Anneliese

 

The second call came a day later.

Late, almost midnight, blocked number—I knew it was him.

Lying in a new bed in a new place, I told myself not to answer.

By the second ring, I was sitting up and swiping my finger across the screen.

Still hurt, still sore, still angry, but more hurt than mad, I again didn’t give him the opportunity to speak first. “I didn’t stay.”

“I know.”

This time, the background noise painted a wide canvas of an outdoor nighttime landscape. Trilling insects, a soft, rustling wind, a distant call of a wild animal. I envisioned a star-studded sky. It hurt more that he was looking at it without me than the fact that he’d left. I didn’t know how to process that. “What do you want?” He was living life, and I was… in another nomadic short-term rental.

There was a pause.

It lasted so long, I wasn’t sure if he was going to answer.

Then it came.

Lower, deeper, quieter, he gave me his three words, but this time he said them with more significance. “Remember my voice.”

“What does that mea—”

The line was already dead.

I lay back down on the too-soft bed in the first short-term rental with immediate occupancy that I’d been able to find yesterday morning.

While he was… doing whatever it was that he was doing wherever it was he was doing it, I’d been pinging my location on my cell so I could torture myself with knowing where his house was. Then I’d quickly showered in his massive bathroom, forced myself not to prowl or snoop through his sprawling, luxury home, and I searched for a rental with immediate occupancy and a view. After pulling on an outfit I’d put on in New York but taken off in an oceanfront mansion north of Miami, I’d arranged for an Uber.

Using the duplicates of my passport and credit card that’d magically been in an envelope when I’d gotten off a private jet from Italy, I’d secured the rental. Then I took the Uber to the agency to pick up the keys before going to the rental itself.

After checking out the small beachfront bungalow that was nothing like his expensive house and didn’t have the sweeping ocean views from the height of a modern home, I’d called the hotel in New York. Checking out, I’d arranged to have my tote—complete with my brush roll and water bottle that held my painting—and my suitcase sent to my new location for a ransom, then I’d hung up.

That’s when I’d panicked.

Was I really renting a place north of Miami? Was I really not going back to Milan to get my paintings out of storage? His voice drifted into my mind.

You wanna fuck or follow?

The events that followed played in my mind like a movie reel. His superbike, blowing up a building, sitting in a bistro, a car chase, another explosion, more dead bodies, another airplane ride and then a night of fucking so thoroughly, I still had his fingerprint marks all over my body.

Unprotected fucking.

And now I was going to stay here?

Near… what?

His house?

So I could wait to see if he came back to drown me, fuck me, blow up my life again?

I rolled to my side and looked out at my slivered view of the nighttime ocean, and I thought of another ocean half a world away.

Then I looked at the stars.

I wondered if he was looking at the same night sky.