by Lyla Payne
The light turns green but no one is behind me, so I stay put and open the e-mail.
Ms. Harper,
My husband and I have taken our time responding to your inquiry as your initial e-mail struck us as suspicious. After some simple research, we have discovered that you are no longer a grad student, as you claimed, nor were you ever studying psychology. We’re unsure why you felt the need to employ a ruse when contacting us for the first time, and I’m sure you understand our desire to keep things aboveboard. For Dylan.
My face squinches, a reaction to the confusion muddling my thoughts. I haven’t the slightest idea why they would be so protective of Dylan. Unless something very bad happened that caused him to leave Texas?
We assume that the reason you’re contacting us is not for professional reasons at all but personal. It’s understandable that you might want to try to get information about Dylan without anyone being the wiser given that your mother, Felicia Harper, was a private woman. We’ve all abided by her wishes and the terms set forth in the adoption, but now that she’s gone and you and Dylan are both adults, we would give you our blessing in forming a relationship if that’s what you both want.
My husband and I would also like to meet you.
The light turns red again. Green. Yellow. Red. The minutes tick past, my heart races. Thunder gets closer, shaking the ground under my feet. Lightning flashes, illuminating corners of the sky that are normally hidden in shadows.
And the storm breaks.
THANK YOU!
I would like to thank you for sticking with Gracie and me through 5 books and 1 novella! For those of you groaning over this cliffhanger ending, I have some good news! After the novella (December) and Book 6 (April) the MAIN storylines we’ve been following will be resolved. The Lowcountry series and Gracie’s adventures in life and ghost-whispering will continue, though, with fresh stories!
If you enjoyed Not Quite Clear please consider leaving a review! If you don’t feel comfortable leaving one of your own, even taking the time to “like” one that resonates with you is a huge help to the author, and we really appreciate it. Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll read more from me in the future.
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The next book in the Lowcountry series will be a novella, Quite Precarious, that will be available FREE to newsletter subscribers this winter, and available everywhere December 29th, 2015. The next full length installment is expected on April 26th, 2016.
Also, don’t forget to grab a copy of Mistletoe & Mr. Right for yourself or someone else this holiday season! It’s available in hardcover or ebook!
I have a NEW SERIES starting very soon that I think you Gracie readers might enjoy. The first book, Secrets Don’t Make Friends, will be out in a few weeks but you can read the first three chapters by turning the page!
TRIGGER WARNING: The beginning of this book deals with a physically and emotionally abusive relationship in a honest and realistic, but violent manner.
Secrets Don’t Make Friends
by
Lyla Payne
1.
Dinah
If I’d wanted to escape the slimy tentacles of Tritt Wadsworth Johnson III, I should’ve left Iowa. Maybe the whole country would have been better off if I had.
But the things I loved about my home state were the same things that made it a poor hiding place—the wide open spaces full of empty backroads, the fact that there were only a handful of towns where the entire population couldn’t learn your name and your business within a week, and the tendency of its occupants to embrace a live-and-let-live philosophy.
The University of Iowa was less than an hour’s drive from Muscatine, where the Johnsons were firmly enthroned as sultans, but when I’d enrolled six years ago, I’d never heard of Tritt—or his family, for that matter—and being from the opposite side of the state ended up putting me at a serious disadvantage.
No one had warned me about him when I met him at that party sophomore year. Nobody had whispered in my ear to run like hell when I started to fall in love, endlessly charmed by his smile and the money he threw around. It would’ve been nice to think it was because no one knew what I was signing up for, but in reality, everyone at home was just as terrified of the guy as I’ve learned to be. Fear seemed to be the only way to survive.
And now it was too late.
Tonight’s party in my apartment had gotten out of hand, but that was sort of the point. The more people crammed inside, the better the chance that Tritt and I wouldn’t end up alone at any point. He was mad hard to get rid of when he was wasted, and with him being six-foot-three and me just a smidge over five-foot-four, fighting him off was impossible.
Not that I’d tried lately. I’d given that up around my third black eye and my first cracked rib.
