and tried to forget all about it. The address was unknown, and I had no proof it was Jameson even though I had no doubt it was. It was no different from the text messages I had been receiving for the last week from an unknown number. The messages stopped coming from Jameson’s number after Thanksgiving. The unknown number started with the creepier messages the day I landed back in New York. Hiding them from my brother took more of my attention than the actual messages. All along, I had been hoping that ignoring them would work, but hours later, another one came through.

Sender: Unknown Address

To: [email protected]

What happened to your watchdog? Who will protect you now, Sarah?

Delete. Delete. Delete.

They were getting worse. I knew I wouldn’t be able to pretend the messages weren’t meant for me for much longer. I tried not to panic while considering the potential danger I could be in by continuing to wish Jameson away. When I received another email, I decided to allow myself a small freak-out.

Sender: Unknown Address

To: [email protected]

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Time is running out.

Feeling angrier and more emotionally unstable by the minute, I forwarded the emails to Darrin Houser, the Assistant District Attorney handling the order of protection I had filed. With the email, I also questioned why they hadn’t arrested Jameson yet. I packed up my stuff from the VA and headed home to transcribe the interviews I had done that day. I was surprised to find Michael there waiting on the steps with takeout, considering I had hardly even talked to him in the last few days.

“Chinese,” he said as he held the bag up. I wondered if it was a peace offering. At the very least, he recognized things had been off and was extending an olive branch. I appreciated the gesture.

“Sure.” I nodded and held the door for him. He paused and let me climb the stairs in front of him. “You’ll quit staring at my ass if you know what’s good for you.”

“Trust me. Seeing your ass in that skirt is very good for me.” I turned and grinned at him. He responded with an innocent look that had me shaking my head. I was surprised at how well we could pretend that nothing happened.

We filled our plates with food and sat down at my kitchen table. It took less than two bites for him to ask about my date with Jay. I knew that was why he was here. He might not want to admit it, but he wanted more from me than friendship. But I would never be the kind of girl to chase a guy. I didn’t have it in me. He made it perfectly clear that he didn’t think he could handle a relationship, and as his
friend
, it was my job to respect that.

“It was fine,” I told him.

He responded by sucking in a breath and grinning wickedly. “Uh-oh.”

“What does that mean?”

“You only say fine when things aren’t actually good but you don’t want to admit it out loud.”

“Because you know me so well,” I argued. So, I was feeling a little irritable. With the way the men in my life had been acting lately, I felt like I had good reason to act a bit bitchy.

He sighed. “I know you well enough. Where’d he take you?”

I decided to focus on his questions for the sake of saving the evening. “His restaurant. He said it was the only place he could guarantee good service and even better food.”

“He’s right about that. You do anything else?”