“Don’t worry. I trust Dalton with my life.” I reach over and take her hand, pulling it onto my lap. “I’ll park at my car and then come over later tonight. I think there should be some distance between you getting home and me showing up.”

She nods, but she doesn’t say anything else on the drive home. We’re both dreading the inevitable, which is coming face to face with an unstable Asa Jackson. He’s bad enough when he’s in a good mood. I don’t even want to think of how he’s going to treat Sloan tonight.

When we reach my car, I look around to make sure I don’t see anyone. I parked a couple miles from her house and then walked the rest of the way this morning.

Before I get out of the car, I pull her to me and kiss her. She kisses me back with a sigh and it’s kind of sad. Like she’s tired of saying goodbye like this.

“How come it seems every time we take a step forward, we’re forced to take ten steps back?” she asks.

I push a strand of hair off her forehead. “We’ll just have to start taking bigger steps forward.”

She forces a smile and then says, “I hate that I won’t get to talk to you when you come over tonight. Or touch you.”

I kiss her forehead. “Me, too,” I say. “We should have a sign we can use in place of being able to talk tonight. Something subtle that only we’ll notice.”

“Like what?”

I lift my hand and rub my thumb across my bottom lip. “That’s mine,” I tell her.

She crinkles up her nose while she tries to think of one.

“You should twirl a strand of hair around your finger,” I suggest. “I like it when you do that.”

She smiles. “Okay. If you see me doing that it means I wish I could be alone with you.” She pulls at a strand of her hair and twirls it around her finger.

I lean forward and kiss her, then force myself out of her car. I wait until she drives away before texting Dalton again.

Me: Don’t let him alone with her before I get there. I’m scared of what he might do.

Dalton: Noted. Not sure what’s going on with him. He shot up, slept for ten minutes, now he’s talking incessantly. He keeps saying he wants spaghetti and that his hair is really thick. He’s not making any sense. He even made Kevin run his hand through his hair.

Fuck. He’s already unpredictable. This isn’t good.

Me: Let me know as soon as you all get back. I’ll wait an hour and then head that way.

Dalton: Good idea. BTW, he just looked at me and said you were LSD. What do you think that means?

Me: No fucking clue.

Dalton: He said, “Carter causes the worst hallucinations and he’s hard to fucking locate. He’s LSD.”

Me: He’s out of his fucking mind.

 Sloan-33

Sloan

My phone is ringing as soon as I walk through the front door. I glance down at the screen and see that it’s Asa.

Great.

I slide my thumb across the screen to answer it. “Hey.”

“Hey, Baby,” he says. He sounds like he just woke up, but I can tell he’s still in a car. “Are you home?”

“Yep. Just walked in the door. Are you still at the casino?”

“Nope,” he says. “On our way back.”

So I heard.

“We’re hungry. We want spaghetti, can you cook some?”

“I have a lot of homework to do. Wasn’t really planning on cooking tonight.”

He sighs and says, “Yeah, well I wasn’t really planning on craving spaghetti.”

“Sounds like we have a dilemma,” I say, uninterested.

“Not to me. Make some fucking spaghetti, Sloan. Please. I’m having kind of a bad day, here.”

I close my eyes and fall onto the couch. This is going to be a long night. I might as well make it as easy on myself as possible. “Okay. I’ll make you spaghetti. Would you like meatballs with that, dear?”

“I would love meatballs. We want meatballs, right, guys?”

I hear a couple of the guys in the car mutter, “Sure.”

I kick my legs up on the arm of the couch and put the phone on speaker, resting it on my chest. “Why are you having a bad day?”

It’s quiet for a minute, and then Asa says, “Have I ever told you about my father, Sloan?”

“No.”

He sighs. “Exactly. There’s nothing to fucking tell.”

Jesus. What in the hell did that man do to him? I rub my fingers against my temples. “When will you be back?”

Asa doesn’t answer my question. Instead, he says, “Is Carter there?”

I immediately sit up on the couch. Blame the paranoia, but my voice grows a little weaker. I try to hide it when I say, “No, Asa. He’s with you.”

There’s a short pause. “No, Sloan. He isn’t.”

The phone grows even quieter, and when I look down at it, I realize he hung up. I press the phone to my forehead. What does he know?

***

An hour later, they all walk through the front door. I’m not finished with the spaghetti yet because I had to go to the store to get the damn noodles. Asa walks into the kitchen, and I gasp when I look up at him. His shirt is covered in blood and his fist is almost unrecognizable. I immediately rush to the first aid kit in the pantry. “Come here,” I tell him, directing him to the sink.

I run water over his hand, trying to find where the blood is coming from, but it seems like it’s coming from everywhere. His whole fist looks like raw flesh. My stomach turns, but I force myself to finish cleaning it so I can bandage it up and not have to look at it.

“What in the hell did you do, Asa?”

He winces and looks down at his hand. Then he shrugs. “Not enough.”

I put ointment all over his hand and then wrap it, but that’s hardly going to help. He probably needs stitches. Several stitches.

I feel his hand clamp tightly around mine, and my eyes dart up to his.

“Where’s your fucking ring?”

Shit.

“On the dresser. I didn’t want to get it dirty while I cooked.”

He stands up and yanks my arm, pulling me toward the stairs. I can feel the pull all the way up to my neck. “Asa, stop!”

He doesn’t let go of me, and when he drags me behind him, through the living room, Dalton stands up. “Asa,” he says.

Asa still doesn’t stop. I have to run just to keep up with him as he takes the stairs two at a time, so I don’t fall down. He swings the bedroom door open and grabs my ring off the dresser, pulling my left hand up between us. “You keep your fucking ring on your hand. That’s why I bought it for you, so people would know they can’t mess with you.”

He slaps my hand on the dresser and then opens the top drawer, holding my hand down flat with his.

“What are you doing?” I ask, fearing the answer. He opens the second drawer and rifles through it.

“Helping you remember never to take it off,” he says, grabbing a tube and slamming the dresser drawer shut. My eyes land on the bottle of super glue in his hand.

The hell he is.

I try to yank my hand back, but he uses even more force to hold down my wrist. He pulls the cap off the super glue and starts squirting it on my finger, spreading it under my ring.

The tears begin stinging at my eyes. I’ve never seen him like this and I don’t want to push things even more. I stop fighting and stand as still as I can, aside from my heart racing in my chest. Carter isn’t here and I’m honestly too scared to fight back right now because I’m not sure that any of those guys downstairs would come to my defense.

Asa tosses the super glue on the dresser and lifts my hand, then blows on it to dry the glue. He stares at me the whole time he’s blowing on my finger. His eyes are black. Huge and black and terrifying.

“You finished?” I whisper. “I don’t want to overcook your spaghetti.”

He blows on my hand for a few more seconds and then leans in and kisses my palm. “All done. Now you won’t forget.”

He’s crazy. He’s fucking crazy. I think I’ve always known he wasn’t a great person, but I had no idea how crazy he was until looking at his eyes just now.