Held A New Adult Romance(50)

"I..." She looks at me and I hardly recognize her. She looks like she did when I first met her - trapped, frantic, like someone who has forgotten how to smile.

"I had a gun," she says. "I made him drive me here. It's not his fault."

"You had a gun? What the hell is wrong with you?"

"What do you think is fucking wrong with me?" she says, her voice rising to a crazy, panic-stricken scream. Her dad reaches out to touch her but she shakes him off in a rage. "Same thing that was wrong with me before," she yells. "After everything that happened you didn't think I was going to get a tiny bit antsy about being watched?"

I don't know her. I don't know what she's talking about. And I'm trying so hard to look like I don't know what she looks like naked. She isn't ready, he said. She doesn't need another man right now. She needs friends.

I let her seduce me. That's the truth of it. I could have walked away. I knew where she'd put both guns. I could have locked them away and I could - I can be pretty persuasive - have talked her into going home to her Dad.

But I didn't. Because I wanted to fuck her. It's that dumb and it's that dirty.

"I feel I should take responsibility for that," says the woman, stepping forward. Amber stares at her as though she's grown an extra head. "The extra camera," the woman adds. "I suggested it when your father was concerned that you might be contemplating a further relationship..." She trails off, like she's been shamed into silence by the look in Amber's eyes.

"Yeah," says Amber, flatly. "You're done."

"I apologies for..."

Amber cuts her off. "Get out of my house," she says, without raising her voice. "You're fired."

Even John Gillespie looks ashamed. "What were we supposed to do, Amber?" he says, eventually. "You know the last thing you need right now is another man in your life..."

She snorts. "What would you know about what I need? You thought I'd be okay with being watched? Really?"

He sighs. "Okay. Fine. I admit that was a mistake..."

"You think?"

"In my defense, you did kind of kidnap the security guard." He waves a hand at me. "How about you?" he says, turning to me. "You're okay, right?"

I nod. "Yeah. I'm fine. Really. No harm done."

"Well, that's a matter of opinion," he says.

I have no idea what to say. If this was a movie this would be the moment when I tell him that I love his daughter, and he'd look at me and then at her and she'd smile and he'd see she was happy, right? Except I know that won't happen, because the last time she was in love she had her heart broken so badly it drove her nuts.

"You need to come back home," he says, but she's shaking her head before he even gets to the end of the sentence. "Amber, you know the rules. You have to keep up your therapy..."

"...not with her, I won't."

"No. All right. We'll find another doctor."

She slumps down on the couch, her head in her hands. Everyone may as well be speaking Chinese for all the sense this conversation makes to me. I can't make her happy. How the hell am I supposed to even start? She hasn't told me the first thing about herself, not really.

But then she glances up through the straggles of her lank, salty hair and I see a light in her eyes that wasn't there before this little adventure of ours. Maybe she would have told me everything, if we'd only had more time.

Maybe.

I got fired, obviously.

For the first few days I walk around in a daze, thinking she'll call, at least. If only to say she was sorry for making me lose my job. But she doesn't. The days slide by one much like the other. Halloween and Dia de los Muertos only stand out because Chuy eats too much candy and pukes all over Beca's hard-won hardwood floor. Jo and Pops talk about me when I'm not in the room; whenever I walk in they sound like they just changed the subject. My mother thinks I'm losing weight. It's left to Beca to broach the subject with her usual trademark tact.

"Are you seriously still hung up on that skinny white bitch?" she says.

It's on the tip of my tongue to say Amber is not a skinny white bitch, before I realize she answers to at least two of these descriptions and right now I'm too sore to refute the third. "I'm not hung up," I say. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm busy. It's hard enough to find a job these days."

"Doubly hard if you never smile," says my sister. "Pull your head out of your ass sometime. She's not worth it - the last guy she 'loved' ended up dead." And then she's out the front door before I can even ask what she means by that.

My laptop is open in front of me - I was looking for job applications. Fuck it. Why shouldn't I break the promise I made to myself? It doesn't count now, now that she's humped me and effectively dumped me. I type in 'Amber Gillespie boyfriend' and a face peers out at me from the image search. A mugshot.