Dangerous To Love

by Toni Anderson, Barbara Freethy, Dee Davis, Leslie A. Kelly, Cynthia Eden, J. Kenner, Meli Raine, Gwen Hernandez, Pamela Clare, Rachel Grant

  “Vicki Santi says ‘hi.’” Vicki’s parents own the pizza place. She’s worked there since, I don’t know, kindergarten? Seems like it. I loved sitting near her in school because she always smelled like oregano and basil. Made my mouth water and want more pizza.

  “How’d she know I’m in town?” I ask through a huge mouthful of luscious perfection.

  Amy eyes my anchovy, artichoke, feta cheese, banana pepper and sausage pizza. “Oh, she guessed,” she says, laughing.

  I want to join in, but my tongue is doing a dance. A happy, tasty dance of joy. Ordering a big old Sicily’s and sitting around in our fat pants is our thing. Me and Amy.

  Next up, pints of ice cream and entire seasons of Sons of Anarchy. We know how to party.

  “I can’t believe The Claw showed up on your first day of work!” Amy mumbles through her own mouthful of feta and tomato pizza.

  “First minute of the job! Like she was stalking me,” I mumble back. A long, stringy piece of mozzarella ricochets down my chin. My tongue finds it, winds it around and I eat it.

  Amy laughs. “You and that tongue. Still tie cherry stems with it and it alone?”

  I blush. “Yep.”

  “Find a guy yet who can appreciate that?” She wiggles her eyebrows and leers.

  The pizza nearly chokes me. “Um, nope.”

  “You still haven’t—ah, come on! Of course you…” Her voice goes still. “Carrie?” she asks softly.

  All the joking has faded. I feel stupid. Twenty-two and a virgin?

  A virgin who can tie a cherry stem with her tongue?

  What a waste, my roommate Janie had said when I showed her and her friends back in Oklahoma City. No guy’s ever gonna benefit from that.

  “Nope.” I’m shutting down, but I don’t want to. Talking is what I need. Bearing my soul. Pouring out how I feel about life and my dad’s death. My new job and, yes, Mark. I still haven’t told her anything about him. She knows all about our past. I’m dying to tell her about his visits to my trailer.

  Amy is slumped on my tiny sofa, dressed like me, her hair messed up and her makeup wiped clean.

  We’re back to being Carrie and Amy, and that’s all I want.

  “You’re still a virgin?” she asks, breathless. “I’m not.”

  “You had sex in ninth grade with Zach Burham, Amy. Of course you’re not.” And of course I know, because she cried in my arms afterward. Didn’t have sex again for two years, until she fell in love with Dane Crawford. Captain of the basketball team. He was six-six. Did I mention Amy is five feet even when she stands up straight?

  They were cute. Until she caught Dane having sex with another girl when she went to visit him at his college. Long distance relationships are great. Amy learned a lesson:

  Don’t surprise your boyfriend with an unexpected trip to his college on a Friday night.

  I’d held her in my arms while she cried then, too.

  “No one, though?” Amy prods.

  “Not anyone worth…that,” I say. Too true. The men who worked midnight shift at the check processing center weren’t exactly the dating type. Pale and older, with bellies and balding heads, they looked like my dad’s generation. Except my dad was way healthier.

  “Yeah, that is pretty important. What about Mark?” she sputters.

  “You know we never did it!” I give her a look that asks WTF?

  “But he lives here now,” she adds, jerking her thumb toward the cabins.

  “You know that?” I ask, and then I stop before I say another word. Of course she knows that. Everyone in town probably knows that Mark lives in Brian and Elaine’s cabins. Just like they know I’m back in town.

  And the gossips have already started wagging their tongues.

  A wave of smallness and shame wipes my appetite away. In Oklahoma City, no one knew me. No one cared. I never told my roommates where I went every Saturday from noon to three. The one hour I got to visit Dad was the highlight of his life. We couldn’t hug. I couldn’t feel his strong, protective arms around me. The deep rumble of laughter in his chest was long gone. A tight hug, an embrace of holding on to me and telling me it would all be okay never happened in those three years.

  And it would never happen again.

