On Solid Ground: Sequel to in Too Deep (34 page)

“I could tell ya, but then I’d have to kill ya.” I saw Noah throw a glance at Chelsea as though he was afraid she’d spill the beans.

“So, why’d you bring us up here? I thought you would show us something worth comin’ out for. But you got nothin’.” I squared my shoulders and looked him directly in the eyes. He held my stare for less than three seconds before his eyes darted away.

That’s right. I know the monster you are.

“Well, Jake, since we were both in Gracie’s pants, I guess we share something deep. Maybe I could divulge something. Let me think.”

My jaw clenched so tight, I actually thought I heard one of my teeth crack. It took every ounce of self-control to not jump across the room and take him down. I needed to get the DVD and get out before I killed him with my bare hands.

“Shit or get off the pot, man! Show us!” Maverick’s voice was gruff, and I knew he was ready to beat the shit out of Noah for that comment, too.

“Let me go make sure no one is in there, then I’ll show you a room only brothers see. You won’t believe what we got in there.” He waggled his eyebrows, slapped Chelsea on the ass, then walked out the door, leaving Mav, Chelsea, and I alone in his room. I turned to Chelsea and took her by the shoulders.

“Chelsea, listen. You might think I’m a dick, but I kind of used you to get in here.”

The corners of her mouth turned down. “Why?”

“Look, Noah and my girlfriend, Gracie, used to date, and he took a video of them having sex, and apparently, he’s been sharing it with the other brothers. We’re here to find the DVD so we can take it. I’m so sorry for—”

“Well, then shut up and let’s look!” She threw my hands off, locked the door and barked orders. “Mav, you look under the mattress and the bed. Jake, you look in the desk. I got the closet. Move, move, move!”

“Thanks, Chelsea. This means a lot.” I hopped over the coffee table and rummaged through the drawers of Noah’s desk. Shouting outside the door startled all of us and we froze until the voices continued down the hall. “Hurry!”

“Jake, I’m so sorry this happened to Gracie. This house is haunted by the secrets it holds. I wish I’d known what I was getting myself into when Hank asked me to be a little sister.” Chelsea shuffled through boxes and opened bags she found in the closet as she spoke. Then her body froze for a second, and I heard her breath catch. “Jake, I need to tell you something, too. I asked you to come with me tonight because I was scared to come alone. My roommate is out of town and we usually come together. Things have gotten out of hand here, and someone needs to do something. What you’re doing is awesome. Gracie is a lucky girl.”

“Anything you need Chelsea, you just say the word.” Mav was pretty good at the whole damsel-in-distress thing.

I continued to pull drawers open and search. “You need to get out of the sisterhood, Chelsea. It’s just not safe here.”

She nodded and her eyes filled with tears, but she pulled out and opened more bags. I saw her take some deep breaths. Poor girl.

Chelsea tipped her head toward the door as if she’d heard something. “He’s coming! He’s coming!” She kicked everything back in the closet and reached over and unlocked the door. Maverick threw the covers around on the bed to cover everything he’d pulled out from under it. And I slammed all the drawers shut and leaned back against the desk just as Noah strutted back in, waving a long skeleton key in the air.

“Prepare for a shitload of shock and awe, my peons.”

“Okay, asshole, give it up. What the hell is such a big deal?” I tried to smile a little so calling him an asshole would appear to be jovial and not an identification of his species.

“Whoa, Jake. Back down, man. Good things come to those who wait. Follow me.”

I looked up at Maverick then over to Chelsea. We weren’t done searching his room, and I doubted we’d come back after he showed us whatever he was planning. Maverick shrugged, and we followed Noah out into the hall. I took one last look into the room. We were so close; I only had three more drawers to search.

