Stirred (28 page)

I don’t remember walking back to my car. Nor do I recall navigating the dark, narrow residential streets of Medina or cruising Bellevue’s high-rise jungle. It wasn’t until a security guard rapped on my side window and shined his flashlight into my eyes that I realized I’d parked dead-center in one of the many large, empty lots on the Microsoft campus. He made the universal signal to roll my window down, which I did, though only a crack.

“What are you doing here at this hour, sir?” he asked.

“I, um…I just… I guess I closed my eyes for a sec and must’ve fallen asleep.”

“Did I see someone else out here with you?”

“Excuse me? I don’t… What?” I shook my head to clear the cobwebs.

“Are you okay, sir? Do you need assistance?”

I glanced around. “Um…no. Sorry. I, um…I’ll leave.” I started my car and pulled away with a wave.

In my rearview mirror, I watched the guard speak into his two-way radio as he got back into his patrol car. He shadow me from a distance until I vacated the grounds. A glance at my dash clock told me it was nearly three-thirty in the morning, and I was shocked. The last thing I clearly remembered was collapsing in the woods and cursing my stupidity as I knelt in the mud, soaked through with rain. But that was nearly four hours ago. And more than five miles away. How had I gotten here? I’d made trips before, so consumed in my thoughts, I didn’t remember the drive over to wherever it was I was going. But this was different, like sleepwalking, and the harder I concentrated on those lost hours, the less I seemed to recollect.

Had I gone to a bar and drowned my sorrows after discovering Eden with her husband? Except for a bitter taste in my mouth, I didn’t feel like I’d had any alcohol, let alone enough to wipe out my memory.

“What the fuck is going on?” I asked myself.

I must’ve been in some kind of emotional shock and had blacked everything out. But if that were true, why could I still recall Eden’s betrayal yet not what had taken place afterwards? It was disconcerting to lose time, to not know where you’d been or what you’d done. I didn’t feel any different. And when I peered at my reflection in the visor mirror, I didn’t look any different either, except for the dark circles under my eyes and the light spray of mud splattered across my nose and cheeks. With that, the memory of me puking my guts out flashed before me, and all the pain that had caused it filled me up all over again.

“Goddammit!” I cursed with a fist to my steering wheel. “I gotta get outta here.”
But where should I go?
I wondered.

The next thing I knew, I was being pulled toward the one person I’d counted on most over the last couple years. Maybe that was why I was in Redmond in the first place. My heart had directed me back to Trinitee, even when my mind couldn’t decipher the reason why.

After parking out front of her building, I walked into the lobby and pushed the elevator call button. Once I boarded, I pressed the button for her floor and turned to face the doors as they slid closed. The interior was finished in a polished metal, and I got a good look at myself, head to toe.

“Great,” I groaned at my reflection.

I wished I’d just gone home, showered, and changed, but it was too late now. I was here, and I needed to speak with Trinitee. She was my sounding board, my voice of reason, and usually steered me in the right direction after hearing my problem and hashing out a solution. Things might be strained between us, but what better way to heal the rift we’d suffered over my relationship with Eden than to admit Trin had been right?

That was my last thought as I approached her door and knocked. I raked my fingers through my hair and realized I was only making matters worse since dirty grit still lined the crevices between my fingers. I was brushing ineffectively at the caked-on soil along the length of my arm when a voice from down the dimly lighted hall startled me.

“You again?” Trinitee asked.

I spun around to face her. She stopped, her hands on her hips, and stared me in the eye, but if she was surprised to see me covered in mud, she didn’t let on. She didn’t even seem to notice. Her jaw was tense, her brow drawn low with a knot in the center. She dropped her hands and sauntered closer with slow, halting steps.

“I thought we settled everything. What could you possibly want now?” Trin demanded.

I raised both arms, but let them flop back to my sides when Trin closed her eyes and held up her hands.

“No, stop. Forget I asked,” she said with a curt shake of her head. She pulled a small ring of keys from the front pocket of her Army surplus jacket and pushed me aside before shoving a key into the lock of her front door. With a quick turn, she opened the door, but only enough to allow her lithe frame to squeeze through sideways. Once inside, she closed the door to a mere three-inch-wide crack, barely enough to see half her stunning face. With one steely, silver eye, she peered at me.

“I’m tired, Sean, and so not in the mood for more of your bullshit. I’m sorry,” she said then pushed against the door.

But I planted my foot over the threshold, barring it from closing. Trin pulled the door wide, one hand back on her hip. She glanced down at my muddy shoe then back up at me, her brow high.

“You mind?” she bit. “I
just
cleaned up there.”

I placed a hand on the door frame, leaned my forehead against it, and sighed. “Trin,” I said, then added, “Please,” with the look of a desperate man begging for mercy.

She huffed at me, but opened the door wide before turning her back on me and disappearing into her darkened apartment. I heard her keys clink in the heavy ceramic bowl she always kept them in just off the entry. A moment later, the kitchen light flashed on. Trin opened an upper cabinet door and pulled down a bottle of whiskey and two lowball glasses. Into one, she poured a single shot, after which she lifted to her lips and tossed down her throat. Setting it back down, she filled both glasses, this time with four generous fingers of the rich walnut-colored scotch. She capped and returned the bottle to the cabinet then grabbed both glasses, leaving one on the slab granite counter near the living room.