  At least living thirteen hundred miles away from my hometown, I didn’t have to deal with judgment on top of it all. And now he’s dead.

  But the shame lives on here in Yates.

  “Of course I know it,” Amy says, setting aside the pizza box. There’s enough left over for me to take a slice to work for lunch.

  I can’t eat any more right now. My throat is too full of my unresolved past.

  “Townies always know,” she says, digging in my tiny fridge to grab her pint of ice cream. Without looking at me, she peels off the top and scoops an enormous piece of what looks like cookies and cream into her mouth. She turns and freezes, her mouth open. The ice cream is a blob in her mouth.

  “Carrie, you look like you’re about to pass out,” she says around the cold blob.

  “What have I done?” I whisper, finally safe enough to break down. “Coming back was a horrible idea. The Claw. Mark. The dean. My dad. All of it.” My voice drops and so does my body as I move fast to the bed, laying on my back and staring at the fiberglass ceiling.

  “I shouldn’t have come back. But after Dad died, what was I supposed to do?” My throat is full of salty tears and regret. It’s the taste of bitterness at having no choices. “I wasn’t getting anywhere in Oklahoma. Elaine kept telling me I always had a place here. The alumni association called and asked if I wanted to apply for the job. Free tuition and a full-time salary with benefits sounded like it was the right move.” My voice cracks. I’m rambling.

  I don’t care.

  Amy finishes her mouthful. Those eyes are warm and nonjudgmental. Caring and just listening. I remember why I came home again. Is having one friend, one tried-and-true BFF enough, though?

  Enough to put myself through all this?

  “You didn’t just come home because of that, Carrie,” she whispers. She says it so quietly it’s like a threat. A threat to say what she really means.

  I’m all fed up with feeling threatened. Been there, done that. “You think my plan is crazy.”

  “Getting a job at the college and snooping around to find the real person who was doing all that drug smuggling? To try to clear your dad’s name? No. It’s fine. That’s a smart plan. Why not jump out of a plane without a parachute or travel back in time to be Jack the Ripper’s mistress?” Her voice has this strange blend of compassion and sarcasm that only Amy can manage.

  “It’s not dangerous,” I protest. Weakly.

  “The hell it’s not! Carrie, the cops investigated. They found evidence.” She held up a palm as I started to argue. “Mark was part of the team. Don’t you think that if there’d been any kind of clue that could have freed your dad, he’d have found it?”

  And now we are back to Mark.

  Everything leads back to Mark.

  “Maybe Mark missed something. My dad kept trying to tell me—”

  “I don’t think you’ve had time to grieve properly, Carrie,” Amy says softly. The fast change in topic cuts me off mid-sentence.

  “What does that mean?” I ask. My tone is more vicious than I want it to be. I can’t help it. She doesn’t take it personally. “People say that, but how do you ‘properly’ grieve? Why are there rules about how you’re supposed to act when your only parent dies?”

  An unspoken extra hovers in the air, because what I’m not saying is harder to deal with.

  “And the way he died,” she says, putting the unspoken to words. What I thought would hurt to hear actually doesn’t. I’d forgotten that Amy was real. Honest and human and real.

  More tears fall down my cheeks. I let them. It feels good to cry in front of someone else, for once.

  It feels good to be able to.

  My dad was found stabbed in prison, right through the heart, his hand on
the knife. The authorities ruled it a suicide. His death happened a few days before he was being called to give yet another deposition about the Yates drug trafficking.

  Timing is everything.

  The photos the medical examiner showed me when I insisted are burned in my brain. The sight of dad on a slab, in the morgue, is my last view of him.

  He’s with me now, though. I unpacked his urn last night, after Mark left.

  Dad is next to the little aloe vera plant Elaine left next to my sink. A silly place, but where do you put your dad’s ashes?

  I don’t think there really is a ‘good’ place.

  Amy reaches in to the freezer and pulls out my pint of cherry cordial ice cream. “Frozen therapy,” she says.

  I try to laugh, but it comes out like a choking snot bubble. Then I really do laugh.

  “God, I’ve missed you,” I confess. Our eyes meet and she isn’t sleek, corporate Amy. She’s just my old friend.