Noah stopped suddenly and reached into his pocket for his phone. “Yeah. What? Are you fucking kidding me? You’re an idiot. No, no, no. Just stay there. I’ll be right down.” He shoved both the phone and the key into his pocket and turned to face us. “Look, something’s going on with some of the guests in the keg room. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

As soon as he was around the corner and down a couple steps, the three of us ran back to his room. I didn’t pay any attention to what Chelsea and Maverick were doing. I had a strong feeling the DVD was in one of the desk drawers. I pulled open a drawer filled with empty condom wrappers and bags of weed. I shut that drawer quickly and grabbed the next.

Sitting on top of a bunch of papers and envelopes was a
stack
of DVDs, each in their own clear plastic sleeve. The top one had “GRACIE” in bold black letters printed across it.

“I got it!” I reached for it and hurried to untuck my shirt so I could stuff it into the front of my pants before Noah got back. But when I went to shut the drawer, I saw another DVD with Gracie’s name on it. I picked it up and there was another. Every single DVD in that drawer had Gracie’s name on it in black marker. “Shit! There are a ton of them. What the hell?!”

Chelsea and Maverick just stared at me. None of us had even entertained the thought that we would be looking for multiple DVDs. He wasn’t just loaning out one copy; he had numerous copies we’d need to account for.

I felt defeated. “All I wanted was to show Gracie that the DVD was out of this house so she could rest easy knowing that ghost was dead.” But there was no way for me to know how many there were or where they all were hidden.

Maverick’s hand swung out and he pointed from across the room to the stack in my hand, “Something’s written on the back of the sleeves. What’s it say?”

They were numbered. “1 of 10”, “2 of 10”...I flipped through them quickly. I held all ten DVDs in my hands. “We’ve got all of them! Let’s go!”

I wasn’t sure what was going on in the keg room, but there was yelling coming from the basement, and hardly anyone left on the main floor. Chelsea, Maverick, and I headed down the stairs quickly, but not so fast that we’d catch the attention of anyone we passed. We were outside and a couple blocks away before we celebrated.

“Hell yeah! We did it!” Maverick was almost as thrilled as I was. Gracie was like his sister. “Sam’s gonna be so pissed he didn’t get to do this with us.”

“We can tell him the story. I wasn’t waiting any longer to get these out of there.”

“What are you going to do with them? Target practice?” Chelsea chuckled and rubbed my shoulder. I was glad she was cool about how the night went down. I guess we’d helped each other out.

“I’m not sure what we’re doing with them. I need to figure that out. I wonder if they could be used for evidence in Ashley’s case.”

“There’s a case?” Chelsea’s smile dropped and she reached out for my arm.

“Yeah, someone I know was raped here last year. I think her case is still pending.”

“Jake, I know of at least three girls with the same story, but none of them have ever reported it. This could be huge. Don’t destroy them. You could do something big by handing those over as evidence.”

“I need to talk to Gracie about it before I do anything. Oh, dammit, Gracie!” I grabbed for my phone and realized it wasn’t in my pocket. Then I remembered leaving it behind so it wouldn’t be a distraction.

Maverick agreed to walk Chelsea home, and I jogged back to the apartment building so I could tell Gracie that we’d found the DVD and nine more. I couldn’t wait until morning.

I quietly turned my key in her door so I wouldn’t freak her out. The living room was completely dark, which was odd because she was afraid of the dark; she always had at least one other light on. I flipped on the living room lamp. It was oddly quiet, too. She always slept with music on.

I peeked into her room and quietly walked over to her bed. Her covers were rumpled, and I smiled at the cocoon she’d made for herself. The light from the living room glowed bright enough that, once my eyes adjusted, I could see better. I pulled back her covers and leaned forward to kiss her.

Her bed was empty. I looked at the clock; it was almost three in the morning. I ran up to my apartment to grab my phone and call her. When I swung the stairwell door open, someone came at me and forced a knee into my junk. I fell to the floor, knees bent to my chest.

“You fucking asshole! What the hell, Jake? You’re supposed to be the good guy!”

“Becki—” Oh, my God, that hurt.