Smoke hung in the air, lifting and swirling in the glow of the cheap light fixtures in my apartment. The fit my roommate was sure to have over people smoking in the apartment would be epic, but it was January in fucking Iowa. Did she expect them to freeze to death?
Jeyne hated everything about parties—and also about me, come to think of it—so pleasing her wasn’t a real concern. The pre-Tritt Dinah wouldn’t have blamed her for hating me. Back then the stink of smoke in my clothes and hair made me nauseated and I preferred to avoid hosting so others were in charge of the cleanup. Or better yet, to stay home alone in my pajamas and have a Netflix marathon.
A sigh wriggled loose. That definitely wasn’t an option anymore. I needed others around, and that meant throwing parties and generally being a huge bitch to my poor, accidental roommate. Otherwise it was just Tritt and me, and that never turned out well.
For me.
So Jeyne hated me. There were worse things, and based on our personalities alone, it wasn’t likely that we would ever have been besties, anyway. She’d answered an ad I’d posted last August, desperate for a buffer that had, in reality, done little to curb my boyfriend’s abuse, and five months of living together hadn’t brought us any closer to painting each other’s nails.
Or tolerating each other’s presence.
She had expressly asked me to keep it quiet tonight because she had some big deal medical school thing in the morning, but she always had something going on that required her nose to be stuck in a book. No one could possibly need to study that much. I honestly had no idea there was still so much learning to be done after a person graduated from medical school, but apparently Jeyne could lose her whole future in about half a second at her residency program.
I rolled my eyes just thinking about it.
She was here somewhere, but there were at least fifty people crammed into the two-bedroom apartment by campus. I didn’t know half of them. Most of them were neighbors or fellow elementary school teachers, but a few were people I’d met at the gym or kept in touch with after college. I squinted, trying to pinpoint Tritt’s location in order to steer clear, but his hulking frame didn’t stand out. The smoky haze in the room, combined with the three Long Island iced teas I’d already knocked back, didn’t help my attempt, of course.
I looked down at my watch. Ten o’clock was still an hour away. This was going to be a long night.
“Hey, Dinah girl!” My best friend Lindy, a sorority sister of mine from college, stumbled up to me and slung an arm around my shoulders. Her long, reddish-blond hair whipped me in the face, the smell a mixture of cigarettes and shampoo. “What’s happening?”
I nodded at the Greek letters stitched on her chest. Lindy still worked for the sorority’s regional office in an attempt to never grow up. “I can’t believe our former president would walk around Lohan-drunk and sporting letters.”
“Who’s gonna turn me in? You?” She wrinkled her nose. “Plus, I am the social chair advisor. Right? And what am I doing right now? CHAIRING SOME MOTHER
FUCKING SOCIAL SHIT.”
“Okay, okay. Stop yelling.” I smiled, grabbing the arms she’d tossed wide as if she wanted to bear hug the lot of us. I couldn’t help eyeing the room as I did. Her antics didn’t exactly go unnoticed, but at least they didn’t draw a crowd. “You sound like Samuel L. Jackson.”
She snorted, then winced. “Whiskey. Nose. Ow.”
“That’s what you get.”
“The reference is all wrong, Dinah. This is Iowa. There are no black people.”
“Except your boyfriend, remember?”
A sly grin snuck across her face. “Oh, yeah. Jesse. Right. Is he black?”
I laughed and she joined in, because we both knew how nuts she was over that man, and who could blame her? He was half-black, half-Hispanic, all sexy. His green eyes against his coffee-and-cream skin was made for honest-to-God swooning.
Though Lindy wasn’t exactly wrong about the racial diversity of Iowa as a whole, the percentages in Iowa City were better than other places, thanks to the university. Still, it was kind of a running joke since people from either coast lumped Iowa in with the rest of the Midwestern hillbillies and assumed we were all meth-addicted racist farmers.
Which was only partially true.
