Stoking the Embers (New Adult Romantic Suspense): The Complete Series (21 page)

The woman looks up and it’s Beth, Stephanie’s friend. “Oh hi, Ken. I’ve got it, thanks anyway.” She hefts a grocery bag higher on a hip and keeps climbing. She stops, hefts it again and takes another step before it slips. She laughs. “Okay, maybe I don’t got it. Help!”

I reach her just as the bag is heading to the ground. “Shit, that’s heavy. What can you possibly buy at the grocery store that weighs sixty-four pounds?”

She laughs again. “Ice cream. Lots of it,” she says and continues up the steps. I can’t help but look up at Stephanie’s door and am grateful when we turn to Beth’s apartment in the opposite direction.

Setting her other bag and the six-pack down, Beth digs in her pocket for her key. She opens the door, grabs her things and I follow her inside. Her apartment is the mirror opposite of Stephanie’s, in layout and in color. Where Stephanie’s is cheerful and sparse, Beth’s is glamorous and knick-knacky. I shudder, trying to imagine dusting all that shit.

In the kitchen, Beth plops everything down on the counter and holds up the six-pack. “Want a beer?” I would have expected some girly beer, but it’s a good German Hefeweizen. Then she starts pulling out cartons of ice cream and raises her eyebrow at me. “I’ve got Rocky Road, Cookie Dough and my favorite, Mocha Toffee Coffee.”

I pretend to gag. “What, no vanilla?”

She rolls her eyes at me and starts stuffing things in her refrigerator. “Boring. I don’t do vanilla.” Realizing what she said could be taken two ways, she points a finger at me. “That totally didn’t come out...” She slaps her hand to her forehead. “Good grief, I’m going to just stop talking now.”

I can’t help but laugh. No wonder Steph and Beth are best friends; they’re both hilarious. With her hand still over her mouth, she holds up a bottle of beer.

“No thanks, I gotta head out. I had a beer with Steph before all the shit went down.”

Beth drops her hand. “What shit?”

She doesn’t know? “I thought all girlfriends got together and plotted out their entire life in ice cream filled chick sessions.” I can’t believe Beth didn’t know Steph was going to break us up, but she certainly looks surprised.

I say with as little emotion as I can possibly muster, “Steph showed me the door tonight.” I give the casual ‘no big deal’ shrug and Beth narrows her eyes at me.

She pops the top off two beers, then opens a cabinet for two glasses. “Want to talk about it?”

Talk about it? Har de har har… I think my testicles just hugged each other in terror. “Uh, no. I don’t do talking.”

She narrows her eyes again. “Well, I want to talk about it, all this crap that’s been going on. Do you think your male dignity can withstand a few spoken words?” She puts a hand on her hip. “You can thump your chest once for yes, twice for no if it makes you feel better.”

Little smart ass.

I laugh as I watch her pour two German weizen glasses with a perfect one-inch head. “Where did you learn that?” I was all about a little change in subject.

She smiles and hands one to me. “We’re allowed electives and I took a beer class.”

I shake my head and take a sip of the still foamy beer. “Damn, maybe I should go back to college. Getting credit for drinking beer. That’s my idea of learning.”

Beth puts her nose into the glass and inhales. “When I took the class with another friend of mine, we thought it was going to be a joke class. We wanted to meet boys and figured it would be easy.”

She holds it up to the light and then takes a small sip. “Little did I know it would be one of the classes I remember the most about. I still geek out and follow the protocol: aroma, appearance, flavor, mouth feel. My friends think I’m weird, and not just because I like beer.”

I take another sip. “I really like this. Maybe one day you can teach me a little more about it, but today is probably not that day.”

Shit! I shouldn’t have said that because Beth’s eyes grow sad again and she says, “Come on, let’s talk.”

Sighing heavily, I follow her into her living room. She sits on her pale blue sofa—who owns a freakin’ pale blue sofa?—and I choose the matching love seat and sink into its low cushions.

“Maybe you should have been an interior decorator instead of a nurse,” I say, looking around.

