The Marriage Pact (1) by M. J. Pullen

Author:M. J. Pullen [M. J. Pullen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9781463600686
Google: jQVsXwAACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 11870144
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
Published: 2011-06-15T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

“What happened to you?” he asked when she emerged from the pump to head to the restroom. The mud had dried on her clothes in a bright red-brown smear.

She’d been thinking about how to answer this question for the last two hundred miles and come up with nothing. “I slipped.”

“Where?”

“By the river. I—I had something I needed to do.”

He looked nonplussed for a minute; she could see questions lingering in his expression. But he decided against asking, apparently, and settled for wiping her cheek with his thumb. “It’s dried here. You’d better check the mirror inside,” he said. He added with a grin, “You’re such a klutz.”

They got to the gate of Suzanne’s apartment around 11 p.m. Georgia time. The three of them unloaded the immediate necessities from Marci’s car and then gathered on Suzanne’s living room floor for a beer. Jake would be sleeping on the couch, and then helping get Marci’s stuff into storage and the truck back to the U-Haul place the next day.

“I’m sorry you both had to take off work tomorrow,” she said to them as they sipped from the cold bottles.

“What are friends for?” Suzanne said. “Mondays are a slow day for me anyway.”

“No problem,” Jake said. He thought for a minute, weighing his words. “I’m not going to press you, Marce, on what all this is about. I just need to know one thing. Are you safe?”

“What?” What did he mean?

“I mean, I don’t need to know what’s going on, or who this guy is if there’s a guy. I just need to know that you’re safe. You know, because you’re running away...”

The question embarrassed her. It had occurred to Marci how much she was asking of her friends, but she had never stopped to think they might be worried about her. She wondered how long Jake had been waiting to ask this question.

“Oh, Jake,” Marci said, putting a hand on his. “Yes, I’m fine. There’s no danger, honestly.”

“Good,” he said, with a tone that meant the matter was closed until she chose to bring it up again. After all the crying in the car, she had thought she would have no tears left. Yet looking at her two best friends sitting there with their beers, rescuing her without questions or judgment, she wept with gratitude anyway.

For the next few days, Marci more or less lived in her pajamas. She had somehow managed to assist with unloading her things and taking the rest to storage, but after that she’d collapsed into a pile on Suzanne’s couch and stayed there, only sometimes making her way to the guest bedroom or the shower. Suzanne brought her a cup of coffee before heading out to work each morning, and that same cup was often still half-full next to her as late as two or three in the afternoon, when she would paddle to the refrigerator for a can of Diet Coke.

She watched TV nearly twenty-four hours a day—lots of crime dramas, but also a variety of soap operas in both English and Spanish.

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