Page 31 of Laila Manning
The idea alone of him with women in the past was enough to raise my blood pressure in a most unflattering way.
The car I booked pulled over to the curb outside of the restaurant where I had an interview, and I waved goodbye to the woman driving as I stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Ignoring the feeling of dread and uncertainty as I walked across the cracked concrete to the front door, I kept my head held high as I walked inside.
I could do this.
I could pretend for just half an hour that I was normal.
I could be normal if I just tried hard enough.
Chapter 10 – Zeke
For the first time in my entire life, I really fucking hated my job. Ryker’s drug smuggling problem came to a head the other morning when our ears on the ground tipped us off that the A1s knew who shorted the last order.
Ryker called me, interrupting my first moment of true fucking bliss in decades when I had Laila in my arms for the first time, and ordered me to report for duty. I tried getting out of it, which was not in my nature. But there was no way. It was all hands on deck.
And it had been three days since that phone call dragged me away from Laila and I hadn’t seen her since. I came home after long nights, and she was gone, and when she came home, I was off dealing with the fallout.
I wasn’t sure where she was going every day exactly, which annoyed me. Since she quit her job at the coffee shop, she’d been looking for another one, but I didn’t know if she'd gotten one.
I didn’t know anything.
And that fucking bothered me.
I thrived on knowing everything. All the time.
Yet Laila was a mystery to me.
Though that was changing slowly.
Each time I came back to my apartment to shower and catch an hour or two of sleep, there would be another journal entry wedged in my door.
Her attempt to communicate with me about her past, the only way that she was comfortable. And I ate it up like catnip, consuming every single word written in her elegant, flowy script like they were a window into her soul.
Into her very being.
I wanted it all. Every morsel she gave me and everything she hid from me. I needed it.
I took the paper, opened my door, and walked into my dark and empty apartment as I unfolded her secrets.
Dear Journal,
I dreamed about that night again. It’s been so long since the last time I was forced to relive that horrid evening in vivid detail, I thought perhaps I was finally past it. But apparently not.
It started just like it always does.
First, I hear the music and feel the bass thumping over my skin as I dance around the cheesy gymnasium with its paper streamers and sparkling confetti. I remember the euphoria in my heart as my friends and I sang to the stupid boy band songs blaring and laughed our way through another tacky award given to someone for best dressed, or most transformed.
Puke.
Myfriends and I were the farthest things from popular, so we would never be on that stage, but we didn’t care. We weren’t there for that.
Prom.
The night of joy and a rite of passage every high schooler should take before they’re thrust out of the illusion of comfort and into the real world full of bills, responsibilities, and deadlines that were never reachable.
But that’s when the dream changes, every time. Gone is the music, and the flashing lights and laughter.
