The Game

http://www.shanescollins.com/

The Game

Copyright © 2013 by Shane Scollins All rights reserved.

Limitless Publishing, LLC

Kailua, HI 96734

http://www.limitlesspublishing.com

First Kindle Edition: 2013

Formatting:
Streetlight Graphics

All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

Thanks - To the Limitless Publishing team for their hard work and continued belief in my talents - To Jen and Jessica for pushing me a little out of my comfort zone to round this project into shape - To Tristan for her continual willingness to catch the first grenade.

Thanks to Mom for teaching me to fight back when life attacks

As always – to Heather, for unwavering support of our dreams- ROI, baby!

“Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.” ~ Voltaire

Chapter 1

T
he stream of a tranquil waterfall washed over her toned body. It felt so wonderful, and real, until the ring of the phone ripped her from the dream.

Groggy eyes focused on the red numbers of the alarm clock on her nightstand. It was two o’clock in the morning, for the third consecutive night. She didn’t answer it either of the previous times, because the caller ID didn’t register the caller.

The first night, it was simple enough to think it was a wrong number. The second night was somewhat annoying, but she let it go. This time, however, it struck the wrong nerve. Candice reached her arm across to the nightstand and picked up the phone.

As with the previous nights, the caller ID only said, NAME UNKNOWN. She reluctantly pressed the call button and said hello. There was no response. “Hello?” Again, there was no reply. After a breath, she hung up.

Candice rolled over to go back to sleep. She closed her eyes and snuggled into her pillow. There was still time to pick that dream back up. If she was lucky, she could conjure up a hunky kayaker trolling down the stream near that pristine waterfall.

The phone rang again.

Her eyes creaked open as she unleashed an audible sigh. She turned over and reached for the phone again. The caller ID showed the same unhelpful tag. She didn’t want to pick up a second time, but her anger got the better of her.

“What. Who is this?” Again, there was no response. But this time, she heard someone on the other end of the phone. There was no specific sound, but it was obviously not dead air. “Who’s there? Dammit, say something!”

She sat up. Then she heard something that confounded her, the chuckle of a young girl. Candice blinked the sting away from her eyes, pressed the phone harder to her ear. “Hello?”

A young girl said, “Candy? Is that you?”

Candice frowned, but no words formed in her brain for a response.

“Candy, it’s me, are you there?” The voice was not familiar. “I miss you, it’s been so long. I’ve been trying to reach you. Can you hear me?”

She swallowed hard, shook her head once to clear out her thoughts. “Who is this?” There was a dangling string of hope that it was her best friend, Zee, playing a trick on her.

“Candy, it’s me. D’you remember me? I remember you, that fine chestnut hair and those amber eyes. You’re so pretty I could never forget you. I’m so glad you grew up to be just as pretty as I thought you would. You were always the prettiest girl in school.”

Candice couldn’t even begin to imagine what in the hell was going on here.

“Candy? Do you remember when we met those boys at the movies? They were so cute. And you were so confident, so sure, I wanted to be just like you.”

She searched her mind, trying to imagine what kind of game this was, running through each memory she could dig up. Finally, unable to come up with anything else, she said, “I’m sorry, but who is this?”

The girl laughed, a preteen giggle, lilting and feminine. “Oh you’re so funny. Ha-ha, right, like you don’t know.”

“I’m not being funny, I don’t know who this is, and it’s the middle of the night. I’m tired of playing this game and I have to get up for work in three hours.” She regretted her tone, but she was tired. It’d been a long week, and she just wanted to get through Friday and enjoy the weekend. She and Zee had a nice Saturday morning bike ride in the park planned, that was all the motivation necessary to drag her ass into work.

There was silence on the other end of the line again. Candice waited for some response. But nothing came and the line was dead. She hung up the phone and rolled back over to go to sleep. But sleep didn’t feel like it was anywhere in the near future. Her mind was going a million miles an hour.

There was something haunting about the call. It nagged at her that she was missing something. She ran through every friend she’d ever gone to the movies with, certain she was probably forgetting someone. But there was just nothing that made sense about the call. Even if she had recalled someone, it made no sense. It’s not as if they could call her from the past.

People did used to call her Candy in grade school. In high school, her good friends called her Goona, which was a play on her last name, Laguna. As an adult, everyone called her Candice. She did date a guy, a few years ago, that insisted on calling her
Candy Girl
. Thankfully, he rarely did it in public. She hated it.

After realizing there was no way she was getting back to sleep, she kicked off the blankets and went out to the living room. Maybe watching some television would occupy her brain enough to drift back off.

Glancing over at the phone on the coffee table, she sat on the couch and threw her legs over the other two cushions. She clicked on the television and started navigating, looking for something that would be just distracting enough to forget the call, but not enough to keep her awake. She settled on an old episode of
Friends
, and dropped the remote on the glass-top table.

After about twenty minutes, sleep was still unattainable through traditional means. She got up and went into the kitchen.

Standing in the center of the mostly white room, she didn’t really know why she’d come in here. A bottle of disgusting cherry vodka that she had planned to dump down the sink suddenly looked like a good idea. She poured a shot into a coffee mug, and slugged it back. It was even nastier than she recalled. It tasted like cough medicine. But hopefully it would do the trick and shut her brain down enough to get some sleep.

She muddled her way back to the couch and flopped down. The vodka worked. Because in no time at all she drifted, off to sleep.

Chapter 2

C
andice woke up when the rude pounding on the door filled her small apartment with resonating sound. She didn’t need to see the time to know she was late. She used an unladylike expletive and jumped up off the couch to answer the door.

