Summer (Four Seasons #2) (19 page)

“Oh my god, oh my god,” he gasps. “You’re okay, baby. You’re okay. Shhh.”

I stand back, trying to catch my breath, blood pumping forcefully around my head as I realize what a close call that was. Suddenly, I’m feeling really lightheaded.

“You alright, miss? I take it the little one belongs to you?” I don’t see the guy speaking to me. All I see is Noah rocking his daughter in his arms, and the look of sheer relief on his face. I’ve never been so scared in all my life. My own life being in danger was one thing, but a child’s? Terrorizing.
 

“You all right?” The man beside me speaks again, and I finally turn to look at him. My breakfast rises up in my chest, threatening to make an appearance. I know this guy. He’s a cop—Luke’s old partner. He was there the night they showed up at that frat party last year. He helped Luke get Morgan to the hospital when she overdosed.
 

Fuck. I can see the recognition in his face. He knows exactly who I am. Or who I used to be.
 

“Tamlinski,” I say, breathing out the word like it’s some sort of accusation.

“Hi, Avery,” he replies. “The little girl… she’s with you?”

I nod quickly, wrapped my arms around my body. “Yeah. Noah...he’s her father.”

“Okay, good. I’ll leave you to it, then.” He turns and is about to walk away when I take him by the arm.
 

“We looked away for one second. We were watching her, I swear.”

“I know,” he says softly. “It happens all the time. Kids have a habit of wandering. This city’s full of sick bastards who’ll take advantage of parents looking away for one second, though.” He gives me a stiff smile. “Better to never take your eyes off them at all.”

He’s right, of course. I feel like I’m going to throw up. “Thank you for bringing her back,” I tell him.
 

“No problem. Just earning my paycheck.” He gives me another tight-lipped smile and starts to move off again.
 

“Wait!”

Tamlinski stops again. When he looks at me, I can see on his face that he already knows what I’m going to ask him next. I can’t stop myself, though. I
have
to ask. “Luke...have you…have you heard from Luke?”

Tamlinski stares at me for a minute, as if he's contemplating whether to spare me from the truth. And then he just says it. “Yeah. He called earlier this week. His band is wrapping up their first music video.”

“Weekly? You guys talk
weekly
?”

“Yeah, well…” He has the common courtesy to look embarrassed. But then I realize he’s probably feeling embarrassed on my behalf and I feel the blood boiling in my chest. “At the moment he’s taken a year’s leave, hasn’t he?” Tamlinski continues. “He wants to keep up with everything that’s happening with the precinct. He’s still, y’know…thinking he might come back once that year’s up.”

He’s planning on coming back to New York? What the fuck? He’s planning on coming back here and he hasn’t said anything to me about it. Not word one about anything. He was just planning on coming back to New York one day, and he wasn’t even going to tell me? Tiny pinpricks of light dance in my vision. It feels like the world has stopped turning. “Great,” I say, trying my best to plaster on a smile. “Well, tell him I said hey when you speak to him next.”

“I will. Take care, Avery.”

Tell him I said hey the next time you talk?
That’s the most absurd thing I could have asked him to do. Now, when he and my ex catch up on their
weekly
motherfucking chats, I’m going to look like a complete psycho.
 

Combined with the terror of nearly losing Neve, what was a lovely, calm afternoon in the park just turned into my worst nightmare.

EIGHTEEN

LUKE

I sit on the couch in my apartment, sweat beading and running down the groove in between my shoulder blades. Summer in LA is hot, but probably not as hot as New York. Closing my eyes, I imagine Avery in a small pair of white shorts and a pink tank top, her hair in a high ponytail and her smile just for me. She's breathtaking. I can't stop myself from kneeling in front of her, worshipping her. I wrap my arms around her waist and press my face into her stomach as she carefully, tenderly brushes her fingers through my hair.
 

The momentary vision is fleeting, though.

