“Cassie,” Ryder says gently. “We need to know what’s going on.”
Last night before we went to bed, while Ryder was finishing his shower, I decided to listen to the messages I ignored from Sebastian earlier. I don’t know why I did it, really—maybe there is a part of me that worries like Ryder, a part that I don’t want to indulge anymore. When I was living with Sebastian, it was almost like I trained myself to be both on alert and in denial about what I might be on alert for. It was easy to think that if a few days or even weeks had passed without him raising a hand or his voice, that maybe it was over. Maybe it wouldn’t happen again.
But then it would. I’d be locked in a closet overnight because I didn’t answer the phone fast enough when he called from work and I needed to learn what it was like to be ignored because that’s how he’d felt, my cheek throbbing from where it had collided with his palm.
Or he’d thump me hard on the top of my head if I used the laptop without asking him first, even though it was my computer I had brought with me from Atlanta. One night he got angry that I had been at the grocery store so long, and he backed me against a kitchen wall, and while I still held the bags of raw meat and vegetables and bread to my chest he told me soon I might not be allowed to leave by myself if I couldn’t respect his rules and then punched the wall next to my head, leaving a fist-size hole.
I hid every sharp item in the house and stayed awake til after he went to work in the morning, unable to close my eyes for even a second without seeing the look on his face as he swung his fist so close to my head. The next day, over the hole, he hung a framed picture of us on a day trip to Stone Mountain when we were first dating, smiling and tan, our arms around each other. Neither of us ever mentioned what was behind the photo. It’s just so damn tempting to let something be out of mind when it’s out of sight.
But Sebastian made pretty clear that night at Altitude, the last time I’ve seen him, that just because he’s invisible to me, it doesn’t mean I’m invisible to him. I guess I was hoping that his voicemails might prove that hunch untrue. Denial is a hard habit to break.
Cassie, I think we should talk about the other night, his voice trilled on the voicemail. You’ve gotten away from me, love, and I don’t know who you’ve become—your hair, your clothes. We have to make it right. You have to make it right. Til death do us part, love.
“Who was on the phone?” Ryder said behind me. I hadn’t heard him come out of the bathroom. He was barefoot and shirtless in loose black pajama pants, his torso and hair still glistening with water droplets.
I turned the phone off. “It was just a voicemail.”
Ryder sat next to me on the bed. “From who?” But the way he said it, his voice going down instead of up at the end of the sentence, I could tell he already knew the answer to his question. I looked at him and nodded. “What did he say?”
“A bunch of nonsense,” I said. “I didn’t even listen to them all. I’m sure they’re identical garbage.”
“Them all?” he said. He put his hand on my hip over the t-shirt I wore. “How many did he leave?”
“Three.”
“And you weren’t even going to tell me?”
I rubbed his arm, my fingers lightly playing across the battleship tattooed on his bicep, canons at the ready, bound for a mid-sea fight. “I just don’t want you to worry. I feel like everyone’s overreacting, which is what Sebastian wants,” I said. “He wants you to be concerned. He wants me to be afraid. He’d be thrilled to know we’re talking about him right now.” I took Ryder’s hand from my hip and kissed his palm, put it to my chest. “He doesn’t love me. This is a game to him, because he’s a child. And the way to make him lose for sure is not to play.”
“I’m not saying we have to respond to him,” Ryder said. “But I think we should take him seriously. So that if the game turns into reality, we’re ready.”
I guess Gunner is our dose of reality.
At Altitude the next day, Ryder says I should just tell Gunner everything I can think of about Sebastian. “The more info he has, the better he can run a search, right, Gun?” Gunner nods and sits on the barstool next to me. Ryder kisses me as he heads back to his office. I chase after him.
“You really think this is necessary?” I say, stopping him in the hallway. My stomach tightens at the thought of having to recite Sebastian’s biography for the next hour. Height, weight, sleeping patterns, food allergies, hotel preferences: All those things a wife is supposed to know because she loves you, not because someday she needs to describe you to a bodyguard.