Forget You (26 page)

“I’m there.” Mindy smiled. “Let me know what
time.”

“All right. I’m in it, so I have to get there
a little earlier, but I’m sure you’ll still have a good time. There
will most likely be some cute guys you can flirt with across the
aisle.” I winked.

I knew her and Wes were on again, off again.
She deserved to find someone better so she would stop letting
herself get strung along by that douche bag. I hoped that Jason had
some decent, worthy friends he had invited.

“I like your way of thinking,” she muttered.
“I’ve got to go. My studio art class starts in twenty. I wanted to
see if you were here so I could ask about tonight, but I also
needed to mix up my creative juice—some tequila and 7UP in a to-go
cup.” She moved around the bar, and grabbed a large Styrofoam to-go
cup. “Shh.” She held a finger to her curved lips.

Mindy had a little deeper wild streak than I
thought. Interesting.

Chuckling, I spun and started toward the guys
in suits, ready to hand them their bill. My phone vibrated in my
apron pocket before I could reach them. The desire to see who it
was made my fingers itch. Even though I knew it wouldn’t be Sawyer
calling, I still wanted to look and see. Pausing mid-step, I
slipped my hand in my pocket, and quickly pulled out my phone.
Janet’s name and number caught my attention. Cramming my phone back
in my pocket, I rushed to the guys’ table and handed them their
ticket without uttering a word.

Weaving through the throng of people on their
lunch break, I headed to the storage room. I’d learned early on
that if you wanted to call or text someone while not on break, this
was the place to do it. The owner, Sam, hardly ever came back here
during open hours. Even if he did, all you had to do was grab
something—a thing of beer for a tap, a bag of frozen French
fries—and he would assume you were still doing as you were supposed
to.

Leaning against the metal shelf all the
condiments were kept on, I grabbed a jar of hot sauce I knew was
needed at table seven, and reached for my phone. Janet hadn’t left
a message, but now I realized she’d already called me twice. I
didn’t know why I hadn’t felt my phone ring the first time. Tapping
on her name, I dialed her number with the hope that she had some
good news to tell me. Maybe Sawyer and his unit had completed their
mission sooner than predicted; maybe they were on their way back.
Excitement from this possibility pumped through me.

“Eva,” Janet answered on the second ring.
From the tone of her voice, I knew there was no good news to be
said, and I felt my heart deflate.

“Hi. What’s wrong?” My lips quivered as the
words passed through them. “Is Sawyer okay?”

A sniffle on the other end was my response.
Moments ticked away, and my willpower not to scream for her to tell
me something, anything, chipped away. I needed to know what had
happened. I couldn’t just continue to let my mind run wild with
possibilities while I listened to her cry.

“Janet, did something happen to Sawyer?” I
asked. My voice was a whisper, but the words jarred me to my core
nonetheless.

“We got word today that there was an
explosion during one of their perimeter searches.” Her voice was
flat and devoid of emotion, but the words she spoke still held all
the punch to them as if she had shouted them at me. “Sawyer’s unit
was right in line of the blast. He didn’t…they said…
my baby
boy
…” Sobs echoed through the phone to my ear.

Janet’s cries of agony bounced off the walls
of the storage room, and crashed into me from all angles. The air
became too thick and dense all at once, and I found myself
struggling to breathe, to remain standing.

Sawyer was gone.

The thought stabbed me through the chest, and
created a pain like nothing I’d ever felt before. It burned and
spread through me like a raging wildfire, uncontrollable and
deadly. The bottle of hot sauce slipped from my fingertips and
crashed to the floor, exploding into jagged pieces that would never
fit together as perfectly as before—just like me.

“My baby boy is
gone
,” Janet cried.
Her words were nothing short of a choked whisper. “I don’t know
what I did in this life to deserve both of my babies to be taken
from me.”

A shuffling noise over the phone filled my
ears, and then Sawyer’s dad was there. “Eva, I’m sorry we had to
tell you this way, but Janet said you needed to know as quickly as
the rest of us.” Mr. Keeton’s voice cracked as the sounds of
Janet’s breakdown became distant. “If you need anything, you know
we’re here for you.”

