Page 104 of One More Chance
After the call with Harlan, I woke up Sloane and let her know what the plan was. I expected pushback, or resistance… but she said she trusted me to do the right thing. Even after everything I'd put her through and all she'd suffered because of me, she trusted me still.
If I'd had the time, I would have spent all night and most of the next day showing her just how much that meant to me. But I didn't.
I had a date with the devil, so I had to leave my goddess behind.
She hugged me before I left, tears in her eyes before whispering to me, “Be safe. I love you.”
By midnight, the park was a frozen graveyard of rotten memories. The lake shimmered under the moonlight, still and cold. It was bitterly cold, each exhaled breath a steamy puff. I stood near the restrooms, thesame place where I first gave in to every selfish impulse, where I first let Angie sink her claws into me.
She approached from the dark, hands stuffed in her thick black coat, blonde hair pulled into a tight braid. Her eyes gleamed in the low light like a wolf stalking its prey.
“You came,” she whispered, her lips curving into that too-wide smile.
“I’m here,” I said. “Say what you need to say.” My phone was held in my hand, the recording app running.
She stepped closer, staying about five feet away, and reached her hands up towards me. “We could disappear, baby. Just us. Like we planned. Remember? Before everything got so… complicated.”
I said nothing. Every muscle in my body was coiled tight. I shook my head at her.
Her smile faltered as she said, nearly begging me, "We could go back to Key West?"
We could go back to Key West?
Go back to Key West?
Back to?
The horror of realization must have been painted across my face, for I saw her manic grin return in full force.
"Baby," she said, "do you remember me now? How many times you fucked me all over the beaches of Key West?"
I shuddered as one hand tightened around my phone and the other covered my mouth. The sound of her voice, too knowing, too familiar, settled into the darkest most stained parts of me. Her voice was the sound of an irreparable wrong I could never right nor ever escape.
Angie wasn't haunted by our past and she wasn’t delusional. This whole time, she had been taunting me with our future that hadn'thappened yet. She was like me. She had lived beyond the present, beyond the boundaries of thenow, and she carried the weight of an already lived future within her… just like I did.
She is like me.
Charlie is like us.
The unexpected randomness of that realization, to think of Charlie right then, was not something I had the luxury of examining in the moment. While I had been processing these revelations, she'd crept closer and was within arm's reach.
Her broken smile split her face in two and she cackled. "Yes! Oh, you remember now, baby? You remember how we used to be?"
How we used to be?
The constant fucking, then fighting, then fucking, then fighting. Our entire two years together had been nothing but empty orgasms and explosive outrage.
I struggled to speak, only managing a strangled, "How?"
"Because we're soulmates, Levi. Isn't that obvious?" She took one tentative step towards me and was so close I smelled her cloying perfume. "Our love transcended death and brought us back to when we first came together."
I violently shook my head. Her explanation forced bile to sear the back of my throat as my stomach roiled.
She reached up and touched my face. "We have one more chance to make it right this time."
I leapt back as if shocked.
Where the fuck are the cops?
