Page 140 of Dirty Rock

“Sarah?”

Her sister?

“What’s wrong? Okay. No, don’t do that. Calm down,” Jules said, her eyes cast down as she spoke. “It’s going to be okay.” She spun away from me and began to walk towards the door.

I cast a glance at the rest of the band, who were looking at me like I had any idea what was happening, before I took off after her and followed Jules into the corridor. Her back came against a wall, and she raised her free hand to her forehead and closed her eyes.

“Sarah, I need you to listen to me,” she said quietly. I didn’t even think she knew I was with her. “You can’t keep doing this. I know you’re hurting, and everything feels like shit, but… sweetie, it’s time to stop. This isn’t his fault. None of this is anybody’s fault. It’s going to be okay, okay? You have to trust me.” Her eyes popped open, and she stood taller. “No, Sarah. No. Don’t…”

The call must have ended because when Jules lowered her phone and turned her pale face and terrified eyes my way, she seemed to look right through me.

“Jules?” I whispered, taking a careful step closer. “What’s going on?”

“I need to go.”

“Where to?”

“To Sarah.”

“Is she okay?” I dared myself to ask.

Julia closed her eyes and kept them that way for a few seconds before she unleashed them on me, filled with tears. “She’s never been okay, Rhett. I need to go to her. She’s just threatened to kill herself again. And it’s all because of us.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

“Should we call the police?” I asked Jules as we made our way out of the building in a hurry.

“No.” She swallowed as she shoved things into her bag and tried to keep it together. “She won’t do it.”

“She’s done this before?”

Jules sighed heavily, readjusted the bag on her shoulder, and she wiped a tear I couldn’t see from her eye. “Erm. Yeah. A… a few times.”

“Fuck, Jules.”

The driver of the car we’d jumped in had taken one look at the usually composed Julia Speed, asked me what was wrong, and then put his foot on the accelerator. I tried talking to her in the backseat, asking about the history of her sister, but Jules just kept saying the same old thing.

“I can’t talk about it, Rhett. Let me get there. Let me see her first.”

“I don’t like seeing you like this.”

She turned to me, a weak version of the strongest woman I’d ever known. “Why do you think I enjoy being away with you guys so much?”

Swallowing down all the shit I wanted to ask, I wrapped my hand in hers and pressed them both down into the seat between us. She didn’t want to expand, and I suddenly had little to say.

The blues, greens, and yellows all whizzed by in the back of the car until we ended up driving down roads that were now becoming familiar to me.

The home of our multi-coloured, beachfront houses.

The place I’d first taken Jules’s body and claimed it as my own.

The place I kept coming back to because of her.

“Just up here?” the driver asked her through the rearview mirror.

Unclipping her belt, she leaned forward and began directing him to where she needed him to go.

Sarah’s house wasn’t far away from ours, but I was barely paying attention as the roads morphed into one. Whatever was about to go down, I had a bad feeling about it, and the thought of finding a young woman hurting herself, or even worse, dead, made my stomach roll.

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