Page 1 of After Dark
Chapter One
Eighteen months she’d been gone and her keys still worked.
She hadn’t expected that. Wasn’t even sure why she’d come up to the apartment to check when she’d been positive he would have gone ahead and changed every lock she’d ever touched within hours of her going.
That was what she’d told herself in those first, hard days after she’d somehow crawled away from this, as if calling a locksmith after a lover left like a thief in the night was the same thing as the leaving itself. As if it made them even.
Maybe she needed to believe they were.
But the lock was the same lock it always had been. The first surprise was that the building still had the same entry code. Then her key slid into the lock at his door and threw the smooth deadbolt the way it always had.
She tried it more than once, to be sure this wasn’t one of those dreams she’d had too often this past year and a half, only to wake up miserable somewhere that he’d never been and yet still haunted like something far more substantial than a simple ghost.
If this was a dream, she didn’t wake up, so that was already an improvement.
She hadn’t expected this to work and the odd fantasy she’d had that she might go inside and strip naked, then kneel there at the door the way she had when they’d been so deep in their life together?—
Well, she couldn’t do it.
Not like this.
Not when she’d left that life so abruptly and cruelly. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her until now that returning the same way would be equally abrupt. And far more cruel.
Assuming he allowed it to happen, which she couldn’t pretend was likely.
Maybe she’d needed to believe this, too.
Josette blew out a shaky little breath and carefully locked the door. Her hand was not exactly steady. She backed away from the apartment’s entrance, glancing around like she expected to be set upon by security guards in the small hall that led only to Arlo’s apartment.
Or worse, him, when she wasn’t ready.
When she was in a place she really shouldn’t be.
She hurried to the elevator and kept her eyes down in case anyone got on, then was unduly relieved when she made it to the lobby and could walk outside again. It was easier to breathe outside. When she’d finally made it in from the airport today she’d wandered out into the commons, a community gathering place here where the water of the estuary surged around the old Oakland Port 9th Street terminal and eventually led out into San Francisco Bay. Alameda hunkered down across the way. Coast Guard Island stood watch.
Back before, she’d spent hours staring down at all of this—and pretty, fairy-tale San Francisco in the distance—from his windows high above.
These days there was a new, fancy coffee place in the bottom of one of the apartment buildings and she’d found a table there. She’d spent most of the afternoon watching the giddy California sunshine dance in and out of shadows, trying to work up her nerve. Trying to find that spine she was terribly afraid she’d left in his apartment eighteen months ago along with several other things it turned out she couldn’t live without.
But there were some things you couldn’t take back.
Josette knew that all too well. Outside again, she found her hand at the hollow of her throat again. Forever looking for the choker that wasn’t there any longer. She should have adapted already. After all, she was the one who’d taken it off.
She’d spent most of the afternoon in the shiny, hipster-y coffee house telling herself to go knock on his door, or call up from the lobby, whatever worked, but she hadn’t moved.
Maybe it was because the sun blinded her, so Californian and bright. Maybe she was as street-stupid as he’d always accused her of being and being back in Oakland scared her. Maybe she was the coward he’d showed her she was, and she didn’t like seeing that truth any more now than she had then.
But she was here. She’d come home. She told herself that counted for something.
She would know that she’d come back, that she’d tried to fix what she’d broken, no matter if he ever did.
Either way, she’d been frozen in place no matter how many coffees she drank. Then when the café closed she was frozen but also jittery and it had seemed like a great idea to go ahead and walk into the building she’d once called home,then march right up to the apartment that had once been theirs.
Was she happy he wasn’t there? Distressed?
Was she something likerelieved?Josette couldn’t tell and she found that unforgivable. She’d had to hurt herself to leave him and it had been so difficult to come back, knowing that the intensity between them wasn’t something that could be slipped on and off like a lost sock in someone’s laundry pile. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t know exactly what she’d done to him. She couldn’t act as if any of this was casual.
It was tempting to call himher exora guy she’d been dating,and she’d done that as often as she could back east, but she’d known better. Because how could she explain him? How could she explainthem?
