Page 58 of Sublimate
I went out to the library parking lot, shivering despite the coat I’d gotten for myself last Christmas, and over to the car that Nolan had bought that wasn’t for me (except I was the only person who ever used it). It was so nice, held together by factory screws instead of my glue, and—
What was that? I turned quickly and caught only a fleeting movement out of the corner of my eye. I thought that someone had been standing there, at the side of the library building and in its shadow, but the figure had disappeared. People were allowed to hang out wherever they wanted, but I had dealt with a similar situation in the past and I was immediately on guard. It was what my former boyfriend had done, not Kolter but the one before him, the one I’d had to run from and drive off to Michigan. He had shown up wherever I happened to be (because he tracked me, of course). I used to come out of the houses I had cleaned and there was his car with him sitting in it, smoking and staring. If I said that I was going to the grocery store, he’d drive by to make sure that was where I’d really gone. He had shown up at our apartment unexpectedly to make sure I was alone, bursting in like the SWAT team and scaring me.
It made me nervous now because it felt the same way, like someone had been watching me, but that was obviously my personal issue due to dealing with that guy’s crapola in the past. Maybe someone had been taking a walk where there was no trail or sidewalk, in the cold as night was falling.
I looked again but there was no one around. No one at all, actually, because this parking lot was empty and there weren’t any cars passing by on the street, either. I ran over to mine and locked the doors when I got in, something I never really thought of doing around here. Then I drove home and as I did, I kept looking in the mirrors. There were still hardly any cars so I would have seen if someone had followed me.
Maybe I had a learned response due to previous crapola, but it wasn’t the first time I’d felt this lately. Since we’d driven back from downstate a couple of weeks before, I’d been having a weird feeling a lot. Like, I kept turning and expecting to see someone, or I would think, “Is that the same car that was behind me this morning?” It probably wasn’t but I was anxious about stuff, including who had been driving that Honda, including whether someone had been hanging around outside of the library.
The house was very quiet when I arrived. When I was living with Kolter, I had loved finding it empty, but I enjoyed coming home to Nolan. I locked the door from the garage, which I also never did, and then I stood, listening. It was an old house and there were always noises, normal sounds of the heaters clanking or creaks from the roof, but now I was jumpy, thinking about my ex and his weirdness. I walked through the rooms but there was no one. I peered around the back yard through the windows and there was no one there, either.
Just to make sure, I went to the office to use Nolan’s laptop, and the Nevada offender search website did give me a little relief. I saw that my ex-boyfriend from Las Vegas was safelylocked up, just like my sister was. Not my mom, though, not currently. I also checked on the man who was her first (and current) husband and looked up all the other names that I could remember, like the guy who’d been my first serious boyfriend, the one I’d lived with when I was fifteen. No, fourteen. He was currently free on parole.
But he wasn’t the type to follow me, anyway—he had been glad when I’d moved out and he hadn’t had to deal with me anymore. Kolter was the same way, the kind of person who liked to take the easy way around difficulties instead of confronting them. He’d sat next to the door in bars because it was easier to escape if he was being mouthy to someone and they objected. He had peed in his boss’s car instead of talking to her when she’d “disrespected” him. He avoided problems, like how he’d avoided the broken furnace at his house by living with his mom, and now I was a problem he would want to avoid, too.
I assumed. But according to Kolter, assuming made you an asshole.
Nolan got home a little later and that was even more of a relief, because maybe I was overly watchful but I was also so happy to see him. I was happy enough that I wanted to hug him, which would have been even weirder. He put the bag he carried onto the counter and looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “Hi. What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I answered. “What do you have there?”
“I was thinking about you in the Hawaiian sun,” he said, and took out an array of high SPF lotions. He had been concernedabout me in the ocean, too, and he took up that topic now. “What if you took some swim lessons? I don’t know if I’m the person to teach you.”
“Why? I thought you were on the swim team as a kid. Don’t you know how?”
“I know how, yes, but I might not show you the right way.”
“I don’t expect to start winning races,” I said. “I just want to stay afloat. Won’t you be with me, though?”
“Yes, I’ll be right there. But in case I wasn’t, I would want you to be safe.” As we made dinner, we kept talking about that, how I needed to stay afloat but also be able to swim on my own. He talked about jellyfish and falling off boats.
“Maybe I won’t go in the water,” I told him. “Tell me more about the hotel. Will the room have a minibar?”
“Our room has a dining room, an infinity pool, and an office. It will definitely have a minibar but I asked them to remove the alcohol,” he answered.
“Our room has more than one room?”
“It’s a suite,” he explained. “It’s almost the entire floor, with several bedrooms.”
Oh.
Nolan returned to discussing jellyfish and then added in some shark talk, and it turned out that there were several varieties of fish that could bite you around there. “I don’t want to hear anymore,” I finally told him.
“I’m sorry. Am I scaring you?”
“Yeah, but I was already a little on edge,” I admitted.
“Why?”
I also didn’t want to discuss my strange suspicions. Instead, I told him about another problem. “I’m worried about not finding a job. I know I don’t have an official employment history but I’m not trying to be the president of a company. I just need something. Anything.”
“I can check in with my relatives to see if they’re hiring. I should have done that before.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I would appreciate it a lot.”
“I have to talk to some of them anyway. My aunt is having a huge Thanksgiving party, right after we get back from the islands,” he said. “She always invites me.”
“You don’t want to see your ahhhnt?”