Undoing the latches, she glanced through the peephole to see Eddie, glancing over the top of his sunglasses. His hair was slicked back as usual, and through the distortion of the peeper, his already narrow face looked like a hatchet. She pulled open the door.

“Did we oversleep again?” He walked in and held out one of the two cups of coffee he was carrying.

She took hold of the cup. “Yeah, I did.” Then she turned and headed to the shower.

Eddie raised his voice incrementally as she walked away. “I don’t want to be late today, now you’re screwing me over.”

She showered and thanked God it was casual Friday. She tossed on some dark blue jeans and a pink top that was a little too tight for work, so she grabbed a lightweight blue shrug to wear over it. Then she slid her bare feet into some open-toed sandals and headed back into the main room.

“That was record time.” Eddie held out her purse and opened the door for her. “Not that we’re going to make up for your slacking.”

About three seconds after hitting the sidewalk outside her apartment building, she realized a jacket might have been a good idea. It looked like a nice warm fall day, but it wasn’t. A cold front with some biting wind had blown in overnight. She thought about telling Eddie she had to run back inside to get a jacket, but that would just cause an argument.

Her ass barely had time to settle into the seat when Eddie tore away from the curb with her door still wide open. “Whoa, hold up!” she exclaimed.

She scrambled for the door handle, pulling it closed just in time to miss the car parked in front of them. She shot him a look. “What the hell? Are you a dumb-ass?” She clicked her seatbelt.

“Can’t be late.”

“We’re already late. Do you think saving another twenty seconds makes a difference? And what if I didn’t get the door in time?” She ran her fingers through her still wet hair and twisted it into the pink scrunchy.

“You’re going to ponytail-it again?” Eddie rolled his eyes as he changed lanes.

“I obviously didn’t have time to do my hair. What does it matter?”

He shrugged. “I just think you look sexy with your hair down.”

“So I don’t look sexy with my hair up?” She gave him an annoyed look.

“Not
as
sexy. And while we’re at it, you’d look better as a redhead.”

“Eddie…” Candice didn’t even feel like finishing her thought. She just had no energy anymore to deal with him. She should have broken up with him two weeks ago like she wanted to; as usual, procrastination got the better of her.

“So why were you late?” Eddie raced into the clogged fast lane on Route 287 South towards Morristown.

“I was up late.”

“No shit. Hello, Captain Obvious! Why were you up late?”

The more time Candice spent around him, the more a desire to punch him in the face swelled inside her. She wasn’t violent by nature, but when pushed, she would push back. He’d just annoyed her for the last time.

“Eddie, how long have we been dating?”

“Five months. Why, you want out already?” He laughed as if that would be inconceivable.

She didn’t answer right away, and that was as close to an affirmative as the word
yes
would’ve been.

“Seriously?” Eddie pulled the car into the parking lot of Altruistic Innovations. “What is this about? I thought things were fine — now you want to break up?”

“Eddie…”

“What did I do?”

“Eddie…”

“Don’t I treat you well? Don’t we have fun together? I don’t get it. I’m a nice guy. I’m well groomed. What did I do wrong that—”

“Eddie, if you’d shut up for one second—” She yelled it louder than she meant. “It’s not anything you did. I just don’t feel like we’re connecting.”

“When did you decide this? Are you seeing someone else? You were out with someone else last night.”

“No, I’m not seeing anyone else.”

“So you’re just going to throw away five months. That’s real great. You know, I always thought…never mind.”

“What, you always thought what?”

“Candice, you’re very pretty, very together. And I’m just a regular guy. No, I can admit it. I’m not that good looking. I don’t have a lot of cash. I can’t be that man that has it all. Don’t insult me by lying and saying it’s not me or something, obviously it’s me.”

She looked away to the sky. A puffy white cloud that looked like a rabbit hovered above. “Yes, Eddie, it’s you. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I want you to be honest with me.”

“Okay, well the truth is it’s you, and it’s me. We just don’t connect. We get along, but you don’t get me the way I need someone to. It has nothing to do with looks. I’m not eighteen anymore, Eddie, I need to be with someone I feel like I have a future with, someone who gets me for me.”

“I get you.”

Candice slowly shook her head. “No, you don’t.”

“Well, tell me how I can.”

“That’s just it. I can’t tell you. It’s not something I can verbalize. It just has to be.” She could see he was upset, mad, and perhaps even on the verge of tears. He was a more sensitive guy than he acted. She saw through that part of him and that’s why she fell in love with him. She fell out of love for the same reason. Because after half a year, he still hadn’t dropped the act, he still didn’t know how to be himself. He didn’t know who he was and that was the root of the problem. Maybe this was the real him, and she was wrong.

“Eddie, we’re just not right for each other. You’re not a bad guy. It’s just not going to work.”

“So I’m not good looking enough, or rich enough, I get that.”

“No, Eddie…” She shook her head, knowing he would never get it. “It has nothing to do with looks or money. It has to do with the fact that you don’t get it’s not about looks and money.”

“I don’t understand. That doesn’t even make sense. Now you’re just dancing around the truth. But whatever, I can take it. We’re over, that’s fine. But know this. You’re gonna regret this one day, when some asshole cheats on you or treats you like garbage, you’re going to be sitting there crying in your coffee wishing I was still around. But I won’t be. I’ll have moved on.” He got out of the car, stood outside and looked back in. “You can find your own ride home.” He slammed the door.

She watched him storm off towards the office building.