Havoc: Mayhem Series #4

by Jamie Shaw

  “Can I ask you something?” I cut in at a random point in the conversation. I’m not even sure what he was saying, since I was too busy replaying my conversation with Danica in my head.

  “What is it?”

  I take a steadying breath and release my lip from between my teeth. “When you realized you had feelings for me, were you still . . . did you and Danica . . . were you two still—”

  I’m stuttering over my words, trying to hold together the pieces of my own fractured heart, when Mike says, “Whoa. Whoa. Hailey, no. I would never—”

  “But Danica said—”

  “Said what?” Mike scoffs. “Haven’t you learned you can’t trust a word that comes out of her mouth?”

  “She said you fell for me when you were sleeping with her,” I finish, and Mike growls into the phone.

  “She just won’t ever fucking stop, will she?”

  My end of the phone remains silent as I squeeze my lip between my fingers at the far corner of my room. I’m sitting on a bed pillow on the floor with my head against the wall and a vise around my heart.

  “Hailey,” Mike says, “Danica and I only slept together one time since she came back around. The night you waited outside my tour bus, that was the only time. It’s part of why she’s been so pissed off at me all the time, because I wouldn’t do it again. It just didn’t feel right. Even that night, it felt so wrong—”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  Mike sighs. “I didn’t even feel like I was in my own body that night. I’d spent years thinking about this girl I loved, and then there she was, and she just kept throwing herself at me, and—it was fucking stupid. It was so fucking stupid. Even when I was doing it, I couldn’t look at her. I had to—” Mike abruptly stops, his voice pained. “You don’t want to hear this.”

  “I need to,” I tell him, and it’s the truth. Danica’s words are a ghost that will haunt me if I don’t pull the floating sheet away from them.

  “I couldn’t even look her in the eye, Hailey. I flipped her over and took her from behind, and afterward, I felt fucking sick. She fell asleep, and I just felt so wrong. I was so confused. When you asked about her later, I told you she’d probably be sleeping a while, but really, I just didn’t want you to wake her up. I couldn’t even think straight.”

  “Why did you date her?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Mike says, and even though I’m hurting, the sadness in his voice makes me want to reach out across thousands and thousands of miles just to hold him. “Stupid reasons. I felt like I needed to see if my feelings would come back. And I felt guilty about what we’d done on the bus . . . I’m not a one-night-stand kind of guy, Hailey. I felt guilty, like I owed it to her to at least give us a chance.”

  I stop punishing my lip, surprised by the easy way his words comfort me. I knew he slept with Danica that night, and while I had thought the details would hurt me, they’re cool relief over my skin. And when Mike tells me he felt like he owed Danica because of the mistake he made that night—I don’t know why that makes me want to hug him, but it does.

  “I love you,” I say, and my heart slams against my ribs. My eyes widen when I realize what I just said, and I hold my breath, curl my toes, squeeze my fingers—

  “Say that again,” Mike says, and the gentle need in his voice pulls the words from my mouth.

  “I love you,” I repeat, releasing the death grip I have on my own fingers. I uncoil them from one another and try to breathe evenly, try not to panic, try not to have a heart attack. The line is quiet for so long that my anxiety kicks back up. “Hello?”

  “I want to be with you so badly right now,” Mike says. “I want to kiss you and spin you around and be inside you—”

  A nervous giggle bubbles out of me, and Mike growls, “Fuck, I want to be inside you.”

  Heat sparks over my skin, and I blush furiously in my dimly lit room. “I miss you,” I whisper, hearing the lust in my own voice.

  Mike groans. “Jesus.”

  Spurred on by his hungry tone, my inner vixen reemerges, and she’s wearing a bloodred dress. “Do you miss me, Mike?”

  “Hailey,” he warns. “I’m standing in the corner of a greenroom filled with people right now.”

  “Which parts do you miss the most?” I purr, and when he curses into the phone, I can’t help laughing.

  “You’re going to find out when I come home in five weeks, baby,” Mike promises, his filthy tone sparking over my flesh.

