Page 82 of Dream Girl Drama

“Please, I fucking love you. I love you so much. Don’t fuck me up like this.”

He could hear her on the other end, attempting to catch her breath and failing. He’d never surmount the pain and frustration of not being there to hold her, kiss her, talk her out of breaking his heart. “Will you do something for me?”

“I’ll do anything for you as long as I live.”

“Go play the game of your life. For me. Show them they’re nothing without you. Don’t let this be for nothing, okay?Please.”

“Chloe—” he growled.

But she’d already hung up.

Sig sat on the bus with a smoking crater in his chest, staring into a void for an unknown length of time, begging himself to wake up from the nightmare of losing her. But daylight never came. The darkness stayed, sucking him in deeper by the second. In the end, it was Burgess who helped a devastated Sig off the bus, holding him up like a soldier from a battlefield. The only thing keeping him relatively sane was having a mission to complete. For her.

Go play the game of your life.

And even though doing as she asked would only drag them further apart, his heart gave him no choice but to fulfill her wishes. That’s what he’d been built to do.

So he did.

Chapter Twenty-One

Chloe blinked gritty eyes at the screen of her phone.

Doggie date?

The number was unknown... but she had an idea who it was. Elton. That baseball player with whom she’d exchanged numbers in the park. She’d deleted his number, but apparently, he had not done the same with hers. And she wasn’t in the mood for this. Not remotely.

Every part of her body ached. Her lower back throbbed from sitting on a wooden stool in perfect posture for hours on end. Her arms hurt from being elevated without cease. Her fingers were stiff. Yet she would go back to Grace’s today and do it all over again. What was her other option? Stay here and think? No. God, no. She couldn’t do that.

A week had passed since she’d spoken to Sig.

This was the time of day she wanted to call him the most. He wasn’t a morning person, either, and they would grumble together over the phone. Pep talk each other into moving, getting out of bed. His voice was so gruff in the mornings, his humor a little less sharp than usual, kind of like he was still in the process of waking up. He’d stay on the phone with her until her morning Pop-Tart was ready, then he’d promise to see her later.

Chloe made a hoarse sound and turned the phone upside down on the mattress.

The way she missed Sig was inhuman. She was pulverized.

An apparition haunting her own life.

There were positives and she tried to focus on those. For one, she’s transcended her own God-given abilities on the harp. Grace’s directives were beginning to click with ease. She’d begun anticipating her mentor’s advice and implementing it without having to be asked. The music she made now was somehow more satisfying. Smoother. Like it had been languishing for years, waiting for her to come and do it justice. She was better than she’d thought—and that made her proud. Of herself. When she stopped and let herself feel it. Which wasn’t often, because when she stopped to think, melancholy and heartbreak flooded in and carried her away on a tide she couldn’t control. But she could control the harp. Her fingertips. So she’d get back on the stool today and bury everything under notes.

The second positive this week had been walking past newsstands while taking Pierre for his evening stroll and seeing Sig on the cover of the Sports section. “Hat Trick for Gauthier.” He’d done it. Gone out and played not just the game of his life while on the road, butgames. Pride overflowed her, made it hard to breathe. She’d done the right thing. For him. For them. For her.

Why did it have to feel so terrible?

A canine snarf forced Chloe’s eyes open to find Pierre standing at the edge of the bed. She’d already taken him for his 5:30 a.m. jaunt—accompanied by her landlord, as she’d been doing every morning for the last week. “Mister Sig asked me to go with you on these early walks,” Raymond had said, by way of explanation.

Of course Sig did that.

Of course he did.

Pierre sat down with a blustering sound, looking up at Chloeexpectantly. She’d really been giving him the bare minimum this week, hadn’t she? Walking him, feeding him, petting him when she could muster the energy. The poor pup deserved better.

“What kind of a dog mother am I?” she murmured, her voice muffled by the pillow. “You deserve to go on a doggie date, don’t you, boy? Do you want to go see your friends at the dog park?”

Pierre’s tongue lolled out, his butt scooting forward an inch on the carpet.

“That looks like a yes. Okay.” Chloe turned the phone over again and punched out a stiff-fingered text to Elton. “I’m a little surprised he reached out, aren’t you, Pierre? Considering I brought four hockey players down on his head the first time we met.”

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