And the Sweet (Addiction Series Book 2) (21 page)

TWENTY-TWO

It’s like the calm before the storm. A storm we never thought we would have to endure. Normal people don’t deal with these things. Because these things
aren’t
normal.

But here we are.

It’s so ridiculous.

Two weeks have passed since it was decided.

Two weeks have passed since Cecelia and I chose to fight back. Stand our ground. Not be bullied by a worthless loser. A loser who for all his bravado does not return the following week to the fights, despite his demand for a challenge.

Two weeks have passed and we finally have an answer. It’s a wholly unexpected one, but it’s an answer nonetheless.

“I can’t believe they’re one in the same.”

I watch Melody take a big swig of her fourth beer. It’s a Corona, which I’m not a fan of, but it’s still booze and that’s really all that matters in most cases. I’ve been so good for so long though, and I’m not falling off the fucking wagon for shitty beer.

To be honest, I don’t know how Melody hasn’t keeled over already. Perhaps she does imbibe when someone buys her a drink and has worked up a pretty impressive tolerance. Or perhaps her adrenaline is rushing and the alcohol hasn’t hit yet. I imagine that crash won’t look very pretty.

“How is this even possible?”

Cecelia is sitting beside me, a can of Sprite in her hand that she’s sharing with me. She’s trying to be sympathetic to her friend, but I can tell sympathy is the last thing she’s feeling. Fear is definitely the overriding emotion. Well, fear and anger. “I don’t know. It feels really staged, to be honest.”

“I thought I’d gotten away from him, you know? I moved here, didn’t let anyone know and now this?” Her voice screeches and I cringe at the volume. “A drug dealer? Seriously?”

It is by chance we figure out that Bryson or Bryant or something is actually Bryson Hagen of Milwaukee. It is by chance we find out the man we can barely remember though the name Hagen sounds vaguely familiar, the man who sold me the coke, and then fucked…it is by chance we find out he also happens to be Melody’s ex-boyfriend. The very one she’d left Wisconsin to escape. The same one she’d disappeared for a month from because he’d tracked her down and found out where she lived.

The very one I now firmly believe fucked over Stretch.

Bryson Hagen had started small in the drug world. Sold some weed here and there while in high school but it got the attention of some bigger dealers the older he got. He’d been trying to push into bigger territory, hoping to find new clients so he didn’t have to do anything more with his life. The bigger dealers didn’t appreciate his tenacity. Instead of giving it up though, Bryson chose to join their ranks and started selling the harder stuff.

He kept all of this from Melody. Pretended to be someone he wasn’t so she trusted him in her naiveté.

They’d met when she graduated from high school. Melody MacIntosh had been a fresh-faced eighteen year old looking for a little bit of rebellious but not dangerous freedom from her strict Irish Catholic parents and met Bryson one night after sneaking out of the house to go to a twenty-one and older club.

She was obviously underage for the club, he was twenty-three.

It’s the classic cliché. A young woman seduced by the attention an older man was willing to give. In the end, she gave up her virginity and logic to this douche.

She would take off for days at a time, staying with Hagen in random motels until he would need to “leave for business” and then she’d go home until he was calling her up again. Her parents didn’t know what to do. Melody had always been relatively good. Until she met Hagen. Then it was like she changed completely.

Long red hair was cut short. Streaks of color smeared through it. Make-up, something she’d never cared for before was suddenly a morning routine. And late-night parties were the norm.

But she’d been eighteen. An adult. Allowed to roam free if she wanted with whom she wanted, according to the law.

The way she tells it, Hagen made her feel special and in that feeling, she didn’t think about anything or anyone else. She didn’t see why her parents were worried. She didn’t see that Hagen was older or that it was odd he lived out of motels. She didn’t see how strange it was that he would disappear like he did.

“I was so young and so fucking naïve,” she says with her head hanging. “I can’t believe I ever fell for his bullshit.”

In the end, it all boiled down to obsession.

While the summer passed on, school was close to starting. Melody had plans to attend college at the University of Wisconsin. It had been her goal her entire educational career. Be a Badger, study sociology. Even in meeting Hagen, she never wavered about the goal. Her parents were relieved but Hagen was furious. He hadn’t known she had goals. He hadn’t realized she expected more from life other than just waiting around for him in dingy motels.

In his delusions, he hadn’t expected anything from sheltered Melody other than worship of him.

So he got mad. Crazy and like a completely different person.

One night, that madness turned into a violent shout that she was his and was not allowed to leave him.

And then that shout turned into a slap across her face when she showed defiance.

Melody, face burning from the slap, grabbed her stuff, ran from his motel room and back home, calling him crazing and swearing to never see him again.

She tried going off to college. And for a few months, things seemed okay. She still felt foolish for being led like she was. She felt foolish for not listening to her parent’s concerns. Yes, her folks might have been strict, but they really only wanted what was best for her.

A month before the end of her freshman year though, things changed. Preparing for finals, she’d started to get the feeling she was being watched. Then she started to feel like she was being followed. She thought she was going crazy until her college roommate mentioned some tall blond guy was hanging around asking about her. Feeling unnerved by this, Melody contacted campus security, requested an escort everywhere she went for the rest of the school year.

Finals came and went without any more weirdness and she thought Hagen had moved on. She’d been wrong.

Instead, he simply waited for her to return home from school where he ambushed her in the driveway of her parent’s house as she exited her car.

His body gaunt, his hair a mess and his skin sickly, he cried and begged for her to take him back. She didn’t understand what was wrong with him, why he was acting so insane. When she rejected him, he changed tactics and threatened her safety, her parents. Of course the police were called, but Bryson Hagen had seemingly disappeared.

