Page 67 of Badd Love
I kept breathing, trying to square breathe: Four seconds in, hold for four, four seconds out, hold for four, repeat. I kept slipping back into panic and had to start over.
"That's it, baby. Keep breathing." I heard his voice—I swear to God I did.
"Dane?" I whispered, sniffling.
I lifted my head, looked around. The alley was empty.
"Dane," I whispered again. "Fuck."
I missed him.
God, I missed him so damn bad.
It'd been over two months since that night in my apartment.
I spoke to Rune almost every day, via text, calls, voice notes, and video calls, but I never mentioned him, and neither did she. Duncan occasionally popped across the screen to say hi, and I could see tightness in his expression when he looked at me.
Angry at me, probably, for being the bitch who broke his brother's heart.
Too bad for me, only Rune seemed to understand how broken I was—what I was really struggling with.
It wasn't Dane.
It wasn't trust.
It wasn't even men.
It was me. My self-worth. My fear. Fear of what? Yes. Love. Sex. Intimacy. Vulnerability. I’d been a vulnerable child, a twelve-year-old girl who had had the misfortune of developing early and significantly—by the time I was twelve, my breasts were already bigger than most high school girls’. Yay—not. The jealous mockery from other girls, the looks and comments from the boys—my age, younger, older, even adults.Sofun.
And then my figure caught the attention of my brother's best friend. My brother was ten years older than me, so at the time, he'd been twenty-two and still living with Mom and me. He was a troubled kid, unsurprisingly, but managed to avoid arrest, despite being involved in a lot of highly illegal shit, most of it drug-related.
Fuck. I have to get him out of my mind.
He hadn’t aged well. That was some consolation, at least.
"Focus on me, honey." I heard Dane's voice again, soothing, calming, comforting. "I gotcha."
Can you panic so hard that you have auditory hallucinations? Or have I just finally, actually lost my mind? Because the alley was still empty.
I don't know how long I was in the alley alone, trying to gather myself, to slow my breathing. At some point, Saleh came back.
"Where is he?" I asked him.
"Do not worry about this, Lindsey. It is my worry, not yours."
"Did…did I…?"
"No. He will recover, unfortunately. Perhaps he will not be making any children, but I do not think this is any great loss for the world."
"Where is he, Saleh?" I demanded. "Please, tell me."
"I left him in the street outside the hospital."
"With any luck, he'll get run over by an ambulance. That would be nice."
"Sadly, I do not think that is what occurred." Saleh knelt in front of me, took my hands in his. "Will you please allow me to drive you home, Lindsey?"
"My car." It was a 2012 Dodge Neon; it was white, which means it was always dirty; the A/C tended to conk out when it was hottest, which is the most fun and helpful during the scorching Angeleno summers; it was always leaking oil and the gauges on the dashboard only worked some of the time, so I could never be entirely sure how fast I was going, how much gas I had left, or how hot the engine was, which was an issue considering the oil leak.