Jesse materialized at Lindy’s side, wrapping a long arm around her waist and bending to plant a kiss on her neck. He had at least six inches on her so it took some effort. When he’d finished greeting his girlfriend, those sea-green eyes landed on me. “Hey, Dinah. You know my friend Adam from the office.”
A guy strode up beside him wearing an expensive-looking gray linen suit, the white shirt underneath unbuttoned at the collar. His tousled hair was brown and matched his eyes. Long story short, I’d definitely have remembered if we’d met.
“I don’t think so. Hi.”
“Nice to meet you.” His smile was shy, sweet even, and in a world where I was allowed to have opinions on guys not named Tritt Wadsworth Johnson III, I might have smiled back. Maybe even flirted with him.
In the real world, I shook his hand and then immediately forgot his name, barely registering my initial observations. Instead, my eyes went back to scanning the room while my brain worked on a way to extract myself from the conversation. Things wouldn’t go well if Tritt found me right now.
“Can I talk to you?”
I stopped my paranoid sweep of the room at the sound of Jeyne’s voice and turned to find my roommate sporting her serious face. To be fair, it was the only face she had—exasperated austerity in her dark eyes, shoulder-length chestnut hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, librarian glasses firmly in place. It was impossible to recall the last time I’d seen her in something other than scrubs.
The rest of our—okay, fine, my—guests at least tried to look like they weren’t homeless twentysomethings. Iowa and winter made that a little difficult since going outside without at least three layers put your nipples at risk of freezing off, but sheesh… Jeyne and her endless commitment to frumpiness.
On the upside, dutifully accepting the earful of gripes she was likely about to unleash gave me a much-needed excuse to step away from the mixed-gender group.
“What’s up?” I ask, turning my back on Jesse’s too-male friend.
She pursed her full lips—the one feature of hers I grudgingly admired. “I told you I have a huge surgery in the morning that I need to prep for. Why is there a party in our apartment?”
“Gee, I don’t know, Jeynie, maybe because it’s fucking Saturday night?”
Usually my patience with people stretched for days, but Jeyne could piss me off just standing in my direct line of sight. She was some kind of annoying pod person—not a proper roommate in any sense of the word. Well, not the kind I needed, anyway. I needed someone willing to look the other way when necessary and join in without asking too many questions. The fact that Jeyne spent all her spare time judging me didn’t sweeten the pot.
Dinah-That-Was cringed at my snappishness with her, and deep down, I knew my annoyance with Jeyne was only an outward showing of my hatred of myself in my current form. Of my lack of control over my life. Of what I’d become.
With her, I could at least have the upper hand, because she wasn’t a fighter. It wasn’t fair, but it was all I had.
“Yes, and what would adulthood be like without an entire wardrobe that reeks of cigarettes and no working knowledge of what cleaning product gets puke out of upholstery?” Sarcasm dripped from her lips like drool, but she looked uncomfortable spitting it toward me. Jeyne was a mouse who avoided confrontation at all costs. It made her an easy target and a pushover to boot.
“Lucky for you, you answered my ad for a roommate. Now the next time some crack addict barfs on your favorite scrubs, you’ll know what to do.”
Her shoulders slumped, bravado wilting. “I need to study and get to bed.”
“I’m pretty sure you could walk to the library in your sleep. Plus, there must be a million quiet spots at the hospital that’d work for sitting alone on a weekend. You’ve got a whole city, so go away and quit harshing my mellow.” I tamped down the urge to cringe at my own attitude. This is the Dinah I have to be to survive in my life.
“What about later?” Tears filled her eyes, but she blinked them back. She had determination, but she usually picked her battles. “My surgery is at eight, and I’ve got rounds beforehand. I need to get some sleep.”
“I’m sure this will wind down by two or three,” I offered, swallowing revulsion at my harsh treatment of her. I couldn’t call off the party and send everyone home. The buffer meant too much with the way Tritt had been drinking all night.
“Last time you said that, I came home and my bed was full of random drunks.”
“They’re not random, Jeynie.” Telling me she hated the nickname had been one of her worst ideas. “They’re my friends. You should get to know them. Maybe even in the biblical sense, because no matter how many late-night study sessions you set up, that Nathan guy just doesn’t seem to want in your pants.”
