Branded(46)

“I just don’t understand how no one has been able to find the fucker yet,” DJ complains to Dax on the phone as I load our dishes from dinner into the dishwasher.

One quiet night in front of the television a few days ago, he admitted he was an asshole with Dax and needed to do some groveling. I didn’t tell him just how much it excited me to know he was jealous of my friendship with the guy. I grabbed his phone from the coffee table and handed it over, telling him to just apologize. He called Dax right in front of me and, even though the conversion that night was only filled with grunts, stammering and no real apology, at least the two men called a truce and were back to speaking to each other.

“We’ve got your cop following our asses every damn place we go. How is this piece of shit getting around him to keep leaving these damn notes?” DJ argues.

Eighteen notes in total so far, each one placed in their own individual zip lock bag and handed over to the police as evidence. Just like with the first couple we received, none of them had any fingerprints or any real way to tie them to my father. Every time we left DJ’s house, a new one would appear on the front door. After that, we tried staying home, figuring there was no way he’d be able to get by Jackson, but he still managed to do it. Notes showed up tucked inside the mail in the mailbox, they were stuck under the windshield wiper of DJ’s car and they were even delivered via certified mail. They all contained some sort of threat, escalating with each one, and Dax believes he’s getting angry because I’m never alone and he can’t get to me. I don’t care about what he says to me, but he’s still including DJ in this shit and that pisses me off. All of his damn notes mention something that happened privately between DJ and I, and they almost always call me a whore.

I can hear my father’s voice, screaming at me when I was in high school like it was yesterday.

“You’re a stupid whore, just like your mother! How many times have you spread your legs this week to get what you want?”

“No good man will ever want a whore like you. Especially with those ugly burns on your back. How about you come over here so I can add another one?”

I close my eyes and shake my head, trying my hardest to get his fucking voice out of my brain.

“Alright, man, keep me posted. No, I’m not letting her out of my sight. She’s even going to do a ride-along with me at work tonight.”

DJ grins at me with the phone pressed to his ear and I try to look angry, but it’s impossible when he smiles at me like that. At Dax’s insistence, I took a leave of absence from work. He didn’t like the idea of me being so easily accessible in such a busy hospital, and there’s no way the administration would let DJ and Jackson follow behind me like a rabid guard dog on my shifts. When DJ was called in on his days off for emergencies, I’d go out to Jackson’s cruiser and have coffee with him until DJ came home. I enjoy his friendship and I feel like I’m doing some good by rekindling it again. It’s my way of making up for the shit that went down with Jackson’s cousin and it’s also nice to sit and chat with someone about nothing important. It takes my mind off of what’s happening with my father and what I’m going to do about my relationship with DJ. It’s strange to be friends with men that I have no intention of sleeping with, first Dax and now Jackson. I’ve made Jackson tell me all about his life since we briefly dated. He’s never been married and he likes to joke that he could never find a woman who could live up to my high standards. He’s very close to his family and has been spending a lot of time with his aunt and uncle, doing whatever he can to ease the pain of losing their child. He doesn’t ask about Finnley and I don’t offer any information. Jordan was fucked up in the head from his drug and alcohol addictions, harassing Finnley after she kicked him out of the house and then breaking in one night with the intention of killing her, spreading gasoline all over the first floor of the house before lighting a match. I know it has to be hard for Jackson, wanting to blame someone for what happened. Jordan was his best friend and it must be difficult to recognize the bad in someone when you have so many good memories of them. Unfortunately, no one is to blame for Jordan’s death aside from Jordan himself. He made his choices and he had to die with them.

The nice thing about Jackson is that being friends with him is easy. He has a great sense of humor and he never asks about my father, even though he knows most of the gritty details. We talk about mundane things like the weather, television shows we saw or books we read. We talk about nonsense and for a few hours, I can just be a normal woman without a care in the world. Part of me feels like I’m betraying DJ in some way by having these thoughts. I want to be normal with him. I try to be normal with him. We laugh, we cuddle, we fuck and we do most of the other regular things a normal couple does. I just won’t let him see me naked and he pretends like it isn’t an issue.