Not Quite Clear (A Lowcountry Mystery) (37 page)

“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, pinching 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.”

“Jesus Christ, man. I was just talking to her.”

“And I’ll deal with her later. Unless you want to be dealt with further right now, I suggest you get your ass out of this
apartment and don’t look back.”

The threat twisted my stomach as I hurried into the kitchen, Jeyne on my heels. The whole thing had happened so fast it slowed my body’s movements, and my hands started to shake as I held Tritt’s shirt under a stream of hot water. My heart pounded so loudly in my ears that it drowned out the party. Sweat coated my forehead and underarms. My tongue stuck to the
roof of my mouth as I breathed through my nose, trying not to throw up.

Jeyne stared at me from across the counter, eyebrows knit together. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Why do you put up with that crap from him, Dinah?” Her tone was one I’d never heard from her in regards to me—concerned.

There were many answers to that question, starting with the fact that I didn’t enjoy getting my ass kicked
and ending with the time he’d slit my cat’s throat senior year of college after the last time I’d gotten up the nerve to dump him. He’d promised he’d get ahold of my younger sister the next time, and he’d meant every word.

“That’s my business, Jeynie. Don’t try to act like we’re friends.”

“Maybe it’s not about you,
Dinah
. Maybe it’s that I don’t like the idea of sleeping in the same apartment
as a fucking psychopath. Why don’t you call the cops?”

I snorted. Did she really think I’d never tried? Half the local cops had moonlighted for Tritt’s father’s company at some point, and the other half bought meth from Tritt on the weekends. I’d gone to them once only to have one of them go to the Johnsons behind my back.

I’d held out some hope that something would change after college, that
maybe he’d get bored beating up a schoolteacher on the weekends. But so far he hadn’t. And after the cat and the betrayal by the cops, I wasn’t taking any chances. Tritt was fucking batshit crazy. If I turned him in, he’d make sure I paid, and besides, it was my word against his. He could be as convincing as a choirboy bathing in holy water when he wanted to be.

“Just mind your own business and
Tritt won’t bother you, mouse.” My heartbeat slowed to almost normal, but my hands still trembled as I wet a towel and shut off the faucet, ignoring the way she pressed her lips into a thin line. “Look at the bright side—now you’ll know how to get blood
and
vomit out of carpet.”

She didn’t follow me as I returned the living room, using the towel to clean the blood spatter off Tritt’s cheek and
hand. Lindy, Jesse, and the poor, battered guy had disappeared—not that I blamed them—and Jeyne made her way toward the exit, too. The inevitable conversation with Lindy at our next yoga class coated my belly with dread. She was technically my best friend, but we weren’t
that
close—I didn’t have real friends because they asked questions they weren’t prepared to hear the answers to—but she was
as close as anyone had gotten in years.

Tritt trapped my hands against his chest and yanked me to him, then bent to press a hard kiss to my mouth. His tongue forced its way past my lips, the invasion ending with a rough bite to my lower lip.

I tasted blood as he pressed his forehead against mine, insanity glittering in his blue eyes. “If you ever embarrass me in public again, you’re going to
regret it. I have a mind to take you in the other room right now, maybe remind you who you belong to.” He pinched my wrists together with one hand, using the other to grope my boob, as though I didn’t understand the threat. When I didn’t respond to the pain, his lips pulled back into an ugly smile. “I guess I’m going to have to dial it up a notch. I do believe you’re starting to enjoy our little
games, you fucking slut.”

He turned me loose. My entire body shook with my hands now, and there was no way to hide it from him. The room wavered, shimmered on the edges, partially from the Long Islands but mostly from the fear that raced through my veins like a drug. An overdose of adrenaline pumped inside me, begging me to run, to hide, to kick him in the balls, but my brain insisted none of
that would work.

One of Tritt’s friends, a girl he’d known since high school, wandered up and asked what had happened to his shirt, clearly flirting. His attention wandered from me, and I took the opportunity to mumble something about the bathroom and make an escape.

