One Day His (The Someday Series Book 2) (20 page)

Still no response.

I kept going. Who knew if I was getting through or not, but I had started this thing and I was going to see it through. “The thing is, this sort of behavior can’t go on. I won’t tolerate it. If it does, I won’t be able to stay and do any more press. I won’t be able to be here for the reporters and photographers that are coming on Thanksgiving to publicize our ‘happy’ family life. The bottom line is, if you kiss Jace again or do anything else that is inappropriate and crosses boundaries, I will go back to school. And if that means that you follow me, so be it. I don’t have any control over that, over you, over Jerry, but I do have control what I allow myself to be subjected to.”

She was silent. It was starting to drive me crazy—which was probably the intended effect. I was going back and forth between wanting to leap off the couch, dive over the coffee table, shake her by the shoulders, and scream, “
Say something! Anything! Just talk!”
and running out of the room like a bat out of hell.

I didn’t do either of those things though—of course. I merely sat in the tense silence and did my best to wait her out. I had a strong feeling that speaking again would be a big strategic mistake. I had said everything that needed to be said. Giving in to the pressure of the silence would be a tacit admission that her tactic was getting to me. I mean, her tactic
was
getting to me. That was true. But I couldn’t let
her
know that.

After a long moment, one that seemed even longer than it actually was, my mother smiled tightly. Then she gracefully stood from the chair she was sitting in and elegantly floated out of the room. I continued to stare at her empty chair, too drained to move. A moment later, the sound of her study door slamming made both Jace and me jump a little in our seats and it snapped me out of my stupor.

I turned to him and shrugged. “Well,” I said, my voice deadpan, “that went quite a bit better than I thought it would.”

Jace

W
ow. I had
thought the first meal I sat through was as awkward and tense as a meal could get but
damn
, I was wrong. This dinner was wiping the floor with that dinner. That first dinner didn’t even run a close second.

Cat and I sat beside each other at the dining table, and her mother was seated at the head of the table. She had not referenced the impromptu spin-the-bottle session she’d pulled on me or the conversation that I knew must have been terrifying for Cat this afternoon. Even though she hadn’t said anything about those things, it was very clear that she was livid. The tension in the room was so thick I wasn’t even sure if you could cut it with a knife, you might need a chainsaw. My blood pressure was rising by the second from just sitting here and I wasn’t even part of the unspoken power struggle that was clearly going on. It was the same principal as getting a secondhand high but without any of the fun benefits. Secondhand pot high was great, you felt relaxed and calm. Secondhand blood pressure high was the opposite, you felt tense and anxious.

One of the elements that was maxing out the tense meter was, although there was definitely a lot of
silent
communication going on, not a single word had been spoken the entire time that we had been sitting here. Even when Rachel brought the food out, Angelica merely thanked her with a tight-lipped smile.

Although, in theory, you would think that silence would be a lot easier to block out than angry outbursts, I found myself having a pretty tough time with it. Maybe it was because, with the way I’d grown up, I was used to screaming and violent, crazy behavior. This felt like a Twilight Zone episode of the Stepford Wives. It was creepy as fuck. By the main course, I found that I could barely manage to choke the food down because my throat was so tight with anxiety.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more fucked up, Jerry came into the room, all smiles and manic pent-up energy.

“Angelica, I managed to get what you wanted. It wasn’t easy. Believe me. But here’s the info you asked for.”

Angelica smiled at him benevolently. “And is it illuminating as I suspected?”

Jerry gave me a bitter look, filled with venom and hatred. I seriously wanted to kick this guy’s ass. I was just waiting for him to give me a reason.

“It’s even better, A. Take a look.”

Cat looked at me questioningly and I shrugged, puzzled. I had no idea what this shit was about.

Cat’s mother opened the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of papers. She scanned them and then let out a cruel laugh. It reminded me of the kind of laughs you hear from the villains in Disney cartoons and it sent a shiver of fear up my spine. I didn’t know why, but I had a distinct feeling that this was all about to go very badly. For me in particular.