  His promise keeps me awake that night as anticipation and fear prickle over my skin. I lie in the dark, thinking, Five weeks until I can lose myself in his arms again.

  Five weeks until I could lose it all.

  Chapter 39

  “Which color?” Danica asks, holding up two dresses worth more than my left leg—one teal, one bloodred.

  “The left,” I say, indicating the teal one as I stand with my back against one of the marble pillars inside a high-end retail store in our town shopping center. The judgmental looks the salespeople gave me as I walked inside the store made it very clear that they don’t believe I belong here, and they’re right. One look at a price tag, and I tucked my hands inside my pockets to keep from accidentally touching anything else. With my luck, it would end up smelling like dog, and I’d have to sell my soul to Danica to buy the damaged goods.

  Danica ponders my suggestion for a moment, looking at both of the dresses. “Mike has always loved me in red though . . .” She giggles and hangs the teal dress back up on the wall. “My cheerleading uniform was red, and you should’ve seen the way he’d watch me at football games, Hail. I think that uniform was the only reason he bothered coming.”

  She smiles as she continues strolling around the store, and I consider stabbing out my eardrums with a clothes hanger as I follow.

  Before we got here, she told me that she plans to find a few sexy outfits for a video message she’s recording for Mike in a few days, one that she believes will make him take her back. And then she’s going to send it to him—to my boyfriend.

  “You should try something on,” she tells me as she walks around the two-story store. Soft golden light illuminates the interior, but bright stage lights are hung on the ceiling for show. This entire shop is like one big runway—one that wasn’t built for the tattered tennis shoes on my feet.

  “No thanks.”

  “Oh, come on. Shopping is no fun if we don’t both try stuff on. Don’t you try things on when you go shopping with your girlfriends?”

  I guess maybe I would if I ever actually had the money to go shopping . . . or if I ever had close girlfriends before Rowan and Dee . . .

  “You do have girlfriends, right?” Danica asks with her brow knitted.

  “Of course I have girlfriends,” I scoff. “I just don’t really like shopping.”

  Danica eyes me skeptically before turning back to a rack against the wall. “We just need to find something you’d like. Liiike—oh!” she squeals, tugging a dress from the rack. “Like this! This is gorgeous. What do you think?” She holds the garment up so I can see it: a very short, very slinky pale pink dress. “Hailey, you would look so pretty in this.”

  “How much is it?” I ask on impulse, but Danica simply shakes her head.

  “It doesn’t matter. Do you think it’s pretty?”

  The truth is, I do. It’s made of some soft, flowy material that I want to reach out and feel between my fingers, and the color is beautiful.

  “I wouldn’t look good in something like that,” I answer, but Danica rolls her eyes.

  “Hailey, do you like it or not?”

  When I nod, she grins from diamond-pierced ear to diamond-pierced ear.

  “Good. You’re trying it on.”

  In a fitting room that contains a plush, embroidered, fringed freaking sitting chair and a hanging crystal chandelier, for God’s sake, I set my five-dollar purse down and take a calming breath. I’d honestly rather be cleaning up dog poop than tiptoeing around this store.
/>   I spent all yesterday evening at the dog shelter, and I worked there again this morning. With the arrival of all of the new dogs rescued from the fighting ring, the shelter is extremely overcrowded and grossly understaffed. The few volunteers who work there have been stretching themselves thin, myself included. Rehabilitating abused animals is a time-consuming process, but it’s worth it to see them go home with a new family, one that will play with them and take care of them and teach them what it means to be loved.

  I don’t have time to be trying on dresses I can’t afford, but here I am, carefully slipping one over my head. I let it slide over my skin—it’s almost as soft as the dress Dee made me for the music video, but not quite—and I stare down at my socked feet before letting my eyes travel up the length of the wall mirror in front of me.

  It’s not anything I would have picked for myself—a cotton-candy-pink dress that’s high in the front but dives low in the back. I zip up the skirt portion of it and stand there studying myself until I bend down to yank off my neon-green socks.