  My now friend.

  “You are so strong, Carrie,” she says, digging in to her own pint, fishing out a chunk of cookie.

  “I’ll trade some of my strength for cash,” I reply.

  She snorts. “You’d have a lot of cash.” Through a mouthful of ice cream she asks, “You seriously going to be okay? I don’t like the idea of you trying to take on the dean.”

  By the time I answer, the silence is so thick it feels like a cloud between us. I pierce it. “The dean put himself in this position. He could have fired me before I started.”

  Her eyes pop open suddenly, like an owl’s. “Oh, my God, why didn’t he? Maybe he’s not guilty.” Her eyes plead with me to consider the idea. “Maybe your dad was wrong, and Landau isn’t part of all this.”

  I make a skeptical sound. “Claudia confronted me because she was pissed she didn’t get the job,” I explain. “Something’s really not adding up there.”

  “Why would she want it?”

  I shrug, then take a small taste of my ice cream. My appetite comes back. Yum.

  “And why would they give it to you instead of her?”

  I give her a bitch, please look, complete with one upturned eyebrow. “Because I am awesomesauce and she’s a skanky ho!”

  That gets us into a giggle fit. The seriousness is fading. Good. Spilling my guts helps, but only in limited quantities. If I talk about my dad too much in one long conversation, I’ll be useless for days. Depression comes in giant waves with no relief in sight. I can’t be useless now, hiding in my room in darkness and calling off work, like I did sometimes in OKC.

  I just can’t.

  Amy flips my laptop up and finds Netflix. It’s one of the few expenses I justify. Eight bucks a month for all that entertainment is worth it. Sons of Anarchy’s opening scene appears, and we let the past go back to rest.

  The future remains to be seen.

  Five hours later we’ve binged. Binge-watched episodes, binged on pizza, binged on ice cream. I am binged out.

  As she clicks out of Netflix, my homepage appears on the laptop. It’s set to a major news channel, and there’s a huge picture of a woman who looks just enough like Amy to make her hand pause.

  “Fourth woman disappears in southern California,” the headline screams. I read it aloud. We both stare at the screen in silence after. Our eyes rake over the screen, reading.

  “Twenty-two,” she finally says. Amy absent-mindedly reaches up and touches her hair. “Maybe I should dye it a different color.”

  I frown. “Just be safe. Four women? And they all have black hair, brown eyes, and similar features? It’s creepy, Amy.”

  “I know.” Her voice is small and soft. Sing-songy, like she can’t deal with this. “And they’re all our age.”

  “Some of the newscasters are saying the police think it’s a serial killer.” I hate even saying those words.

  She blows out a long sigh, like she’s been holding her breath. “Yeah, except they aren’t finding bodies.”

  We shudder in unison.

  Somehow, the fact that the women’s bodies haven’t appeared makes it all worse. You can drive yourself a little crazy worrying about being next. Especially Amy.

  She turns to me, eyes clouded with too many emotions. “I’m already careful.”

  “But—”

  “And I’ll be even more careful from now on. Promise.” She holds up her pinkie. I haven’t done this in years. We pinkie swear.

  Our hug is crushing. Amy’s got that glazed look that comes from a food coma and watching a little too much Charlie Hunnam.

  “I have to work tomorrow or I’d stay,” she says with regret. We’re both pretending we’re done with the topic of the kidnappings.

  We really want to be done.

  “I have to work, too!” I chirp. We shake our heads and marvel at our new life. What happened to the wild party girls?

  They’ve been replaced by working women who can’t stay up past midnight.

  She leaves. I watch her car taillights turn to the right and fade out as she heads back to her apartment. The night air has chilled, and my arms prickle with gooseflesh. No moonlight tonight. Clouds are everywhere, the moon suddenly modest.

  I walk back in the trailer and close the door. As I pack up my extra pizza, I see Amy’s left a piece of hers. I’ll wrap it up and either eat it or call her and have her come over tomorrow.

  Searching for something to wrap it up with, because my fridge is too small for the pizza box, I jump and make a scared noise when someone knocks three times on the door.