I closed the front door and slipped off my Nikes, but I was hesitant to come in any farther. “I don’t wanna track in any mud.”

She snickered and shook her head. “Should’ve thought of that earlier.” Irritated, she pressed her mouth in a crooked line. But then she sighed and waved an impatient hand at me. “Just… There’s a basket of clean laundry on the washer. Grab a towel and some sweats and go take a shower.” She snagged the drink she left on the counter and walked up to me, holding the glass up like a peace offering. “Don’t keep me waiting.” 

After looking at her long and hard, right in the eyes, I bowed my head and accepted her olive branch. That done, Trin turned and walked away, peeling her jacket off and dumping it on the sofa. Without another word, she withdrew into her bedroom and gently closed the door.

I finished up in the bathroom and dressed in the grey UW sweats I’d retrieved from Trin’s laundry. When I opened the door, it was to total darkness. Not a light on anywhere. Not in the hall or the kitchen. Nor the living or dining. I turned toward Trinitee’s bedroom and saw only the barest glow coming from beneath her closed door. She was playing hardball, making me work for whatever she thought I was here for. I let out a heavy sigh, knowing I deserved as much, and that she’d earned the right to rub it in.

In my head, I knew this all, and I’d come to terms with it before I even arrived. But there was still a small part of me that rebelled. I knew I’d have to rein that in, restrain it somehow. Look at what it had done so far, how far off-track it’d led me. Why was it, whenever my heart ruled, when I let my emotions control my sense of reason, did I lose myself so completely?

It was no wonder Trin had reacted the way she had. Unlike me, she saw everything from the outside, from the detached perspective of an observer. She learned. She deducted. Then she came to understand. I’d watched her do it dozens of times. Yet, when it was me in her lens, I refused to acknowledge what she’d determined to be true. Trin was right, as always. And that’s when everything clicked into place.

Of
course
she knew. Trin
always
knew. She knew
me
. She knew my mind. And she knew the second I’d pointed Eden out to her in the bar that first night. From then on, I was putty in her hands—game on. But instead of it being
our
game and Eden
my
prize, it had been Trinitee’s game, and I was merely her token, the little piece she moved around the game board.

I should’ve seen it coming. Trin got bored easily and was constantly upping her game. I, no doubt, presented the perfect challenge, someone who knew her moves and understood her motives, someone with a reasonably comparable intellect who could comprehend her objective—to control her subject like a marionette. And yet, I never even detected her machinations.

Damn, she was good, a fucking master manipulator. I wondered what she’d learned from watching me, where I’d place on her shelf of case studies. Not that it mattered anymore. I was done. No longer a cooperative participant.

Buttressing my resolve, I took in a deep breath and knocked on her bedroom door.

“Yeah,” she said.

Opening the door, I stepped inside and glanced around at the half dozen burning candles. My eyes settled on the full wall of shelves and the books that filled them—a smattering of true crime novels among a myriad of texts on criminal law, psychology, psychiatry, pharmacology, and general medicine. Music played softly from the speakers in each corner, though the tunes themselves were anything but soft, some kind of death metal, in stark contrast to the subdued candlelit setting.

Trin sat on her bed, her back propped against a mountain of pillows leaning along her headboard. She stopped, mid text, tossed her phone into the open book in her lap, then closed and placed it on the bed beside her. Without one word, she stood and walked to her dresser, snagging the same two lowball glasses from earlier, now half-filled with fresh shots, but, instead of the full-bodied, single malt Glenfiddich whiskey, this time Trin had poured two fingers of Rey Sol Anejo tequila. Top-shelf alcohol was one of the few luxuries she didn’t mind splurging on. And so, it seemed, was the new gem sparkling a clear ruby-red from her right ring finger.

I closed the six feet between us when Trin held the glass out to me. “Nice rock ya got there,” I commented. 

She glanced at her hand with a wry smile and the briefest of chuckles then raised her glass. “To friends and enemies.” she said, tipping the glass back and swallowing the liquor in one gulp.

After a moment to think that one over, I mimicked her action, without the cryptic toast, and placed my glass back down on her dresser. She grabbed the sculpted bottle with nubby sunrays and a smiling face and splashed two more shots into each of our glasses—shampoo, rinse, repeat—but I stopped her at a third round with a raised hand.

“No more for me, Trin, thanks. I should probably just go.”

She pulled her chin in close, her brow low. “Really?” she asked. “I figured a visit at four in the morning meant you had something important to say. Was I wrong, or did you change your mind?”

“You’re right, on both counts, but…I’ve reconsidered.”

Her brow shifted upwards. “And why is that? Because I kinda thought, or hoped anyway, that you were here to admit I was right, that you never should’ve allowed yourself to get so deeply involved with an older, married, ridiculously wealthy woman.”

“How would you know how wealthy Eden is?”

She quirked only one eyebrow at that question. “Does it really matter, Sean? I mean, I
was
right, wasn’t I?”

I hitched both hands on my hips and looked away as I shook my head. “What matters, Trinitee,” I began as I focused back on her, “…is not who’s right or wrong. It’s whether or not we support each other. As long as
you’re
happy, I don’t give a fuck that
you
see older, married, ridiculously wealthy men. I could’ve jumped all over your ass for that guy I saw you with at—”