“Thank you,” I muttered, my voice small and
broken…nothing like it should sound.

“I think you should know.” Mr. Keeton paused
in whatever he was about to say, and cleared his throat. “He loved
you, you know. Even though the two of you were only together for
such a short time, he’d already told me he thought he loved you.”
Mr. Keeton hung up then, Janet’s distant cries were cut off, and a
loud beep from the dropped call pierced my ear.

My arm fell lethargically to my side. Sawyer
was gone. Tears built in my eyes. Blinking them away, I attempted
to take in a few deep breaths. It did no good. The tears continued
to swell and sting the corners of my eyes in their persistent
effort to fall. My surroundings blurred before coming back into
view. I couldn’t be here anymore. I needed to get out of this
confining storage room, out of this restaurant.

Exiting the storage room in a hazy fog, I
frantically rushed to the front of the restaurant.

“Your table has been waiting for their check.
Are you planning on making them sit here all day?” Sarah, another
waitress working today, asked with more attitude than I cared for
at the moment.

Reaching in my apron pocket, I grabbed my
ticket book and chucked it at her. Her face contorted into an
expression of rage and frustration, but everything she said was
drowned out by the pounding of my heart. I tugged off my apron,
dizziness making my motions unsteady, and wadded it up. Stepping
behind the counter, I grabbed my purse and coat from the area we
stowed our things in, and darted out the front door of The Point
without looking back.

My stomach hardened, and nausea crept up my
throat as the sounds of Janet’s cries clogged my head once more. My
hands trembled as I dug through my purse for my keys.

Gone
, Sawyer was gone. How was that
even possible?

The thought pummeled me repeatedly as I
crammed my keys in the ignition and started my Escape. Shifting
into reverse, I floored it, and squealed tires out of the parking
lot, not knowing where I was going, but positive that I had to get
away.

I traveled wildly, and more recklessly than I
ever had before, down the streets of Norhurst. When the sign for
Gareth’s Park came into view, I cut into the parking lot, and
turned into the first space I saw. The place was nearly deserted.
No one came to the park in the dead of winter. No one except me
apparently. Climbing out, I started to my favorite studying bench,
to the spot where this thing with Sawyer had begun. Cold wind beat
against my cheeks, and nipped at my nose as I crossed the
field.

Sitting on the bench, I pulled my knees up to
my chin, and finally allowed the tears to fall that had been
building in my eyes since hearing Janet’s words. Wrapping my arms
around my legs tightly, I pressed my forehead to my knees as all of
my sadness bubbled from me in the form of salty, warm tears.

Images of Sawyer running with his Guard
buddies through the oddly warm fall sun filled my mind. The sexy
smile he’d worn that day came next, followed by the way he had
refused to drop his gaze from mine, until finally my mind chose to
focus on his first words to me. They rippled through my mind in
vivid detail, and broke the large fragments of my heart into
smaller pieces.

“
The girl who can handle some serious eye
contact.”

I thought of all the funny things Sawyer had
said to me in the short time I’d known him, all the hilarious
one-liners, and our juvenile dates, which had ended up being the
best dates I’d ever been on. I thought of how strange I found it
that he hated coffee. I thought of how much he loved to run at the
butt crack of dawn every day. I thought of his cobalt blue eyes,
and his scruffy face he never seemed to keep clean-shaven.

Then I thought of how I would never get to
enjoy those things again, how I never would get to tell him how I
truly felt.

I had love, and then I lost it.

The tears streamed from my eyes like twin
rivers raging with a fury. I wiped my nose with the back of my
hand, and twisted my body so I could lie down across the bench.
After a while, my tears stopped and my limbs grew numb, either from
the cold or exhaustion, I couldn’t be sure. Reaching in my pocket,
I pulled out my phone, and dialed the only person I cared to talk
to. As soon as I heard the first ring go through, I closed my eyes
and nearly wept.

“Whoa, a phone call from Eva during her work
hours, is the apocalypse coming?” he answered.

“Cam…” I couldn’t say another word. My vocal
cords clamped. The sobs that had gripped me wracked from my body in
a whole new way as I thought of how to tell him what had happened,
how I felt as though I was dying because of it.