The harpoon, however cheap, hit its mark below the belt. Nathan Summers was hot in a sweet, slightly nerdy doctor way, and he and Jeyne spent at least three nights a week going over case studies or whatever they did together. She was obviously blitzed for the guy, but he hadn’t made a move. And if he hadn’t done it by now, it wasn’t gonna happen.
If we were friends, I would have put it in a much nicer way, though.
“Just what every patient wants, Dinah. A doctor with a herpes diagnosis.” Jeyne’s mouth twisted over the word herpes, as though saying it aloud soiled her.
The comeback made me laugh, a real laugh that started in my gut and bubbled past my lips, stealing the air from my lungs. My face felt warm, but that could have been the booze. Lindy, Jesse, and Whatever-His-Name all turned and stared, but no one looked more shocked than Jeyne.
“That was…hilarious… Good one,” I gasped, because it was.
She didn’t reply, her dark, in-need-of-a-tweeze eyebrows nearly buried in her hairline. She seemed to gather herself after a moment, hiking her messenger bag up on her shoulder and checking her cell phone. The others moved closer, including Jeyne in our group by accident, all wanting to know what had tickled me so thoroughly. My laugh felt rusty, a little raw against my throat.
The guy whose name I’d purposefully forgot put out a hand and laid it on my arm, his brown eyes playful. “Are you going to be okay there? Need any medical attention?”
Before I could point out that my roommate was a doctor or slip out from under his touch, Tritt appeared out of thin air, elbowing Jeyne roughly out of the way. The movement knocked her glasses askew, and she glared as she straightened them. The fire in her eyes, her clear hatred of Tritt, almost made me like her.
It did make me question my assumption that she had a working brain between her ears, though. People didn’t glare at Tritt. He did what he wanted, and the rest of us edged out of the way.
Tritt’s long, strong fingers wrapped around my upper arm, pinchin
g hard. My cardigan hid the roughness of his squeeze, and I smiled through the pain and stepped toward him as he yanked so it looked as though I’d meant to do it, unwilling to let him embarrass me.
“Hey, baby.” He might as well have said You’re a fucking whore because it was easy enough for everyone to extrapolate the insult from his tone. The small crowd’s immediate discomfort displayed in pained expressions, averted gazes, and shuffling feet.
I attempted to keep smiling through the nerves tightening my cheeks. It was all for nothing since Tritt’s gaze wasn’t anywhere near me but shooting daggers at the new guy, who had made two mistakes: talking to me and touching me.
“Hi.” I slid the abused arm around his waist, trying to appease him.
The glint in his eyes betrayed the use of a substance other than alcohol and promised my efforts to smooth things over were wasted. Tritt otherwise looked the picture of class with his perfectly coifed, shining blond hair, bright blue eyes, pressed khakis, long-sleeved button-down, and loafers. A well-to-do son following in the footsteps of his business-mogul father. And that’s exactly what people outside Tritt’s immediate reach assumed.
He stepped in front of me, crushing my toe beneath his foot. This time the wince couldn’t be avoided, but his frame hid my pain from everyone except Jeyne, whose eyes narrowed on my face. I rearranged my features into a haughty expression, daring her to say a word.
“Hey, man, I’m—” The new guy stuck out a hand, hesitant but trying to shake it off.
Tritt cut off the attempt at friendliness with a swift elbow to the nose. Blood spurted, splattering like rain on the carpet and dotting my boyfriend’s shirt. As the guy stumbled backward, hands cupping his face and soft eyes swimming with agony and bewilderment, Tritt turned to me with a calm expression.
“Get me a goddamn towel.” His voice settled low and quiet. A warning.
“What the hell, man?” Jesse’s handsome face was an almost comical mixture of shock and anger as he moved toward his battered friend.
Tritt didn’t bother to answer. He shrugged out of his bloody dress shirt and threw it at me, then turned his attention back to his latest victim. “Touch my girlfriend again and you’ll get worse.”
