We all spend New Year’s together, but then it’s time for Laurel to head back to Chicago. Carly is sad that day. I try to cheer her up by taking her out for milkshakes, but it’s not enough. I take her to the craft store, which is the worst place in the whole world, but that bums her out more because it reminds her of Laurel.
It reminds me how I felt when I first got exiled and went from seeing Cherie every day to not even being able to see her or talk to her. She wasn’t even allowed to know I was alive.
I just got drunk when I was down in the dumps, so when ice cream and craft stores fail to boost Carly’s mood, I stop and buy a bottle of whiskey and we spend the evening drinking and talking about our siblings. Carly gets super drunk and informs me we’re going to have two kids. A boy and a girl. Then she tackles me to the ground and attempts to make one, and I can’t really object to that.
Thankfully she’s a good planner and has been on the pill all along, because otherwise I’m pretty sure we’d be in trouble already. I’m probably in trouble anyway. Dying men shouldn’t fall in love.
Sometimes I stir shit up. We’ll just be sitting on the couch watching some stupid show and my mind will drift. I’ll visualize a knock at the door. Adrian answers to deliver the bullet he should have shot into me back when he killed Joey. I got Carly involved, so now he has to kill her, too.
I had a dream Mark of all people showed up to kill me. After he shot me in the head, but before I was completely dead, he stepped over me, walked over, and kissed Carly. She wrapped her arms around his neck, kissed him back, and said, “About fucking time.”
I wish she hadn’t worked for Castellanos. It makes me so goddamn uncomfortable.
When I get to thinking about how much I could cost Carly, I try to stir shit up. I try to push her away. She’s a patient woman with a spine of steel, so she doesn’t let me, but damn, do I try.
Somehow, she sticks around.
My good, my bad, none of it seems to faze her.
Winter fades to spring. Carly is getting excited about going back to school this year. I asked why she took the gap year if she was so excited—surely she could have done the internship at the same time. It seems like she’s never actually at the internship. The hours must be weird as hell. She only seems to go when I’m at work.
“Life happened,” she tells me, shrugging.
Carly takes everything in stride.
Carly is awesome.
I wish I knew how to protect Carly. She insists she doesn’t need protecting. Nothing I say, no story I tell her seems to convince her of Mateo’s reality. She doesn’t argue with my perception of him, she just continues to insist my facts don’t check out. She’s confident she could find me if she put her mind to it, so if Mateo’s people haven’t by now, he needs to upgrade his intel unit.
The thing is, she’s not wrong. Makes me wonder if he has found me, which leads me right back to horrible, grizzly imaginings of how we’ll both die.
Carly has mostly taken to ignoring my concerns at this point. She listens, nods, makes eye contact, murmurs comments to affirm my feelings, then goes on about her day—and our life—without concern.
—
“We should move in together.”
I look up from the can opener I’m plugging in and stare at Carly. She stands at the stove, her hair pulled up in a messy bun. “What?”
Tossing me one of her sultry little smiles over her shoulder, she says, “You heard me.”
“I must not have, because you’re talking crazy.”
“I don’t think it’s so crazy. We already basically live together. You sleep here every night. You have a drawer in my dresser, several shirts in my closet, and a drawer in my bathroom. You shaved off your five o’clock shadow in my sink yesterday—we live together. It’s pointless to pay rent in two places. We could be putting all that extra money aside for a down payment on a house next year.”
“We’ve been over this, Carly.”
She sets the spoon down, crossing the kitchen and coming over to me. She leans against me, pressing me into the counter, and wraps her arms around my neck. “I’m getting tired of saying this. I’m not going to get killed if we move in together.”
“He’s planning something, Carly. I don’t know what. I don’t know why. But he’s planning something. You are probably right that he’s found me, but you’re wrong that he’s just going to watch me move in with some girl and decide I’m settled and he can move on.”