“Ovaries quivering yet?” Candace had asked her.
Starla had cocked an eyebrow at her. “Dude, I have ovaries of motherfucking steel.”
But she did love cuddling that baby. He was so sweet and smelled so good. Thinking of how close he’d come to losing his daddy never failed to take her breath away. The entire Dermamania crew confessed to still having nightmares about that night, but they were slowly getting better, all of them thankful they still had their friend here. That Candace still had her husband, and Lyric his father.
All was definitely as it should be. If Jared had only been a stepping stone to reach this pleasant height in her life, she supposed she would have to accept that. Enjoy the view she had, and not the one she wished she had, with him at her side.
Things could always be worse.
***
“The number you have reached is no longer in service…”
Jared could practically feel the blood leaving his face as he let the hand holding his phone drop to his lap. He could still hear the recording prattling on, but it scarcely registered. She’d changed her number.
He sat alone in his truck across the street from Dermamania. Starla’s car still wasn’t at work. This time, he’d planned to stop if she was there, but now several days in a row had gone by and she hadn’t been there once. Curiosity had become concern, and now outright panic, so he’d dared to try to call her. No luck. She’d said she was quitting, so maybe she’d followed through with that. But where was she? What was she doing?
Here they’d fought so hard to defeat a stalker, and he was on the verge of turning into one himself.
Jared had thought with Brian on the mend and everything settled on that front, she might reconsider her decision to leave her job; she might decide she needed her friends and stay at Dermamania after all. Okay, obviously that hadn’t happened. He drove to her house, going over in his head everything he needed to say, everything she deserved to hear. Maybe she would tell him to go to hell, in which case he supposed he would, forever doomed to replay in his head those hateful words they’d exchanged at his house the morning she left.
Her car wasn’t at the little house in the cul-de-sac either. There didn’t appear to be anyone there.
“Fuck!”
Jared clenched his fists to keep from punishing his steering wheel or dashboard. He didn’t relish resorting to the only solution he could imagine at this point, the one he’d shoved to the back of his mind from the start, but he wasn’t going to sit here and wait anymore either. All his life, waiting had gotten him jack shit.
The tattoo shop stayed open late—Jared could have spared himself some wounded pride and caught Ghost as he was leaving for the night, but he was ready to grovel on his knees in front of them all if need be. He snatched the door open and swept inside before he could talk himself out of it, immediately seeing that all of Starla’s things were gone from her station as if she had never been there. The cute blue-haired girl working across from Starla’s old workspace was staring at him with her carefully penciled eyebrows high in her smooth white forehead.
“Can I help you?”
“She’s not here anymore, dude.” Ghost spoke up from the back before he could answer. Jared hadn’t noticed him hunched over a client, working on an ankle piece. Muttering a thanks to the girl, he strode back. Ghost finished his line and wiped the ink before looking up at him, mouth set in a grim line. Obviously, he was waiting for Jared to ask the questions before he offered any information.
Pride went down hard, and it tasted like shit. The girl in Ghost’s chair looked back and forth between them in fascination.
“Where did she go?”
“Man, you know what she just went through.”
“All too well.”
“So I’m not going to tell you where she is so you can put her through it again.”
“You think I’d do that?”
“I don’t have to worry about it, because you’re not going to do anything. Leave her alone. She’s doing good, probably better than ever. Let that be enough for you.”
“Look, I know you don’t like me too much, for obvious reasons.” Ghost remained silent on that point, but he threw an apologetic glance at his client. “And a while back, the feeling was mutual. I’m over it now. It’s all in the past. You have to know by now that I would never do anything to hurt her. If she tells me to take a walk, then I walk.”
“That’s beautiful, dude.”