Page 69 of Forbidden Hearts
“Sooooo, you like him?”
“You know I do, but I also am tired of making the wrong choices. I just . . . Paige, the girl from tonight, had this bright future, and now she’s alone and worried her parents are going to go after the teacher.”
“They should!” Emmeline says with anger lacing each word.
“I agree. Men like him shouldn’t get away with these things.”
Her story broke my heart. Paige was sixteen when they started their affair, and she was so emphatic that he loves her even though he abandoned her. She ran away three weeks ago, and each time he was supposed to meet her, he came up with some other excuse for why he couldn’t. For the last week and a half, she’s been living in the treehouse on the Arrowood farm, waiting for him to contact her and tell her it was clear so they could run away together.
He never showed.
“What ended up happening with her?” Emmy asks.
“She asked us to call her dad but then gave us the teacher’s number instead, which was a whole other issue.”
“Oh God.”
“Yeah,” I say around a sigh. “Addison wanted me to make the call so I could learn the procedure. Em, I was beyond disgusted. He pretended as though he didn’t even know her. Said she was a student, but that he wasn’t sure why she was reaching out to him. Never mind the fact she had his freaking personal cell phone number. But then, I heard a woman talking to him in the background.”
I feel physically ill thinking about her. The woman who called him babe and asked who was on the phone. The woman who he clearly is either married to or living with. The woman who that teenager will never replace because he wasn’t going to leave her.
“No wonder you’re so upset.”
“It’s like the universe wanted to punch me in the face.”
“You definitely got a right hook,” she jokes.
I turn onto the backroad, taking the shortcut to my father’s house, and the lights on my car start flashing.
“Shit! Em, I gotta go, something’s wrong with my car,” I say as the car sputters, jerks, sputters again, and then rolls to a stop.
“Are . . . you”—her voice is breaking up—“call?”
My phone beeps twice, letting me know I’ve completely lost signal, and I toss it onto my passenger seat and get out of my car. I look toward the hood, thankful nothing is smoking, and then I glance up and down the road I’ve broken down on. There is nothing within miles of this stupid dirt road, and the half moon really isn’t giving me enough light to see. I try to remember what my dad said about tires and all that, and I walk around, kicking each wheel. They all feel fine—I think.
Okay, next step, pop the hood. I open the driver’s side door, pull the lever, and release the lock to open it up. For a solid minute, I stare blankly at the engine, and then I decide it was a stupid idea to look because I don’t know shit about cars.
I close it, go back to the driver’s seat, and turn the key again, hoping maybe it just needed a break. We all do sometimes, right?
Nothing.
The lights come on, which means it’s not the battery, and that’s when I see that the gas gauge is on empty.
Fuck my life.
I left Run to Me, and the light came on, but I told myself ten times that I’d get gas after grocery shopping. Clearly, I forgot.
All I could think about was Paige and her piece-of-shit teacher.
It’s now one twenty-five in the morning, my father is definitely asleep, and I have no fucking service.
“Curse you Sugarloaf!” I scream up at the sky.
I have two options. I can hunker down in my car and wait for someone to find me, or I can start to walk until I get service on my phone. Considering I had some about twenty feet back, I pull my coat on and start to walk.
I must look ridiculous, holding my phone up and walking around in circles like that commercial where the guy keeps asking, “Can you hear me now?”
No, no one can hear me because I still don’t have a single bar.
