My teeth chattered, and I knew that talking would be impossible.
So our conversation would have to wait until morning.
sixteen
Morning came at three o’clock, apparently. I woke up in a cold sweat. Parker had piled blankets on me to try to warm me, and once I’d fallen asleep tangled in my fiancé, his heat plus the heat from the blankets was overbearing.
I must’ve fallen asleep, because I woke up from a nightmare. In it, Damien and Katie stood by a doorway surrounded in white clouds. They were beckoning Parker to come with them.
I shook Parker awake, tears finally streaming down my cheeks. It felt good to cry, but the dream had terrified me enough to push me out of the cold shakes. I needed to tell Parker what was going through my mind. I needed to tell him about that dream.
“What?” he mumbled. I kept shaking him. “Are you okay?” he finally asked, his voice groggy.
“No,” I cried out, a louder sob than I’d intended.
He reached to the bedside table and flicked on the light.
He leaned up against the headboard and pulled me against his chest.
“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice gentle and soothing. He was always so much more than I deserved.
“I’m so scared, Parker,” I sobbed into his chest. He stroked my back comfortingly while I cried into him.
“I’ve got you. You don’t have to be scared of Randy.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it, baby?” he crooned softly.
“I’m not scared for me. I’m scared for you.”
“I’m right here. I’m safe.”
“You don’t get it. That’s what I thought about Katie and Damien, too, and now you’re the third. You’re the third person who became the most important person in my world, and bad things always happen in threes.” I paused for a moment to let out a sob that I couldn’t control. “I’m terrified you’re next.”
“You don’t need to worry about me. Your dad is taking all sorts of precautions. We’re both safe. I’m not going anywhere.”
He could say that all he wanted, but he had no control over fate. And I was fully convinced that fate was working against me to take everything precious.
Just like I’d told Parker, life was a series of tragedies. And I was terrified that the next tragedy would somehow involve him.
When I awoke later that morning, I knew that I would be worthless at Vintage for the day. Part of me wanted to go in just to escape my own head, but the other part of me wanted to hold Parker close by my side for the entire day.
I called into work. I spoke with Tim, who expressed his condolences and told me not to worry about my shift. Virginia would cover for me.
I snuggled back into Parker, glad to feel his warmth beside me.
I loved him, and I was ready to begin my future with him. I didn’t want to wait a second longer to be his wife, especially not when I thought about Damien’s passing. He was only a year older than me, dead at twenty-three. It was such a waste of a beautiful soul. He had so much ahead of him, and he’d simply gotten into a bad situation with the wrong people.
It was a tragic reminder about how short this life was.
But that was the thing… Life wasn’t just too short.
It was too unpredictable.
It was too volatile and precious to waste away when your heart knew what it wanted.
Maybe I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, but Damien had met Randy through my dad, and he’d met my dad through me. So if I was out of the equation, Damien would be living and breathing somewhere in California instead of dead in Connecticut. I couldn’t help but take some of the blame for what happened to him.
A fresh wave of tears came at that thought. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever feel normal again. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever get past the awful guilt that seeped into every cell of my blood.
Parker sat up in the bed beside me. He didn’t speak. Instead, he pulled me into him. He seemed to instinctively know what I needed, and at that moment, it was him. Just the feel of his arms around me was enough to comfort me.
“I love you, Jimi.”
“I love you, too.”
“I don’t want to wait to marry you. Life’s too goddamn short.”
I looked up at him. “It’s like you read my mind.”
“Did you call in today?”
I nodded.
“Let’s make plans today, then. Let’s set a date. And let’s see if we can stop by Vintage and talk to Barry.”
“Today?” I suddenly felt rushed, but he was absolutely right. Life was too short to waste what precious little time we had, so if we wanted to get married, we would get married. If we wanted to buy Vintage, we’d buy Vintage.
And apparently we’d get it all taken care of in one short day.
I untangled myself from Parker and threw off the blankets.
“Where are you going?”
“Shower. If we’re planning a wedding and buying a store today, I at least need to shower first.”
He chuckled. “Wait a second,” he said, and I stopped mid-stride on my way to the bathroom.
“What?”
“Do you ever get one of those little waves in your chest where you realize how much you fucking love someone else and how much you never want to be without that person? Because I get those for you all the time.”
Despite the gravity of the night before and the catastrophe of losing someone I cared about, Parker managed to get my heart beating faster again.
“I just got one,” I answered. “Just this very second.”
I turned toward the bathroom for my shower. I heard a joyous laugh follow behind me, and that euphoric feeling of being in love lanced through me.
As awful as what had happened to Damien was, and for as much guilt as I felt, I had something to look ahead to. Many things, actually. And as long as I kept Parker close, at least until someone found Randy, everything was going to be okay.
I kept that thought in my mind while I showered, trying to focus on the truth in it.
The steam from the shower helped my guilty feelings. As much as I wanted to blame myself, it was Damien’s bad decisions that had gotten him into trouble. Nothing I could have done would have changed that. Deep down, I’d always known that. It just took realizing it in the quiet moments I had alone in the shower.
I met Parker at my kitchen table. He was munching on some cereal he’d found in one of my cabinets.
“Want anything?” he asked. I shook my head. I just wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t work up an appetite with everything going on. It was like I was being pushed and pulled in a million different directions at one time.
“So wedding date,” he began, and then he shoved a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. I raised an eyebrow at him. He chewed and swallowed before he continued.
“Let’s get planning. Neither of us wants to wait. It only takes a few days to get a marriage license. Fitz is working on a tour with our manager, and it looks like we’re hitting the road for a college campus tour in the fall. Probably end of August through mid-October. Life’s moving too fast and all I know is that I need you to be my wife.”
He was right. Neither of us wanted to wait, and if he was going back on tour, I loved the idea of getting married before he left. That gave us at least five weeks to figure it out.
Shit.
Five weeks.
That sounded way too fast.
And then Parker shot my five weeks being too fast theory right into the ground.
“We’ll be in the studio until we head out on tour. We’re set to finish the album we started before we left for the Black Shadow tour. I’ve got the next two weeks off before all that starts. Let’s get married next Saturday at your dad’s house. Then we can take a week for our honeymoon before I have to be back in the studio.”
Did I hear that right?
“Next Saturday?” My voice was an octave too high and a decibel too loud.