Just as her sophomore year was to start, Melody walked into the dorms to find a stuffed Teddy Bear with its stuffing tore apart and her name and the words, “you’re mine” attached to the card on its neck.

“I left the state after that. Didn’t tell anyone but my parents where I was going. I was too freaked out. It really tore them up me leaving like I did. Tore them up but they understand.” Melody sniffs. “I use burner phones to call them so he can’t find me. All the good that did, huh.”

“Holy shit,” Celia says her body trembling. I feel my heart rate speed up and my veins run cold at the implication.

“I don’t really know how he got in to the dorms. I mean you had to have a key to enter. So unless he followed someone, I don’t know.” She opens another beer and downs half of it. “I just can’t believe he’s back. Again.”

I nod and struggle for what to say. What do you say, really? I can’t think of anything that isn’t contrite or stupid. Cecelia does not appear to have my problem though.

“It feels like a movie. Our fuckup, your ex-boyfriend.”

“What are the odds he’d show up right as we were changing shifts? I mean, I don’t believe it was a coincidence so he had to have known that we knew one another right?” Melody looks lost. I can’t help her.

In some ways, I don’t believe the coincidence either. But his target has been Cecelia in recent weeks, not Melody. And from what we could tell, he only knew where Melody lived, not where she works.

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Who knows who he was looking for last night, though.”

I’m uneasy knowing Hagen had returned to the restaurant. I’m uneasy knowing he was there when Cecelia was most vulnerable because shift changes mean she isn’t front and center for the security to see. I’m uneasy knowing I don’t know if he was there to rattle her again, torment her with more threats, or if he really was there to bother Melody. She’s moved from where she was living when he found her. It’s possible he tracked her down at work. But again, he purposely used Cecelia’s job to get to her before.

I hate this man. I hate that he has this mistake hanging over us with nothing for us to do about it. All I want is to protect Cecelia and I am impotent.

“I should have known,” Melody says after a bit. “I should have known he was a dealer. Or at least using. It’s so blatantly obvious. I am so fucking dumb.”

“You’re not dumb. You just didn’t want to see it. It happens to the best of us.”

Cecelia’s words cut me. She isn’t talking about me. Not really, anyhow. But for all intents and purposes, she could be. I mean hell, I wouldn’t see the lies, the jealousy or manipulations until it was almost too late. I wouldn’t see the truth right in front of my face with the woman I love falling apart in front of me because I was too stupid to see reality. I let foolishness steal my sanity. I let stress and struggle take control until all that was left were ashes of a life that could have been good. Ashes of a life forced to be rebuilt when it should have never burned to begin with.

I can’t think on that right now. There are bigger, pressing matters to attend to. Starting with the woman sitting in the chair in front of us, downing yet another drink.

I hate knowing Melody knows about our drug use. I hate knowing she knows we spent a month completely lost and that once upon a time, we had been in rehab because of addiction. I hate knowing this because for the longest time, it was our secret, our private shame and I’d wanted to keep it that way.

It was important to keep it that way.

But then I realize that I have to accept this. I don’t really have a choice, for one. But it’s so much more than that. I mean Cecelia doesn’t really have any friends. Marshall has come back into our lives but he has always been more my friend than hers. So, I guess it’s fitting Cecelia would finally feel comfortable enough to trust someone with our secrets. It’s a fucking incredible thing how connected that person is though.

Thankfully, while Melody knows of our addictions, she does not know the whole of our shame. It was something we discussed the moment Celia stepped into our apartment and told me what had happened.

The moment the words “
he
was at work again,” left her mouth and I’d pulled her into our bedroom to talk, everything was instantly frozen. How do you respond to that? Especially after it being my main worry and having it come to fruition. I think I stood there for ten minutes, blinking, not wanting to hear what she’d said.

“Are you sure” had been my response, as though Cecelia wouldn’t remember what this piece of shit looks like, sounds like, especially after ambushing her prior. She’d looked like she’d wanted to cry, like the stress of it all was getting to her. And that made me want to kill him all the more.

Instead all she did was nod, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “He was hiding in the shadows. He was waiting, ready to pounce like some demon in a haunted house. He saw us both so I really don’t know who he was looking for, even though he really didn’t know Mel works at Coco. But I don’t think that matters because he’s the same person. Her tormentor, ours.”

I’d pulled her into my arms. Held her for a moment, let her have her freak out until she was calm enough for us to return to the front room where Melody waited.

I’d wanted to grab our shit, whatever was important and run because after everything we’d been through, we really could have done without this. To not have to deal with
more
.

“We have to tell her something, Chace.”

I had shaken my head vigorously with these next words. I’d tried to say no. Tried to say Melody didn’t need to know anything at all. I mean let’s be honest; who wants to talk about stuff as indelicate as this?

But the look on her face, the fact that Melody now knew something was up because Cecelia had had an obvious reaction to Hagen being so close, not to mention needing answers, pushed me to give in. My back was against the wall, our secret had to be shared.

“We won’t say everything. I promise.”

It still feels unnerving the way that whole conversation went down. Hearing Cecelia tell Melody how she and I met. Hearing her talk about how messed up we were once upon a time and that even though we left behind that life, it didn’t leave us behind. Hearing her talk about our struggle, and how a terrible moment of weakness led us to meeting Hagen. Led us to buying from him and losing a month of our lives to drugs to the point where we don’t remember what we did.

In some ways, I appreciate that aspect. I mean how can you talk about something you can’t even remember? Bits and pieces from dreams, feelings of things while awake but not really knowing the context behind them, that’s not an encounter. That’s nothing but a possible hallucination or a fragmented mind from the drug use.