He waited at the house until four that afternoon. Soon, it would be dark. She hadn’t answered any of his calls or texts and he couldn’t sit around any longer with his thumb up his ass.
He drove around town, looking for her car, but didn’t see her anywhere. He stopped off in O’Malley’s, but it was Sunday and the place was dead.
Should he go back to her house or go home? He really didn’t want to be around his father. Now that he was working at the lumberyard, his dad had all this unwelcome wisdom to share. It made Giovanni want to scream.
He drove around, burning a tank of gas looking for her. He’d called her more than twenty times and she wasn’t getting back to him. When he circled her place again, her car still wasn’t back.
“What the fuck, Erin? This isn’t cool. Call me so I know you’re alive and not in a ditch somewhere.” He hung up the phone. It wasn’t a completely unreasonable worry, considering the night they got together. Once the sun set, the roads would get icy, and he didn’t want her out driving alone.
He had no choice but to go home. He wanted to wait for her at her place, but the more he replayed their argument, the more he thought this might be her way of asking for space.
Last night when they made love, there had been a chill in more than the air between them. She was cold and it had nothing to do with her and everything to do with how he’d snapped at her. He had felt her body, but couldn’t reach her mind.
Now he realized, despite her intimacy issues, how much she’d opened up to him over the past several weeks, because the moment she cut herself off, he felt it.
He just needed to find her. Then he would gladly talk to her about anything she wanted.
When he got home, he couldn’t sleep. He called her one last time.
“Erin, I’m sorry. You’re right. I should quit, but I don’t know what to do right now. Everything’s a mess, and now you’re mad at me. I don’t care about the job. I care about you. I want to talk about your day and hear what you did. I know I haven’t been myself lately, but… I’m not going anywhere. Neither are you.” Not without me, at least. “Please call me or at least text me to let me know you’re safe. I…” He swallowed, not wanting the first time he told her he loved her to be on her voicemail when they were obviously in a fight. “…miss you.”
He put his phone on the nightstand and it buzzed a minute later with a text notification from Erin. His relief was short lived. I’ll call you tomorrow, it read.
Great, now he could spend the next twenty hours dreading whatever that meant.
CHAPTER 23
Giovanni’s phone finally rang when he was thirty feet up a tree and unable to answer it. By the time he got back to the ground, he had two missed calls and no bars.
“Yo, Giovanni,” Finn yelled. “Where you going?”
“I gotta make a call!”
A chainsaw buzzed and Finn pointed to his ear, telling him he couldn’t hear what he said. Giovanni waved him away and left the site.
He had to drive into the damn town to get a decent signal, but it was worth it to hear Erin’s voice.
“Hey.”
He sighed. “Tell me we’re okay.”
She didn’t answer right away and that scared him. “We’re okay,” she finally said with little inflection.
“Where are you?” Screw work. She was more important. He needed to see her.
“I’m in a town called Clifton Heights.”
“Clif—Erin, where the hell is that? What’s going on?”
“I needed room to think.”
“About us?”
“About everything.”
He gripped his phone so tight the case creaked. “Forget what I said the other night. I was exhausted and in a shitty mood. It had nothing to do with you.”
“It’s not what you say, Giovanni. It’s what you do.”
He didn’t know what she meant. “Look, I’m trying to make some money. Maybe the lumberyard’s not for me, but it’s something until I find a better option. We’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t care about your money, so long as you’re not in financial trouble.”
“Then what?”
“I just want you to be happy.”
“Then come home.”
“I’m trying to figure out where that is.”
His heart stopped. “Well, I can tell you it sure as fuck isn’t a place called Clifton Heights.”
“I’ll call you tonight.”
“Erin, wait, how long are you staying out of town?”
“I don’t know, but I have to go. I’ll call you tonight.”
The line cut off. “Fuck!”
When he returned to the lumberyard his temper was fuming. Finn spotted him right away and sent out a whistle for him to stop like he was a goddamn dog or something.
“Yo, where the hell did you disappear to? You don’t take off in the middle of a shift when you have a whole crew depending on you.”