“What’s wrong?” He panicked. “Eva, baby,
answer me. What’s the matter?”

“He’s gone, Cam, and I can’t even breathe…” I
sobbed. The force of each heartfelt cry shook my body as my sadness
escaped from me while I lay across the bench, reliving the moment
Janet first told me the horrible news. “
I can’t
breathe
.”

My chest tightened even more as noises crept
past my lips I’d never heard myself make before. My heart seemed to
slow in my chest as my limbs weakened.

“Oh my God, I’m coming. I’ll come get you.
Where are you?” he asked. I vaguely heard the muffled sounds of him
slipping his coat on, and the jingle of his keys. “Eva, sweetheart,
you’ve got to tell me where you are.”

“Gareth’s Park,” I whispered. My teeth
chattered as I said the words.

“Jesus, what are you doing there? It’s
freezing out,” Cam insisted. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Hold
on.”

The phone went dead against my ear, and I
closed my eyes.
Hold on
? I repeated his words in my mind.
Hold on to what? Everything about my life had just been flipped
upside down, and turned to shit. What the hell was there to hold on
to?

SAWYER

My eyes blinked open to see a dingy, white
ceiling above me. I continued to blink, hoping that when the fog of
sleep left me, I would remember something about where I was, about
what had happened. The smell of food cooking filled my nose,
causing my stomach to growl. When was the last time I’d eaten? What
the hell was going on?

A small voice filled my ears, but I couldn’t
understand the words being said. Why did everything sound so damn
muffled on my right side, as though I were under water? Movement
caught my attention at the foot of the mattress I was spread out
on. My eyes trailed over the face of a small child. A boy. It took
me a second to realize who I was seeing—the little boy who had been
with his mother, walking through the alley.

The alley
.

Everything came rushing back to me then.
There had been an explosion!

Moving to sit up, my head swam, and my vision
dotted as nausea gripped my stomach. The little boy yelled
something, and then glanced over his shoulder. The same woman whose
bag I’d searched rushed into the tiny room. She shooed her son
away, and motioned for me to lie down.

“What happened? I need to check in with my
unit,” I muttered. My voice sounded hollow and strange to my
ears.

The woman pushed against my shoulders,
forcing me back onto the bed. The spinning stopped the moment my
head touched the mattress. Sighing, I brought my hands up to smooth
over my face. The stubble my palms met with was longer than I
remembered it.

“How long have I been here? What the hell
happened?” I asked, noticing the edge of panic to my tone.

The woman smiled while reaching into a bowl
sitting on the floor. She dabbed a cool cloth over my forehead, and
stared into my eyes. I noticed the color of her eyes instantly—a
smooth brown, but it was a sense of calm and kindness shining
brightly in them that put me at ease. Closing my eyes, I focused on
the way the cool droplets of water slipped down my temples, and the
feel of the soft cloth swiping at my skin. Visions of the last
things I remembered swirled through my head as sleep overtook me
once more.

EVA

Footsteps sounded outside my bedroom door.
Keeping my eyes closed, I attempted to drift to sleep, but
couldn’t. Sleep wouldn’t find me. It hadn’t for days. What would
have been my only escape from this hellish nightmare evaded me no
matter how much I welcomed it. A throbbing pain radiated from where
my heart used to beat, healthy and strong, keeping my dreams at
bay.

Loving someone, and then losing him, had
weakened me.

“I wish I could just forget you,” I whispered
into the darkness of my room.

I wished this were a horrible nightmare, but
that hadn’t seemed to work. Wishing to forget Sawyer seemed to be
the next logical step for me.

For the first time since I’d found out, I
felt a tear slip across my cheek and trickle along my chin. A
second one came across the bridge of my nose, following the same
path as the first. I didn’t wipe either of them away. I didn’t
move. I was barely breathing. That was all I was asking my body to
continue to do for me.

My bedroom door opened slowly, and heavy
footfalls met my ears. I didn’t need to see who it was. I already
knew. The stench of his cologne had floated through my room the
second he had opened the door. It overpowered any smell of food he
was undoubtedly bringing for me.