  With my bare toes on the white marble floor, I turn this way and that. I run my hands down the skirt. I spin a little back and forth to watch it fan out around me. I smile in the mirror.

  “Are you ready?” Danica calls from the dressing room across from me, and I swallow as I open the door and step out to meet her.

  She takes my breath away in the bright red dress she chose, which looks like it was made just for her. It fits like a glove on top and ends at a soft hem at the middle of her thigh, and I forget all about the reason she’s buying it as I open my mouth to tell her how pretty she looks.

  “Oh,” she interrupts, scrunching her nose at me. I close my mouth, and she steps in close enough for me to see the line between her brows when she furrows them in disapproval. “You’re right. This dress doesn’t look good on you at all.”

  I stare down at the pink dress that had made me smile at my reflection just a minute ago, and then up into Danica’s dark brown eyes. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, for one, it’s supposed to end here, not here,” she says, poking my thigh and then just above my knee. “I mean, I suppose you could get it hemmed, but—” She lifts her hand to her mouth to conceal a quiet chuckle. “Hailey, you’ve got the worst chicken legs. I figured you would have grown out of those by now.”

  My cheeks stain red as I stare down at my knees while Danica circles behind me.

  “Even your shoulders are bony.” She comes to face me again, shaking her head. “No, this dress looks terrible on you.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “We’ll find you another one,” she says with a white smile before spinning around. “What do you think of mine?”

  “It’s really pretty,” I tell her, still thinking of my chicken knees and resisting the temptation to frown down at them.

  “What about the back?” Danica asks, turning away from me.

  I take in her smooth, lightly tanned skin; the perfect lines of her shoulder blades; the generous slope of her curves; her long, not-bony legs. “Beautiful,” I tell her, and she beams when she turns back around.

  “I think Mike is really going to love this one,” she says, and I force a smile to keep my face from falling. “Okay, get that hideous dress off and let’s pick out something else for round two.”

  We’re on round five when Danica suggests we split up. “I’m going to check out those racks over there, but find something you like, okay? Remember, we’re having fun.”

  Fun, I think as I walk through the store, positive that I’m being watched by security to make sure I don’t steal anything. After the past four fun rounds of trying on dresses, I’m convinced that my knees are too bony, my legs are too stubby, my hips are too narrow, my shoulders are too pointy, my breasts are too small, my skin is too pale.

  It’s not like I could afford any of these dresses anyway, but they’re all so pretty . . . and I guess I just wanted to look pretty in them.

  I stop in front of a mannequin at the front of the store and chew on my lip as I admire it. She’s propped up on a pedestal wearing the most gorgeous dress I’ve ever seen. It’s sleeveless, but high-backed and long, so it would hide my bony shoulders and bony knees. The material is a soft cotton gauzelike fabric in a mist-gray color, with vibrant blue wildflowers gathered into striking bouquets throughout the pattern. The waist is cinched with a blue lace overlay, and the bottom is shaped into pretty, uneven layers lined by the same bright blue as the lace and flowers. The whole dress is stunning, and I stand there too timid to touch it.

  “Oh, I love this,” Danica says from beside me, and I snap out of whatever daydream I was in. She smiles down at me. “You should try it on.”

  I worry my lip as I stare back at the dress, but Danica is already snapping her fingers to get the closest saleswoman’s attention. She makes them find one in my size, and then she nudges me toward the dressing rooms while she continues browsing the racks for something to try on herself.

  Back in my crystal-chandeliered, fringed-chaired room, I remove my tennis shoes and socks and threadbare jeans. I tug my T-shirt over my head and unclasp my bra. I place all my secondhand clothes on the absurdly expensive-looking chair, and then I stand there staring at the beautiful dress hanging against the wall in front of me. I don’t dare glance at the price tag before I remove it from its hanger and slip it over my head.

