Yes, this is really goodbye.
Suddenly, he steps forward and pulls me against his strong body. His hands tighten around my arms just the way I’d wanted to grab for him—desperately, with no intention of ever letting go. His heart is beating in my ear and he’s warm and pleasant and safe and all those things that Boston is not. It’s more than that, though—it’s a sensation I’ve only had a handful of times in my life, of being one hundred percent comfortable and happy and home.
With him. I’ve only had it with him.
He doesn’t say anything though. He just holds me there. I have to remind myself that he was the one who threw me away. The seconds tick by, making this home feel so temporary, and futile.
I feel my every nerve weakening inside me. If I stay here any longer, I will be powerless to stop him from hurting me, over and over again.
And I can’t do this anymore.
Standing on my tip-toes, I kiss him on the cheek, and push him away. I don’t look in his eyes. That would be my undoing.
I mumble a goodbye and rush into the house before he can see my eyes fill with tears. Turns out, I’m not all cried out, after all.
Chapter 12
“Miss Donahue! This brief is incomplete!”
His words hit me like gunshots fired from Fowler’s office across the hall. He’s so loud that every head in cubicleland swings in my direction. They’re all eating their bagels and cream cheese, courtesy of me, but do they show me any sympathy at all? Nope. The other interns look like they’re enjoying my crucifixion, because at least it isn’t them.
Not that it’s ever them very often.
No, Fowler has made it pretty clear I’m his number one target.
Shoving away from my desk, I wipe the cream cheese from my thumb. They didn’t save a bagel for me so I’ve managed to cobble together my breakfast by scraping out the remains of the spread container and putting them on a couple stale saltines I found in the kitchen. I take a swig of lukewarm coffee, and hurry across the hall. “Yes?” I ask.
My car drove like a dream all the way to Boston. It didn’t even protest when I gunned it to eighty on the interstate. I couldn’t stop thinking the inside smelled like my mechanic, like that heady combination of grease and soap, despite the orange-scented air freshener he’d hung from the rearview mirror.
When I finally got back to my apartment, I had nothing but a quart of spoiled milk and a few handfuls of Frosted Flakes left, so I went to bed hungry, listening to the couple in the unit next door arguing all night about something unintelligible, and likely unimportant.
But that’s what people do to each other, isn’t it?
My parents had tucked a couple hundred dollars in my purse, but I spent a good chunk of it on this bagel breakfast in attempt to make things right with my boss. And now, where is Fowler, but right up my ass again. He’s getting me back for the Dax thing, I know. But I didn’t know he’d be quite this vindictive.
“Do you have excrement between your ears, Miss Donahue?” he seethes, shoving the file across the desk toward me. “I told you that the red folders are only for the cases that are still pending.”
I take the folder. “I’m sorry.”
He takes a bite of a bagel. I watch him do so, disgusted by the way it looks being chomped by his overly whitened teeth.
He stands and starts to pile case files in front of me, slamming each one down with increasing ire. “You see?” he says, like I’m three. “Do it like this. You understand?”
I nod obediently.
Then I watch, horrified, as he tosses the rest of his barely-nibbled bagel into the trash.
As I gather the shitload of files into my arms and start to scoot away, the only thing in my mind is what Dax had said to me. Face it. A job working for that scumbag ain’t worth it, Katydid.
No, I tell myself. This is my father’s dream for me.
But what about my dreams? Truthfully, I haven’t been sleeping much, but I know if I did, my dreams would only be of one person.
And he threw me away.
And what have I been thinking about ever since?
Our last few seconds together. How he’d held me there, desperately, as if wanting me to say something he couldn’t, or didn’t think I could say myself.
Maybe he wanted me to say what I should’ve said four years ago. I’m staying.
What if I had said that? What would he have done then?
I trudge back to my desk, red-faced, trying to make sense of Fowler’s orders. But he isn’t done yet. He follows me out into the sea of cubicles and stands behind my chair as I slump into it. “Make it snappy. I need this before ten. In fact I should’ve had it an hour ago. My last intern—“
“Probably committed suicide,” I mutter under my breath.
He stops short. “What?”