Page 70 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
“I don’t like this, Ember. I don’t like this one bit. You’re holding something back from me, and you’re obviously lying to me about your reasons for wanting to live in this dump. And, if I may say so, your face looks like a thousand miles of bad road.”
Ember’s lips twisted to a wry pucker, but she didn’t have the energy to be really offended. “Gee, thanks.”
“Thank me when I’m done,” he shot back. “You’re dropping weight like it’s going out of style, you’ve got spooky haunted house eyes and those bags you’re incubating beneath them look like they’re going to hatch something evil. So please be straight with me: what the hell is going on with you?”
His voice grew softer, and definitely more worried. “Are you sick?”
Lovesick. Heartsick. Soulsick. Sick with grief, and regret, and an ocean of self-hatred, cold, black, and infinite. Yes, she was very, very sick indeed.
She was all of those things and much more, but aloud she only offered him a weak, “No, I’m not sick, Ash. And there’s nothing wrong. I’m just…I just needed a new apartment, that’s all. Everything’s fine.”
There was another long silence. Suddenly the sound of Asher’s footsteps pounding toward the front door made her turn in surprise. He yanked open the door and paused on the threshold, staring back at her with an expression that fluctuated between rage and disappointment.
“You know something, Ember? I always knew you had things you didn’t want to talk about and I was okay with that—I accepted you just like you accepted me; the Full Monty, no questions asked. But I never thought you were a coward. Until now.”
Her mouth dropped open as pain lanced straight through her chest. Through the hand that flew up to cover her mouth, she whispered a choked, “Ash!”
“You don’t want to tell me something, that’s your prerogative. But we’ve been friends—good friends, I thought—for years, and you have the nerve to lie right to my face—multiple times now—when I want to help you. Which in my book is a big ‘fuck you, Asher.’ So I get the hint; you don’t want my help. But I’m sorry, I’m not going to hang around and watch you waste away and wallow in this depression like a pig in shit, without any kind of inkling of what the hell is happening, or without being allowed to help in some way. Do you have any idea how…how impotent that makes me feel? How frustrating that might be for me? Or are you too busy feeling sorry for yourself that you can’t see past the end of your own nose?”
She stood there in shock with her mouth open, heat burning her cheeks.
But he wasn’t quite done yet.
He said, “I am so tired of people feeling sorry for themselves. Sorry for their shitty parents, sorry for their shitty friends, and their shitty jobs, and all the shitty things that happen every day in life to everyone, but somehow everyone seems to think their particular brand of shitty is the shittiest of them all. But you know what? There’s always someone else who’s got it a thousand times shittier than you. So suck it up and quit your bellyaching and try focusing on someone else. It might make your problems seem a little bit better in comparison. Or if not, at least it will make you less of an asshole!”
Breath left her lungs as if she’d been punched in the chest. Her eyes filled with tears. She began to stammer an apology, but Asher held his hand to his ear and snapped, “What’s that? I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over your tragic past!”
Ember cried, “What the hell, Asher?”
He stared at her long and hard. Behind his glasses, his dark eyes burned. “You didn’t invent suffering, Ember, no matter what happened to you. And just because you’re suffering doesn’t give you the right to lie to your friends and make them feel useless and unwanted. People who care about each other help each other out when they’re hurting, they don’t shut each other out. That’s what you do to people you don’t really give a shit about. Which, coincidentally, is how you’ve made me feel. Congratulations on losing your only friend.”
He turned to walk out the door, and she crumbled.
Sobbing his name, she ran across the room and flung herself at him, catching him off guard so he stumbled against the wall. With her arms wrapped around his neck, she sagged against him and cried like a baby into his shirt, blathering apologies and a long, incoherent description of what had happened between her and Christian, interspersed with background story of what had happened that fateful day in New Mexico.
By the end of it, he was crying, too, and her troll of a landlady shouted at them from the end of the hall to shut up or take it inside.
They went inside.
He held her tightly, leaning against the back of the closed door, until her crying stopped and she hung limp in his arms.
“I’m so sorry,” he said in a broken voice. “I didn’t know…I had no idea—”
“Please don’t apologize, that will only make me feel worse,” she whispered. “I don’t deserve any sympathy. I should have been locked up for what I did. They should have locked me up and thrown away the key.”
Or worse.
“Did the police…why didn’t the police…”
He hesitated, and she lifted her head and looked at him through swollen eyes. He couldn’t say it, but she knew what he meant: Why didn’t they arrest you?
“Technically they couldn’t. There wasn’t enough…my blood alcohol level…something went wrong with their test and it came back negative. I kept telling them—I told them as soon as they got there and the paramedics took my blood but it didn’t work.”
They’d taken blood at the hospital, too, with the same result: nothing.
No one would listen to her when she tried to tell them what she’d done. They all looked at her as if something had broken inside her head. All the therapists afterward had looked at her the same way, so she finally learned to arrange her face into an emotionless mask and tell them what they wanted to hear, which was that accidents happen and it wasn’t her fault.
It was almost worse than the accident itself, the sympathy she was shown by the police, social workers, and therapists. By her friends and her friends’ parents. Even by her father, who should have hated her most of all, but never did.