  It’s magic, how it molds against my curves. The V-cut top pulls my breasts up and together in a way that’s sexy without being indecent, and the lace cincher hugs the curve of my waist flatteringly. The bottom drops down to just above my ankles, and I curl my bare toes against the polished floor as I stare down at it.

  “Hailey, you almost ready?” Danica asks, and I hear her close and lock the door to her own dressing room.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, hold on a sec.”

  I study myself in the mirror as I wait, wondering if Mike would think this dress is as pretty as I do. Would he think I’m pretty wearing it?

  I consider looking at the price tag, but instead, I simply smile at myself in the mirror. Maybe I should snap a picture with my phone. Maybe I should send it to him.

  “Alright, you ready?” Danica calls, and we both step out of our dressing rooms at the exact same time—wearing the exact same dress.

  I freeze when she emerges in my soft gray fabric and bright blue wildflowers—her skin a shade tanner, her legs a lot longer, and her long copper hair cascading softly over her shoulders while mine curls wildly around my face. The bottom hem hits her shins at a much more flattering spot, and I notice all these details as she steps forward with a smile on her face.

  “What do you think?” she asks, and honestly, I think I want to cry.

  Danica turns us both toward the gold-rimmed mirror at the end of the hallway, and I see just how ridiculous I look standing next to her. She looks like a runway model born for this catwalk of a store, and I look like a beggar child who snuck in to try on her clothes.

  “I think you found the perfect dress,” she praises as she watches herself walk toward the mirror and away from it again. She beams as she closes the distance between us, her lips turning up and her eyes sparking prettily. “Mike is going to die when he sees me in this.”

  She bends down to hug me tightly before disappearing back inside her fitting room, and behind my own closed door, I try not to tear the dress as I rush to pull it over my head.

  I know Mike will think it’s beautiful, but pretty dresses like this weren’t made for girls like me.

  They were made for girls like Danica.

  Chapter 40

  “She’s not thriving. She’s losing weight,” my boss says two days after my hellish shopping trip with Danica. I hook my fingers into the chain-link cage as I frown at the mutt balled up in the corner. She looks like a golden Chow mix, but her ice-blue eyes make me think part Border collie or Siberian husky.

  “Was she one of the bait dogs from the fighting ring?” I ask, and Bar
b nods solemnly. Along with the pit bulls we seized a week and a half ago, we rescued a few bait animals—animals that would have been used to help train the pits to fight and kill. The rabbits and kittens went to other facilities, but the puppies and our golden Chow mix stayed here.

  “When she got here, her snout was duct-taped shut, but they didn’t break her teeth or anything, so she can eat . . . She just won’t.”

  “Who’s been her primary caretaker?” I ask, since all of the volunteers were assigned their own group of new arrivals. The plan was for the dogs to bond with one new person before we started switching things around to get them properly socialized.

  “Gabe,” Barb answers. “He has to carry the poor baby outside just to get her to use the bathroom. Otherwise, she just pees on herself. She’s too scared to leave her cage.”

  “How old is she?” I wonder through the emotion in my throat, and Barb shakes her head.

  “Two, maybe three. She’s a little old for a bait dog. We thought maybe she was stolen from someone, but she’s not chipped, and no one has reported a dog like this missing.” Barb sighs heavily over the sound of other dogs barking throughout the shelter. Their noise echoes off the walls, terrifying our poor golden. “My guess is she was a stray they picked up and decided to use.”

  I crouch down as I stare into the cage, wishing the dog would stop tucking her head under her body. If she doesn’t adjust, she’s never going to get adopted. “Can’t anyone foster her?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

  “Beth tried,” Barb says. “But she has other dogs, so it wasn’t working. Goldie here wasn’t aggressive or anything—she was just terrified. She ended up urinating and defecating in the house just like she does in her cage. Beth and her husband tried kennel training her, but then she wouldn’t come out of the kennel. It was just too much.”

  I nod in understanding. Beth is almost as tiny as I am, and I can’t imagine her trying to pick up a urine-soaked golden Chow and carrying her outside for every single bathroom trip.