… Ready for It? (Now)
MY PHONE IS ringing.
It takes a minute for the sound to drag me out of the deep, dreamless sleep I’d been under. Then I’m groaning, groping to my left, hand finally closing around it on my nightstand.
I prop myself up on an elbow, squinting against the brightness of the screen. Fucking five AM, and I’m getting a call from a number I don’t recognize in—
Wyoming.
Wonderland, Wyoming.
And suddenly I’m wide awake.
I go still, the ringing somehow growing louder, the screen getting brighter.
The woman lying next to me grumbles something incoherent, the bed dipping beneath us as she rolls over, throwing her arm around my bare waist. “What time is it?” she groans, trying in vain to pull me back to her. She’s Jessie or Jaime; another face, another name I won’t remember come the sunrise.
But I remember Wonderland, Wyoming, as much as I wish I didn’t.
And the only person who would be calling me from there—yeah, I’d like to be able to forget her too.
I sit up, my hand shaking as I bring the phone to my ear and answer with a short “You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve calling me, Cora.”
Silence. For so long that I think that surely my long-estranged aunt has simply misdialed and is now realizing what a terrible, horrible mistake she’s made. A mix of anger and anxiety is making my pulse pound so hard I can feel it against the inside of my temple.
“Not Cora,” a deep female voice responds.
“Then who the hell is this, calling me at five in the goddamn morning?”
“Didn’t realize it was too early to call.”
Fucking Wyomingites and their ranching hours. “What do you want?” I demand.
The woman next to me releases her grip on my stomach, pulling away in alarm, as the one on the other end of the line offers me no reply. I already know what Jesse/Jaime is thinking, wondering exactly who she went home with tonight: “What’s wrong with her? How could she talk to someone like that?”
But that’s the good thing about one-night stands: they know nothing about me and my past and one tiny town in the most miserable excuse for a state in this entire country.
“Cora wants you here,” she replies, quiet and terse.
“She shouldn’t have sent me packing eight years ago, then.”
“Well, your aunt’s missing now. Maybe that’ll change your mind.”
Either the woman on the other end hangs up or the phone slips from my hand, landing somewhere below me in the tangle of skin and sheets—which one, I don’t know.