When I open my eyes, she’s not here with me. I’m alone, wrapped in the darkness of my apartment. Fucking awesome. That happens a lot these days—it gets dark and I don’t even notice. I spend too much time inside my own head, imagining what I’d be doing if I’d stayed in New York with Avery, if I’d somehow convinced her to come out here with me. If things were different.
If, if, if
. My life is a series of ifs now.
 

I get up, head to the bathroom and take a piss, forcing myself to look at my reflection in the glass when I wash my hands. I’ve always hated seeing myself in the mirror, ever since I was a kid. Whenever I’d look at myself, I’d see him—my father. I’d see all the fucked up, gnarly things he did to me and, in turn, made
me
do, and it used to make me panic. If I looked so much like him, then surely I would turn into him one day. I’d be just as mean and drunk and fucked up as he ever was. I know I’ll never be anything like him now, though. I’ll kill myself first. So I undergo this ritual of staring myself in the eye whenever I find myself in front of a mirror, as though staring myself down somehow confirms I’m still me and I’m not losing it.
 

I barely sleep these days, but I haven’t lost any weight. Cole’s been making sure of that. He corrals us down to the gym at least once a day, and puts three plates of food in front of us every day, too. Sometimes it’s more like four or five plates of food. Says he doesn’t want us too skinny for the videos we’ve been recording.
 

I secretly think he wants to bulk up even more—he’s already huge—because he wants to impress Marika. She’s been knocking him back every time he makes a pass at her, and for the very first time I think I see my boy getting flustered. He probably thought he’d have bagged her by now, that she’d have caved and given in to his increasingly more obvious advances, but she hasn’t. She’s stood firm and shut him down time and time again, and I think it’s playing on Cole’s nerves.

She's obviously interested in
me
, however, but I'm not willing to even consider it. The last time I took a girl home I put my hand through the wall and ended up fucking up our plans for a while. I can’t even contemplate going through that again. I also can’t even contemplate touching another girl. The idea of it physically revolts me.
 

I scowl at myself in the mirror, prodding at the dark circles under my eyes. I should sleep. I really should. Everyone keeps telling me so, but they don’t know about the demons waiting for me every time I allow my consciousness to slip away. I was meant to use this time away from Avery to get better, to fix this nightmare, but instead it’s only getting worse. Now, I’m practically crippled by my night terrors, and I’m no closer to seeing my girl.

Somewhere in the apartment my phone is ringing. It continues to blare out an obnoxiously loud rap song that Cole set as my ringtone, shattering the peace and quiet. After eight rings it stops, then starts up again immediately after.

“Fuck.”

I find my phone on the small counter in the kitchen. Some part of me prays that it’s Avery calling, but I know that is as stupid as it sounds. She's not calling. She’s never calling again, I’d imagine.
 

When I look at the caller ID, it’s no great shock that it’s not her. “Reid,” I answer, walking back to the bedroom. I have to be quick. I have an appointment with Rafferty in an hour and there’s no way I'm missing it. I’m out of sleeping pills, and I’m definitely not in a position to be doing without them. At least when I take the pills, I don’t dream. I don’t remember. I’m just gone.
 

“Hey, man, it's Tamlinski.”

“That time of the week already, huh?”

“Yes, sir. Just thought you might like a SitRep on the whole
Operation: Stalk Avery Patterson
thing you sent me out on.”

“You saw her again?” My voice is all gravel as I grind out the question. Half of me looks forward to these updates from Tamlinski, while the other half dreads it. So far all he’s told me indicates that she’s doing just fine without me. She’s going about her life, visiting her friend, hanging out with some other musician guy at a run down recording studio close to her school. That one had me a little perplexed until Tamlinski discovered the guy is Morgan’s boyfriend. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of them hanging out together alone, but I know Avery. There’s no way she’d be messing around with her best friend’s boyfriend.
 

“Yeah,” Tamlinski confirms. “It was a complete fluke this time, though. I was patrolling through Central Park and I found this little girl. She’d wandered off on her own. When I take the kid back to the park, Avery runs up out of nowhere and grabs her from me, all freaked out. There was a guy there, the girl’s father apparently. They were flipping their shit. From what she told me, Avery was apparently helping watch the kid.”