I shut and locked the door, flicking on the light and staring at myself in the mirror. Except for the too-pale state of my face
and the cornered-animal fear in my eyes, I looked like I had my shit together. My blond hair still fell past my shoulders in a perfect curl. The dark shadow on my lids had turned my green eyes dusky, as intended. Even my lip gloss was still shiny. It disconcerted me that my inside and outside could be such a dichotomy. How could I stay that way, in two pieces all the time?
 

Tears filled my eyes,
but I blinked them away. Fuck Tritt Wadsworth Johnson III and the train he rode in on. He could—and would—kick the shit out of me later. Carefully, too, so there wouldn’t be any marks. He’d learned that trick before high school graduation. But he would not fucking make me cry.

I splashed a little water on my face and then fixed my makeup. I knew I had to do something. If things continued this
way, the rest of my life would be a wasteland.

The problem was, and had always been, that I had no idea how to change the trajectory.

2.

Jeyne

Despite the fact that I spent a good portion of every day wanting to yank Dinah’s perfect blond curls out of her perfect blond head, the scene at the apartment rattled me. She was a spoiled little rich girl who had made my life a living hell ever since we’d moved in together last fall, but I didn’t want her to get hurt. That boyfriend of hers was the definition of bad news,
and after growing up with the men my mother paraded in and out of my life, I considered myself an expert on the matter.

Tritt usually made himself pretty scarce when we were in the apartment at the same time. Both Dinah and I went out of our way to ensure that happened as little as possible to begin with, and for that, I was grateful. As bad as it sounded, their messed-up relationship wasn’t
my problem. I’d left home and all that behind. Eighteen years of worrying about the woman I shared a house with was more than enough, at least for me. I wasn’t about to spend any more of tonight in an apartment doing the same thing.

But man, that guy could make me shiver in the middle of summer. Not the kind of warm electricity I felt around Nathan, either. Not even close.

I slid into the booth
closest to the outlet at the Village Inn, the one I’d come to think of as ours since we’d met the first day of our residency. The seconds before he looked up gave me a chance to drink in the slight curl in his blond hair, the broad, muscled shoulders filling out his thin, green scrubs, and the strong fingers grasping an old-school number-two pencil.

The picture heated me from head to toe.

Nathan
finished scrawling some notes and then smiled my direction, his pale blue eyes sparkling and happy. “Hey. Glad you called. I was having trouble staying awake at home.”

Steam rose from the cheap ceramic mug in front of him, the smell of coffee like a drug that perked me up. I filled the empty mug he’d gotten for me from the pot at the end of the table, still trying to shake the lingering feeling
of
ick
from the apartment drama in order to focus on the task at hand. Nathan hardly talked about his home life, and I’d never been to his house. I guessed his roommate situation was no more ideal than mine was, but neither of us spent much time at our respective apartments. Or had any money that didn’t go straight to mountains of student loans.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, as perceptive as ever.

The concern on his handsome face tickled my heart, replacing my lingering unease with comfort. His rugged, solid, six-foot frame had a way of making me feel safe, even though he’d never given me anything but a side hug. My daydreams were filled with something more, but having him as a friend during this crazy first year of being a doctor was better than nothing. I’d caught more than one appreciative
stare over the past several months, even though I always, always looked exhausted, but Nathan had never made a move. As my roommate had so kindly pointed out earlier tonight.

“Just Dinah.”

“What did she do this time?”

I pulled my laptop and a pile of neat notes out of my bag, setting them on the table. “Nothing. Well, I mean, she threw another party even though I told her about the surgery
tomorrow, but that’s normal. Her boyfriend showed up and attacked some poor guy for daring to speak to her.”

“Are you serious?” His hand snaked out and covered mine, big and warm.

My eyes jerked up to his. Sparks shot up my arm and through my blood until they shocked my heart into a gallop. It was stupid to be so affected by a simple touch.
Focus, Jeyne.

I pulled my hand away and swallowed.
“Yeah. He’s a piece of work. Some rich asshole from her hometown, super jealous and protective.”

“That sounds like more than a healthy amount of jealous and protective.” He reached toward my hand again, curling his fingers around mine and forcing my eyes to his. The seriousness in them brought back all my earlier discomfort.