“Jace,” Angelica said, her voice as sweet as honey, “do you know what I have here?”

I decided to employ her tactic from earlier. I stayed quiet, not backing down but not saying a word either. Her grin widened. Apparently, she viewed this as a victory.

“This,” she cried, brandishing the papers triumphantly over her head like a sword she was about to bring down on my neck, “is your discharge packet from the military.”

I sat for a moment, not speaking. This was no tactic though. I was truly stunned. “Those papers are confidential,” I finally rasped.

Angelica waved this away as if it had no bearing on the subject at hand. “The thing I think you should
really
be concerned about is what they say, not how I got them. There are things in here that I’m guessing my dear daughter doesn’t know. Am I correct?”

I felt my fingers go numb. I didn’t want to have any secrets from Cat. I had wanted to tell her about my past, about what had happened. But we just hadn’t had the time. I wanted to have the time and space to tell her about them in my own way. I wanted to explain and talk with her, answer her questions. I didn’t want her to hear all of my most personal failings victoriously blurted out by Angelica in the same way that chess players yell, “Checkmate!”

Turning to Cat, knowing that those things were not going to be a luxury I would be afforded, I heard my voice come out stronger than I felt. “Cat—” I started to explain, but when I looked at her, but she wasn’t even looking at me. She was glaring furiously at her mother.

“There’s nothing in there I need to know, Mom. There’s nothing you can tell me about Jace that will change the most important thing I know about him—that he’s the man I love.”

Angelica was not going to be deterred by anything as trivial, in her mind, as what Cat had just said. She directed her attention back to the papers in front of her and flipped through them, making a show of perusing them to refresh her memory. I got the feeling that it was all fake, for effect. I got the feeling, in fact, that she could have recited the contents of the papers pretty much verbatim after having glanced at them just once.

“Well, it seems like the man that you love had quite a colorful history in the military. It seems that he was in a convoy that hit an IED. Apparently, there was quite the explosion. Somehow, Jace was the only one to walk away. But not everyone died in the explosion. No, several of your fellow soldiers lingered for hours waiting for help to arrive. Isn’t that right, Jace? It says here you tried to save them. Tried to drag them to safety. Tried to stop the bleeding. Tried to keep them conscious until someone came to bail all of you out.

“But, sadly, it seems like you failed at all that. Quite badly, really. All of them died. I don’t really see how you could fail worse than that, really.

“And then, after that, your next mission was also a total and complete disaster. I see that friendly fire killed not one but two of your fellow soldiers. Now, you were never
convicted
of this hideous crime. But I have to wonder if that is partly because, during the trial, you were diagnosed with…well, the medical file says PTSD, but the description of symptoms tells a much fuller story. Catatonic for long periods? Uncontrollable panic at loud noises? Flashbacks? Losing time? Sounds like just plain ‘crazy’ to me. Or maybe it was just convenient. Either way, I don’t think any of your behavior had anything to do with PTSD at all. You are smarter than I give you credit for, though, because I see here that you were let out on a ‘medical’ discharge. Hmmm…that’s really just another word for ‘dishonorable,’ right? If we’re being honest? But hey, it’s better than prison, right?”

Angelica tamped the edges of the papers together and carefully slid them back into the envelope, the condescending smile never leaving her face. She handed the envelope back to Jerry. “Put those in the safe deposit box, will you, Jerry? We don’t want to lose track of them. Ever.”

For the first time since Cat and I had been together, I felt like the walls were closing in on me. Literally. The room began spinning. My tongue swelled in my mouth and sweat broke out down my back. Panic rose inside me as my heart pounded like hammer against my rib cage.

My eyes darted around the room, trying to get my bearings. I needed to focus on one thing if I had any hope of centering myself.

Everything was blurry. Jerry’s face, Angelica’s face. Even Cat’s face was just fuzzy circles.

I felt like I was going to pass out. I felt like I was going to throw up. I felt like I was going to die.