Beth pulls a cream colored throw over her legs. “This is my mom’s doing. She surprised me one day by having an interior decorator overhaul my entire apartment. I walked in the door and just about screamed my head off thinking I’d stepped into some kind of gaudy twilight zone.”

I look around again, trying to think of something nice to say. “It’s fancy.”

Beth barks out a laugh. “You should have seen it before I tossed most of it out. It looked like Martha Stewart threw up in here. There were pearls…
pearls
… hanging off the lampshades.”

As I continue to look around, the silence between us grows to an uncomfortable level. I’m sure as shit not going to bring up Stephanie, and if Beth doesn’t, I’m going to drink my beer and split. I start to gulp, deciding that’s my getaway plan, but I’m thwarted by little Miss Talkative.

“Ken, I know you don’t know me that well, but I’m scared for Stephanie and everything that’s been going on. She mentioned to me that she thought you’d be better off without her messing up your life, but I never thought she would actually break up with you.”

I stare at my glass, turning it around and around in my hands. “Beth, I have to be honest with you. I’m not the type to really give a crap about leaving a relationship when the time is right.”

Beth’s mouth tightens, her lips pursing together into a thin line. She’s about to let me have it, so I go on. “If it was any other girl, I would have been out the door weeks ago and never looked back. Steph scares you? She scares me too, for different reasons. I like her, a lot, which totally goes against my long term plans of not ending up with a ball on the end of my chain. I’m just not that kind of guy and I’m afraid I’ll be the one who ends up hurting her. I don’t want that either.”

Beth rolls her eyes. “Don’t tell me, you used to play football and popped your cherry at fourteen, right?”

It was my turn to narrow my eyes. “Fifteen, thank you very much. And yes, I did play football, for your information. I…”

“I knew it,” she interrupts me. “Look, I’ve hung out with too many jocks who think they’re God’s gift to women and who think a relationship means some female is leading them around by their dicks.”

I stand up, pissed as hell now for some reason. “And that’s exactly what relationships are. Broken hearts. Broken lives. Split up homes. No sex. Fights over money. Fights over kids. No sex.”

“You said that one already,” she yells at me.

“Well, it deserves to be on the list a dozen times,” I yell back and stare at her as she bursts out laughing.

“I think we just had our first fight,” she finally says when she’s able to talk.

Women are crazy!

I shake my head. “Great. So now I get to add ‘fights with girlfriend’s best friend’ to my long, long list of why relationships suck.”

“Oh sit the fuck down and drink another beer.” She walks back to her kitchen, opens the fridge and is back while I just stand there, totally confused. She hands me the beer, then pushes my chest until I’m once again sitting on the loveseat.

She sits beside me this time, turning toward me in the small space. Her knee is against my hip and I scoot over to give her a little more room. “I’m sorry I riled you up,” she says. “I really do want to talk to you about everything that’s going on.”

I take a sip from the bottle she gave me, my abandoned glass still on the table. “It’s pretty fucked up, isn’t it?” I concede and feel the familiar rage pass through me.

She points to my empty glass and the bottle I placed next to it. I pick it up again and drink. “Yes, and I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse.”

I nod. “I think so too. It’s like a game to him, I think. He just wants us to worry about how far he will take it. Show off how smart he is.”

“Yeah, that’s what the detective said this afternoon at Stephanie’s. That psychos like Jerome will keep going, thinking they’re untouchable.”

“Untouchable, huh?” I sneer, the rage simmering again, white hot below the surface. “I’d like to show him how untouchable he is when I beat the holy shit out of his untouchable self.” I turn a little to face her and ask the question I’ve avoided asking Stephanie. “What did she see in him? And three years? Why did she put up with his shit for so long?”