Forty-five

Calon

Becki left to find Jake, because he wasn’t answering his phone, and she was pissed after what went down at Sigma Chi. I wasn’t sure what she was going to do when she found him, but I actually feared for his safety.
Hell hath no fury like a Becki scorned.
I prided myself on being able to read people pretty well. I could pick up on things about their character even before I knew them. I had only spoken to Jake a couple times, but the vibe I’d gotten from him wasn’t that of a player. It was easy for me to sense when someone was genuinely a good person. I had Jake pegged as a good guy, which is why I was conflicted. I’d never been so wrong about someone.

I walked over to where I’d laid Gracie. I sat. I watched her sleep. I paced. I watched her again. I sat. Her body looked deflated and small in my big bed. Her hair spilled across my pillows. And for the first time since the start of her night, she looked peaceful. Her eyes twitched under their lids. I didn’t know if Becki planned on coming back. And I didn’t want her to see me gawking all over Gracie like a creeper.

When I saw Gracie at The Garage that day, she wrecked me all over again. It was like synapses, dormant for two years, started firing again. I’d spent the following forty-eight hours in a daze. I imagined what it would be like to touch her again, to taste her on my lips. The connection we’d shared that one night, it was just a kiss, but it was so much more. I couldn’t put any of my emotions into words. Her soul was so beautiful and open so wide, I fell into it, and it wouldn’t let me go. I’d spent the next couple nights wondering if she even felt a portion of the connection I felt to her. And now, she was in my bed, broken-hearted and drained. It was not how I’d hoped we’d spend our first night together.

My back pocket buzzed, though I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?” I whispered and walked over to the kitchen so I wouldn’t wake Gracie.

“Calon, it’s Jake.”

“Look, you asshole—” It was hard to seethe quietly.

“Just listen, please. I’m with Becki. She gave me your number so I could explain.”

“Oh, good God! This isn’t a soap opera, Jake. Calon, Jake got the DVDs! It was a fake out! We’re on our way!” Becki yelled from wherever she was then the line went dead.

She was fucking amazing. Her abrupt nature and off-the-wall humor was refreshing, and she was balls out about anything and everything. We’d had some pretty deep talks on the nights I walked her home. She was super insightful and sweet. Becki stirred something in me, but I kept pushing it down because I still held out hope Gracie and I would connect in a deeper way.

I hung up the phone and crouched down next to my bed, which was just a box spring and mattress stacked on the floor. I brushed the hair from Gracie’s face. The streetlight outside my loft window shone in and illuminated her small body resting so still beneath my sheets. I wanted to take all her pain away. I was so pissed at Noah for cutting her so deep, but so relieved that Jake could put all her pieces back together once he explained everything to her.

The pain and sheer panic I’d seen in her eyes when she saw Jake with Chelsea, the way she sobbed until her body went limp in my arms while I carried her back to my loft, made something clear to me. Her heart would never be mine, and I needed to make peace with that.

The intimacy we experienced while we worked on her music was deep and such a huge turn on. The intimacy I felt from her when I could get her to open up and bare her soul was so intense, sometimes I could barely breathe. Sometimes, I’d closed my eyes when I touched her so, in my mind, we could be anywhere else but the basement of
Mitchell’s
. When I saw her react to Jake after she sang the week before, I realized her raw emotion wasn’t coming from her connection to me, it was coming from the love and trust she had for Jake. And it was evident to me, even though I’d just found her again, that I had to let her go. She’d never leave me, but I knew I couldn’t have her in the way my soul craved. It was time for me to make peace and move on.

“Calon!” Becki burst through the door, followed by Jake, who looked as panicked as Gracie had earlier.

“Shhh. Becki, you’re going to freak her out even more if you wake her out of a dead sleep.” I smiled at Becki and turned to Jake. “Dude, sorry I called you an asshole.”

“No worries. I would have done the same thing.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Was she drinking?” Jake walked over to the edge of my bed and knelt down so he was face-to-face with Gracie. He brushed the hair from her face, just as I had, then kissed her forehead.