I stood up and, without thinking any further ahead than my intense need to escape, bolted from the room. I heard Cat calling after me, but I didn’t stop or even slow down. I kept going, straight out the front door, down the driveway, and as far away from there as I could get.

Cat

S
hit! Shit shit
shit shit shit.

I picked up my phone with trembling fingers and swiped Jace’s name in my contacts, dialing his number yet again. I didn’t care that I’d dialed his phone twenty-five times in as many minutes. I didn’t care that I’d left voicemails on at least half of the calls. I didn’t care that this was making me appear to be an insecure, maybe even crazy girlfriend. All I cared about was that he was okay.

I kept hearing the voice of Natalya, his ex-girlfriend, as she had told me not so long ago that Jace had contemplated suicide in his darker moments. His terrible experiences while growing up in foster care coupled with the combat he had seen overseas—which I hadn’t known the specifics of until tonight, but which I had been aware existed—had left him with an awful case of PTSD. I had tried on multiple occasions to get him to open up to me about it—about both what had happened in his past and how it affected him now—but he hadn’t ever wanted to talk about it. It was possible that he was ashamed or it was painful. Either way, I hadn’t wanted to push things.

Now, I really wished that I had. I wished that I had kept asking questions, that I had prodded and pressed until I’d gotten him to let me in on where his head, actually, was. If I had done that, maybe I would know where he was right now. Maybe I would have a good idea of where he might have gone, what he might do.

Maybe I would have felt more confident that he wouldn’t hurt himself.

He’d left so fast that I’d been in shock. One minute, he’d been beside me, and the next, he was out the door. When I’d gotten up to chase after him, Jerry had stood in my way and told me to, “Let him go.” I’d told him to get out of my way several times before finally pushing past him, but in doing so, I’d wasted precious minutes in which Jace had disappeared. By the time I’d made it outside, he’d been nowhere to be seen.

“Pick up, pick up, pick up…” I muttered desperately into the phone as it rang.

No luck. “You have reached Jace Butler. Leave a message after the beep.”

Shit!

I angrily brushed away several tears that had slipped down my cheeks. This was not the time to lose it. I needed to keep it together, not cry like a baby. But no matter how many times I told myself that, the waterworks just kept coming.

I was terrified. This was my nightmare. This was exactly what I had been worried about when I’d told Jace that he should go. Leave. I knew what my mother was capable of. And I also knew the reason that I had dropped the subject way too easily. Why? Because, deep down, I’d wanted Jace here. With me. I was selfish, just like my mother had always claimed I was. If anything happened to Jace, it would be my fault.

No
! Nothing was going to happen to Jace. I couldn’t think like that.

I tried calling again. This time, I’d leave yet another message. I’d left so many voicemails, most of them along the same lines, so it wasn’t like leaving one more was going to make any difference…but I couldn’t help myself. I just had to say something, even if only to hear myself speak. They all said variations of the same things.

“Jace? Please call me.
Please
.”

“I just need to know you’re okay.”

“I love you. You know that. Please just come back.”

“I’ve packed all your stuff up. We’ll leave the minute you walk in the door. We’ll go back to Arcata. You wanted to before, and I was so stupid not to listen to you. Please. Let’s just go back.”

“Everything will be fine. Please,
please
, just call me and let me know you’re okay!”

My mother had gotten her wish. She had cost me the person who meant the world to me. Despair, like I’d never felt before, filled me.

At a loss of what else to do, I found myself staring down at my phone as if it was the magical solution to this entire horrifying fiasco. The face stared back at me blankly. Closing my eyes I
willed
the screen to light up with Jace’s photo, indicating that he was calling me. I begged the universe, God, whoever was listening to please, please let him call me back. I opened my eyes. Nothing. Same blank screen.

Sliding down the wall in my room, I half-sat, half-collapsed as I finally gave in to the anguish that was crashing over me. The tears came in a flood, one after the other, pouring down my face, and I was powerless to stop them.