Beth blows out a breath and lifts a shoulder. “That’s not an easy question to answer. We’ve talked about it a hundred times, I guess. I think it’s mostly because things didn’t use to be that way. He was actually a pretty nice guy. Quiet and reserved, which fit Steph perfectly. Hyper. You know, he’s one of those people who sit and their legs bounce up and down or they’re constantly tapping on things. He was like that. Steph told me he was on some drug for hyperactivity, had been on it since he was little, so it was pretty well controlled, I guess. Then… bam… he started changing, getting more aggressive and really short tempered.”

“Any idea why he changed so much?”

“That’s the thing, neither of us know, and anytime Steph asked him about it, he’d just get angry.” She leans forward and places a hand on my arm and lowers her voice, like she’s telling a secret. “I talked to my psych professor about him once and she thinks he must have gone through something traumatic and was too embarrassed or ashamed to talk about it. She said personality changes like that don’t just happen without a trigger of some sort.”

“Drugs?” I ask, going to an obvious trigger.

She sits up straight again and leans back into her corner of the seat. She crosses her arms over her chest and shakes her head. “Drugs would make sense, but I don’t know. I’ve been around people on drugs before and he doesn’t have the classic symptoms of coke or meth. I know for sure he’s never offered anything to me or Steph. I think he would have made her try it. You know, take her down his same path.”

“Yeah, junkies love company. I know that from experience. I’ve spent years pulling junkies out of accidents.”

“Did Steph tell you about the crazy proposal?” Beth asks, chewing her bottom lip as if unsure whether to bring it up. When I nod, she exhales in relief and goes on. “Professor Donovan says he looked strung out to her. He could have been.”

“Wow, she didn’t tell me that. She did tell me once that he had gotten to where he talked a lot to himself and had really brutal nightmares.” My jaw tightens as I think about her sleeping with that bastard. How could someone so sweet and kind stand being touched by someone so vile?

Beth started chewing on her fingernail. “That’s
if
he slept, which he seemed to never do. He was working on some software thing and would stay up for twenty-four hours at a time, get a few hours sleep and bang back energy drinks to keep going.”

“Extreme sleep deprivation can cause people to do crazy things,” I offer, remembering a course I had to take not too long ago. “And if he was having nightmares…” I shrug and take another sip of my beer. “It could be a contributing factor for sure.”

Beth stares at the wall and pulls her knees close to her chin. “A couple months ago, Steph woke up to him hitting her. He had his hands around her neck when he finally realized what he was doing. She wore a scarf for nearly two weeks. She also had a black eye and bloody nose.”

Fuck! The thought of Stephanie being hurt feels like a punch in the gut, even if the bastard didn’t know what he was doing. Another side of me wishes I could go back in time to shake some sense into her for staying with that nutcase, and not bailing from the relationship sooner.

I press a thumb into my right temple, where a migraine is beginning. I need to get home and get some sleep. Close the door on this suck-ass day.

“Headache?”

I nod and Beth says, “Here, I know an acupressure technique that will help.”

She gets up on her knees and slides closer. I hold up a hand. “It’s okay—”

“Oh hush up,” she interrupts. “Three minutes tops and you’ll feel better.” She rubs her hands together and places both of her index fingers on the space between my eyes and her thumbs on the underside of cheekbones, next to my nose. Then, she presses.

“Holy hell,” I yell, pulling away from the evil female. Whatever she did hurt like a son-of-a-bitch and my cheekbones pulse in complaint.

She laughs. “Wimp. Now sit still, this will help.”

She raises those demon hands again and I grab her wrists, trying to stop her. She loses her balance and falls face first into me, her forehead hitting my nose. She howls and is laughing hysterically as she topples onto my lap, crushing my left nut in the process.

She’s trying to get up, I’m trying to help her. She finally rolls off me and onto the floor, lying on her back and giggling like a fool, her hand covering her forehead.

“You’re such a baby for a big ole fireman,” she says after several moments have passed. She sits up on the floor, still laughing and rubbing her head. “Let me try another way.” She squeezes the flesh between my thumb and index finger, hard. I can’t help the tears.

“What is with you two?” I ask, leaning over, still trying to manage all the pain that was just inflicted on me. “I feel like I’m in a comedy skit any time you or Steph are around.”