“Wait, you
spoke
to her?” I hold my breath, jealousy surging through me. He
spoke
to her. He got to hear her. I can barely remember what the soft rise and fall of her voice sounds like.
 

“Yeah. When the father was going nuts on the kid for walking off.”

“The father…” I have absolutely no idea who this person could be. It’s infuriating.
 

“Yeah, dude. Fuck, keep up. I have real shit to do.”

“What did he look like? Older?” If she’s babysitting, that would make sense.

“No. The guy was her age. I haven’t seen them together before, but hell...I don’t have eyes on her twenty four seven. I think…I think he sounded Irish.”

I slump back against the wall, the back of my head banging against the plasterwork. It feels like I’ve been sucker punched in the gut. Never did I see that one coming.
Irish
. I don’t need to hear anymore.
 

I hang up the phone and press the warmed glass and metal into my forehead, trying to get a handle on this. Noah? She went back to
Noah
?
 

I can’t be mad at her. I did this.
I
did this to us, and now I’m going to have to deal with the consequences. I know all of this, and yet I can barely swallow as I grab my car keys and head for the apartment door.
 

Rafferty is gonna have a lot of shit to deal with tonight.

******

I press my face into my hands as I sit in the waiting room. I wear sunglasses and a ball cap pulled low. It’s not as though anyone would recognize me here—D.M.F. are doing well, but not
that
well. Not yet, anyway—but I want to feel anonymous. I don’t want people looking me in the eye. I just want to be invisible.

Noah Richards.
 

I can’t stop picturing him smiling, his arm slung around my girl’s shoulders. And a kid? Where the hell did a kid come from? It’s like, in the space of four months, Avery has found herself set up nicely with a complete family and I’m falling apart at the damn seams.

Rafferty steps out of his office door into the waiting room. He’s an economic kind of guy, doesn’t bother with a receptionist. I like that about him. He gestures me into his office with a jerk of his head. I get up and follow him.
 

“You look like shit,” he tells me.
 

“I know.”

“Wanna tell me about it?” He plays this game where he pretends to be a clichéd shrink, and I play along by being a cocky asshole. Except I’m not usually playing.
 

“Not really,” I reply. “I’d rather sit here and stare at the ceiling for the next hour. That would be three hundred bucks well spent, right?”

Rafferty rolls his eyes. “Shut up and sit your ass down, Hollywood. These sessions aren’t mandatory, y’know? You make the appointments. You show up of your own volition. That says you want help.”

I shut up and sit down because he’s right. I do keep coming back here under my own steam. I never feel great, but sometimes I feel better after I’ve had a session with him.

Rafferty’s office isn’t your average shrink’s set up. He has no desk, just a comfortable black swivel chair that he likes to lounge back in. Similarly, there’s no typical patient’s sofa. I have a black swivel chair, exactly the same as his. The chairs face each other with nothing in between them bar seven feet of empty space. Rafferty never has a notepad and pen, never takes notes about the shit I tell him. He explained during our first session that he records his discussions with his patients, and asked for my consent to do so with me, which I gave. So instead of furiously scribbling down everything I say, Rafferty usually stares out of the large ceiling to floor window that overlooks the sprawling city in the distance, his face utterly expressionless as he listens. Or doesn’t. I can never really tell.
 

He takes a seat and assumes his regular position. “All right,” he says. “Let’s do this.”

I blow out a deep breath. This happens to me every time—I show up and suddenly I don’t know what to say, what to think. Seems very self indulgent to come in here and complain about my life. Eventually I realize that I’m wasting both his time and my own if I say nothing. “I don’t care about anything anymore,” I tell him.
 

He doesn’t miss a beat. “What was the last thing you
did
care about?”

From the amount of sessions we’ve had, he should know the answer to this question. I
know
he does, but the whole admitting-stuff-out-loud thing is apparently part of this process. “Avery,” I say.
 

“And now you come in here today, telling me you don’t care about anything at all. Does that mean you’ve stopped caring about
her
?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why do you feel that way?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Think about it.’