The Stranger Inside (14 page)

“Yeah, I’m a real heartbreaker,” he muttered. He gazed at me and his eyes softened. “Hi Jodi.” Hearing the warmth in his voice made me spazzy.

I tried replying with a casual, “hi,” tried to sound nonchalant, but suddenly I had a huge lump in my throat.

Thank goodness Eve was clueless. She totally missed the sudden tension in the air. She briskly went on with her introductions, “And the model, slash, beauty queen over there is Chloe, Romeo’s latest victim.”

Chloe greeted me with a big, friendly smile. I instantly hated her. “Jeremy’s not as bad as Eve’s making him out to be,” she said. “Actually, he’s a pussy cat.”

Jeremy raised his eyebrows playfully at this, looking adorable and I felt an immediate jab of pain. Quickly, I laced my fingers through Sawyer’s, wishing with all my heart that Micah guy was sitting across from us instead of Jeremy. Or better yet, that we just hadn’t come.

Sawyer and I got dealt in, and the gambling began. We were only playing with nickels so the stakes weren’t that high, but the guys fully got into it, acting as though they stood to lose or gain a fortune. I’m pretty good at bluffing, though. I was raking in the nickels.

“I’m glad I didn’t suggest strip poker
tonight
,” Zack said, as he lost yet another hand.

“Strip poker?” I grinned as I took his money. “Sounds good.”

He flashed me a smile. “You might see my game improve if we do.”

It was funny, but until that moment, until he smiled, I’d been kind of afraid of Zack. I didn’t know why exactly, since he’d been nothing but nice. Only, I’d catch him looking at me kind of weird sometimes. And, you know, there was that dark, sinister look about him. But like I said, it practically disappeared as soon as he smiled.

“Wanna try your luck?” he asked with a grin.

He was talking about the strip poker, so I laughed with a terse, “No.”

“Yeah, she’d rather take your money than see you naked,” Micah said, “just like the rest of us.”

I liked the band. I really did. They were fun. Amazingly, I was even starting to feel slightly comfortable around Jeremy. I mean, as long as he didn’t smile at me. Or look at me. Or do anything adorable. Those kinds of things still jabbed at my heart. But the rest of the time I was pretty much okay. And I even started to like Chloe, a little. She seemed nice. In fact, everyone did. The only person I couldn’t stand was Eve. And I didn’t exactly
hate
her. I just hated her voice. Big time. I was pretty sure I could tolerate her a lot easier if she didn’t talk so much. But she talked, and talked, and talked.

When it was Zack’s turn to deal, he did it really fancy, like the guys in Vegas. “Hey, babe,” he said to Eve as he shuffled, “get me another beer, would ya?”

“What, I sleep with you one night and suddenly I’m your slave?”

“
One
night,” he smirked. “Look, you’re the hostess, right? Do your job. Get Sawyer and his little fox one too.”

“Hey, yeah, I could use a drink,” Sawyer said. “Only, make mine and Jodi’s sodas, would ya?”

“Soda?” Eve said the word as though it was foreign to her.

“Yeah.” He smiled. “Jodi and I, we don’t drink.”

Eve eyed him skeptically, but once she was over the shock, she went to the refrigerator without making a comment.

“Oh, my gosh, you got Sawyer to give up drinking?” Trista asked incredulously. “What’d you have to do to get him to stop?”

“Nothing,” I shrugged. “I just told him I don’t drink.”

Sawyer put his arm around me. “Who needs alcohol when you’re with a beautiful woman?” he said, pulling me close. I noticed Sawyer take a sidelong look at Jeremy as he said this, and Jeremy must have noticed too, because he immediately threw back his head, taking a long, deliberate swig of beer.

Eve came back to the table, handing me a soda. I reached up and my blouse slid down my arm. “Hey,” she exclaimed, “you have the same tattoo as Jeremy.”

I jerked my hand to cover the tattoo. But the damage was already done. Everyone was staring at me. Chloe looked perplexed. Her round blue eyes seemed to be asking, “How can this be?”

My face burned red hot.

I glanced at Jeremy, but of course
he
wasn’t embarrassed. He was anything
but
embarrassed. Meeting my gaze, he didn’t say a word, but his eyes danced with amusement, and a small smile crept on his lips.

“You have a tattoo?” Sawyer asked with surprise. He moved my hand away to get a better look. “Cool,” he said, studying it closely. “I never noticed it before.”

“I usually wear sleeves to cover it,” I said curtly.