  I grab a big sandwich bag and shove her slice in. “You came back for your pizza, huh?” I say to the door as I open it. “Can’t even let one slice of Sicily’s go to waste—”

  My words stop, like my vocal cords slammed on the brakes. It’s not Amy at my door.

  It’s Mark.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Hey,” he says, his voice like silk dragging against gravel. The sexy tone is smoky, and his eyes are dark with an unrelenting desire. I remember this Mark. I dream about this Mark most nights.

  Heat rises fast below my belly. The cool night air chills my skin at the same time. I don’t know whether I’m hot or cold. All I know is my eyes can’t stop looking deep into his.

  This isn’t supposed to happen.

  “I came to replace your lock,” he says.

  “That’s an original pick-up line,” I mumble.

  He laughs. “Can I come in?” he asks when I stand there, quiet and starting to shiver. “It’s cold out here.” His finger strokes my bare forearm. It’s like he’s branded me. The skin stands out, as if given a special purpose.

  And that sensation joins the heat that makes me gasp. I’m holding my breath. The comfort of his arms last night feels dangerous, suddenly. I’m vulnerable. I’m needy.

  I’m conflicted.

  “Why?” I find my voice, wrapping my arms around my breasts. The nipples strain against the thin cloth of my cami. It’s not because of the cold night air.

  His eyes soften. There’s a pleading in them. That’s new, and it makes me blink, then swallow. Something clicks in my throat. Something inside me melts, just a little.

  It feels like I’m betraying my dad.

  It also feels right.

  “Can we just talk?” He holds his hands up, palms facing me, in a gesture of surrender. Normally I’d respond with an eye roll, but he’s sincere. I can tell. I can feel it. And I want to believe it.

  So badly that it makes the heat burn more.

  “Just talk,” I whisper.

  “I swear,” he says, holding up two fingers. “Boy Scout promise.”

  The snort that comes from me feels good. I can sense his cockeyed grin as I step back and let him inside. Legends say that the only way a vampire can get into your home is if you invite him.

  Maybe I’ve just welcomed danger into my little safe home.

  But maybe I like danger.

  Or I just want to hear him out. A pang of wishfulness that Amy were still here hits m
e. She would know what to do. She could guide me.

  I’m on my own now, and Mark’s standing a few feet away, all sandy blonde hair and smooth skin, a tiny shadow of stubble on his cheek. Those lips move with reactions ranging from frowns to amusement as he surveys my place.

  “Cute,” he says.

  “It’s very 1993, isn’t it?” I say, extending my arm in a gesture of welcome. The thin cotton of my cami brushes against my braless nipple and I clench my arms around my chest, fast. Did he see? My arm presses my tight nipples into my flesh and I feel the heat churning inside, making me flutter with need.

  “I meant you’re cute,” he says, eyes on my arms, then my face. “I like what you’re wearing.”

  “Oh, please. I’m wearing pajamas. I’m dressed for bed.”

  “I like that. Besides, I saw you in your pajamas last night.”

  Oh, that voice. He sounds like whisky and jazz.

  I have to harden myself. I cross my arms tighter in an act of defiance and say, “Seriously, Mark? If you’re here for a booty call, you’ve come to the wrong place. Thank you for last night, but I don’t need to be rescued again.”

  A genuine smile stretches his face. His dimples make their appearance. He relaxes, one hand tucking itself in the back pocket of his jeans, and he looks at my eyes. He rests against the wall of my trailer.

  “No booty call. No rescue. It’s just…I can’t help it, Carrie. Three years without seeing you. You just disappeared one day. Amy wouldn’t tell me where you went. Elaine and Brian clamped shut. It took me four months to figure out you were in Oklahoma City.”

  I gasp. “You had me tracked?” All the comfort I felt from last night drains out of me.

  “No. Yes. Maybe,” he admits. “I realized you followed your dad. But I spent most of those four months going out of my mind trying to find you.” His eyes flash between desperation, tenderness, and anger. Bending slightly, he takes a step in and rests his hip on the little dining table. I move, facing him.

  We’re a foot apart.

  “Amy told you I was safe.”