Pieces of You(14)
“Yeah, but this is normal. This is the way these things go. They’re good people, as far as I can tell, but she got cold feet. I guess she’s a big fan of your music and she got a little nervous about meeting you. Then her husband got freaked out about the whole rock star thing.”
“Fuck!”
“Hey, it’s just a minor setback. We’ll give them a few days to cool off then I’ll call and try to set up another meeting. Don’t get discouraged.”
“What happened?” Claire whispers.
“Thanks, Tasha.”
As soon as I say her name, Claire’s face falls. I tuck the phone into my pocket and we sit in silence for a moment. I don’t know how much more heartache Claire and I can take. All I know is that this was not the homecoming I had planned for today.
“Hey, did I show you this tattoo,” I say as I pull up the sleeve on my right arm and show her the shattered heart tattoo I got on New Year’s Day.
It’s just a two-inch red heart broken into a bunch of pieces, but some of the shards are colored black and spell out the one word I think of when I think of Claire: home. She gazes at my arm for a moment before she looks up at me.
“This is really hard for me, too,” she says. She doesn’t have to say anything more.
Chapter Seven
Adam
I PULL INTO THE PARKING lot at Spencer Hall and, as usual, there’s no parking on a Friday night. I pull back out and find a parking space in the lot on Franklin. I’m walking past the Chapel of the Cross, just a few hundred feet from the dorm, when my phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s my dad.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your mom needs you to come into the office tomorrow to help her with the Blackwell close-out. She’s having a problem reconciling the change order log. You need to be there by two.”
“I can’t. I’m not coming home until Sunday. I’ll go in early on Monday to look at it.”
“No, you’ll be there tomorrow. The auditor is coming on Monday morning and this shit needs to be done by then. Your mom has a church thing on Sunday, so it has to be tomorrow.”
My dad knows I can’t refuse now. Religion is a topic we no longer discuss ever since I stopped going to church when I was seventeen—after Myles’ death. I don’t know if I believe in God anymore. The universe seems to be too random and unforgiving a place to be part of any grand design. But a part of me wants to believe. I want to believe that there was a reason Myles fell to his death. I want to believe there’s a reason I fell in love with Claire. I want to believe there’s a reason for me to keep driving one hundred miles every weekend for a girl who doesn’t believe she’s worth it.
“I’ll be there at five. That’s the earliest I can make it.”
I hang up before my father can respond. I always thought it was strange how people in movies never seem to say goodbye to each other before they hang up the phone. Now I do it all the time with my dad. There’s an abruptness to our conversations, a sense of urgency that drives the words out of us until the second we hang up. All our phone conversations sound clipped and often, on my part, flippant. I can’t help it. He makes me feel like a fucking teenager.
If he didn’t hold such a big secret over me, I’d have quit years ago. I’m going to have to come clean to Claire tonight. This may be our last weekend together before my dad sends me to Hawaii to close the deal on the Barking Sands Training Center construction project.
I reach the front entrance at Spencer Hall and get lucky when a scrawny guy in a UNC hoodie comes out the door. I resist the urge to punch him for reminding me of Chris Knight. Being on this campus always puts me on edge. I always expect someone to magically know I just graduated from Duke—or “Puke” as they like to call it.
“Thanks,” I mutter as he holds the door for me.
I make my way up to the third floor to room 330B, ignoring the four girls who smile at me on the way up. But I can’t help but smile as I approach the door. Twelve days is too fucking long to go without Claire.
I knock on the door and hear a short scream followed by giggles coming from the inside of the dorm. I shake my head as I wait for someone to answer. The door opens and Senia is standing there, all five feet ten inches of her, with her perfectly penciled eyebrow cocked.
She nods toward the interior of the room. “Hurry up before she finishes getting dressed.”
I laugh as I step inside and see Claire hastily pulling a gray T-shirt over her pink bra. Her back is to me, but just the sight of her calms me.
Senia claps me on the arm. “I’ll leave you two to your plans. I’m going downstairs to hang with Isabel for a while.”