“Is that a ‘J’ on it?” Sawyer asked, still inspecting the tattoo. “It’s so tiny it’s hard to tell.”

“It’s a ‘J’,” Eve assured him. “It’s just like Jeremy’s, only smaller.”

I gave a sidelong look at Jeremy—wondering if he remembered. He and I had gotten the tattoos together. We each got a red heart, outlined in black, with a “J” inscribed in the center. My “J” stood for Jeremy, and his stood for Jodi. Ironically, we’d gotten the tattoos to symbolize our eternal, undying love for each other.

Oh well, the tattoos were eternal.

Unlike my necklace, I hadn’t thought to change its symbol—its meaning. Back when we got them, Jeremy had kissed me passionately, and murmured in my ear, “Tattoos are forever, just like us.”

Chloe gazed up at Jeremy now. “Why do you have matching tattoos?

“We were in love,” he said with a nervous laugh. “People do kooky things when they’re in love.”

Hearing him say that sent my stomach for a loop. I didn’t know if it was because he just admitted to this entire group that we were once in love or if it was more because of the phrase he chose—“
were
in love,” indicating that we weren’t anymore—that everything we had once felt for each other was gone. But in any case, I was suddenly shaking.

I glanced over at Jeremy. It was weird he was able to be so honest about it—about everything. Honesty can be a brutal thing to hear when you’re not expecting it.

“How romantic,” Trista cooed.

“I’ve been planning to get it removed,” I muttered.

“Need to destroy the evidence, huh Jodi?” The sudden soberness in Jeremy’s voice made me look over at him, but he was busy studying his cards and wouldn’t meet my gaze.

Was he doing this on purpose? Deliberately trying to drive me crazy? My hands were shaking so bad I hid them under the table.

“So, are you the Jodi from their song, ‘Little Jodi’?” Eve asked.

Having no idea what she was talking about, I answered uncertainly, “I don’t think so.”

“Yes she is,” Jeremy said, interrupting Eve and whatever she was about to say. Then he turned to me. “Yes you are,” he said softly.

I didn’t know what to say to that. Jeremy wrote a song about me? Sawyer took my hand from under the table, trying to stop it from shaking.

“Well, who’s deal is it?” Zack asked after a moment of awkward silence, but Eve dismissed his attempt to get back to the game. “It’s cold in here,” she said. “Zack, go build a fire, and we can all snuggle up in the living room.”

“What about the game?” Zack protested.

“No one’s interested in the game anymore,” she said with a wave of her hand.

“I am,” the guys all said in unison.

“Well, we girls aren’t,” Eve declared. “Go build a fire.”

Zack and Micah dutifully got up to do her bidding, neither of them looking too pleased about it, but not looking exactly angry either.

“Things were better when we didn’t have girls come to our poker games,” Micah grumbled.

“Yeah,” Zack agreed, “we actually played poker.”

“Well, you didn’t really want to play anymore, did you?” Eve asked, appealing to us girls once Micah and Zack had left the room.

“I didn’t,” Chloe said, running her fingers through Jeremy’s hair. “Snuggling by the fire sounds nice.”

Seeing her be so intimate with Jeremy hurt—a lot. Every time she touched him killed. The whole night I’d been bleeding all over the floor.

“So, Jodi,” Eve said. “You don’t drink?”

I thought that was already pretty clear. “No,” I said slowly. “I don’t.”

“Is it a religious thing or something?”

I shook my head. “I just don’t see the point.”

“Well, it could loosen you up,” she said dryly.

“Never mind her,” Trista interrupted, blowing Eve off with the wave of her hand. “She gets obnoxious when she drinks. Besides, she’s just jealous that Zack called you a ‘little fox.’ I’m like you, though, I try not to drink very much either, and jeez, I wish Micah would ease up—the whole band drinks too much. It’s nice Sawyer stopped for you.”

I smiled at Sawyer. He smiled back, giving me a soft kiss on my forehead, then on my lips. His kisses were soft and warm—nice. Really, really nice. Unfortunately though—so frustrating—I found myself comparing them to Jeremy’s kisses. They had always given me a strange, light-headed, giddy sensation—every kiss—every time. Grrr! It didn’t help that he was here now, in the same room—it made me compare even more than usual.

I glanced at Jeremy from the corner of my eye and he gave me a sardonic look. My face burned and I looked away.

“Okay,” Zack muttered, trudging back into the kitchen. “There’s a stupid fire in the stupid fire place.”

Eve herded us all off to the living room, and put on soft “snuggling” music, turning the lights down low. “Dance with me,” she said to Zack and he silently obeyed, taking her in his arms. They kissed as they swayed to the music.

Micah and Trista danced as well. They were kind of an odd looking couple. He was tall, and she was tiny. But they seemed really in love. It was sweet. “How long have they been together?” I asked Sawyer softly, as we sat snuggling on the couch.

“I don’t know—about a year, I guess. She’s moving, though.”

“Oh. She is?” My heart sank hearing that. It was lame, but I had already started making plans in my head for her and I becoming friends.

“Yeah. I think she’s leaving this month. Micah’s pretty upset about it.”

“I bet.”

Sawyer and I kissed a little, but I sort of tried nudging him away. Jeremy and Chloe were entwined on the couch across from us, reading the lyrics of a CD. They seemed engrossed, but every once in a while I’d catch Jeremy looking at us. It kept zinging my heart.

“How about Zack and Eve?” I whispered as Sawyer continued trying to work me over.

“I don’t know, about a year too, I guess.” Finally, he divulged what I really wanted to know. “Chloe and Jeremy have only been together a couple weeks.” He exhaled a breath, raising his eyebrows. “Jeremy doesn’t stay with a girl very long.”

It was kind of weird the way everyone talked about Jeremy. When Jeremy and I had been together I’d never once thought of him as the type of guy who would drift from girl to girl. For over a year we’d been a tight, inseparable couple. Had my mom not caught us in the midst of our relationship and sent me away, it seemed we would have continued blissfully on forever and ever.

It was strange that everyone made him out to be so incapable of a relationship. They were describing a totally different person than the Jeremy I knew. But of course it had been over two years. Obviously I didn’t know him anymore. It was painful to admit, but what he told Mom seemed to be true—we were strangers.

***

When I got home, I went straight to my laptop. I wrote in my journal, lamenting about the party, realizing how Jeremy still made me catch my breath. Still … having Sawyer with me really helped. So much. He understood how confused I was about Jeremy, understood how hard it was for me to see him with a girl. I couldn’t have endured the night without him.

Finally, I ran out of steam. I took a break from writing, getting a drink of water. When I came back, I stared at my computer screen, then nearly dropped my glass.

In big, bold font was a message, saying,
“
Jeremy is smokin’ hot!”

CHAPTER 10

I couldn’t sleep. First of all, there were my nightmares—creepy, creepy. Then, of course, there was Kenzie. Kenzie. Grr! Kenzie writing messages on my laptop. Kenzie popping up whenever she felt like it. And stupid shock therapy. Blah! The rubber bands idea was stupid. Useless. Totally no help. At all. I had no clue she was even coming. None. What was happening? Why was she taking over my life? Was this how it started for Dad? Did he progressively get crazier and crazier until he started
murdering
people? Then hacked up himself? Plunged his scalpel into his own heart?

No! Dad wasn’t crazy. He didn’t do those things. I would have noticed if I was living with a homicidal maniac. My stomach clenched, remembering that night again—the night Dad came home, covered in blood. “Leave,” he had shouted, throwing the money at me. “Leave!”

I turned over in bed, trying to get the memory out of my head.
Okay, so that
was
crazy.
But before that night he had been totally, totally normal, wonderful—a great dad, a great surgeon—a hero. And he had tried turning me into a hero too. Helping people, that’s what Dad did. He wasn’t a murderer. He just wasn’t.

So, what happened to him?

I thought about that Psychic Center commercial. I’d seen it again last night. I’d never paid attention to it before, ever. But recently, I was drawn to it. I’d gotten a chill when it came on. They’d said something about linking with the dead and all the hairs on my arm stood on end.

I’d heard of psychic people being able to connect with the dead before. I’d never believed in that stuff, though. But then … I didn’t believe Dad was a murderer either. Maybe they could just tell me, explain what happened. Was he somehow framed, or did he really go crazy and grab an axe? … And was I headed down that exact same road? Was I going to turn deranged too?

The thought sent a chill through me.

I jumped out of bed and flipped open my laptop, then clicked on the link to the Psychic Center. What really got my attention was the services they listed—one was connecting via the effects of a loved one that had been violently killed. Hm. Dad had been violently killed. Drawn to it, I clicked on the next link, but then suddenly everything turned hazy. And the room started to tilt. I fumbled with the rubber bands around my wrists, but I couldn’t grasp them. The world was spinning … spinning mad, out of control …