Locke 2 (Blackwater Boys #4)

Nineteen

Kali

L ocke didn’t pay me a visit last night, and now I was exhausted. That marked two nights in a row I’d stayed up waiting for him, and that wasn’t including the night I’d hardly slept when he’d fucked me to pieces.

I was also dodging Hal in the mornings, and Patsy was a real dick at the school because she was making me stay back to clean the classroom. She didn’t like my cleaning of it the previous morning.

“I found dust on the window that the children look out of,” she grumped.

“I wasn’t aware I had to clean windows.”

“What did you think I meant?”

“I swept the floors and the change station where they trekked their boots across the floor.”

She shot me this disapproving frown and eyed me behind her half-moon glasses. “I’m not talking about that room. I’m talking about the windows.”

“But then you asked me what I did instead.”

“No, I asked what you thought I meant.”

I was getting a headache and looked at her confusedly. “Okay, so you want me to clean the windows so the kids can look out of them?”

“Your tone implies you don’t think it’s important that kids look out windows.”

“I’m not.”

“It’s important they watch the leaves fall off the trees during autumn.”

There were no trees outside our classroom window. This woman was crazy. “Okay, I can run a cloth along the windows so the kids can watch the leaves fall off the trees.”

She blinked hard at me. “I detect sarcasm in your tone. Cleaning is important.”

“Yes, I know cleaning is important.”

“Just because we are in a workplace setting, we must also remember we are women.”

I blinked at her, absorbing her words. Did she just say that? With all these nights of little sleep, I was definitely grumpier than normal, and the old Kali might have challenged Patsy’s prehistoric views of womanly duties, but the one that needed to pay bills plastered a fake smile. “I totally understand, Patsy.”

But really, I wanted to tell the asshole that my job as a teacher’s aide did not include wiping the fucking windows down so kids could look at leaves.

Had she always made me do useless tasks such as this?

I thought about how much I did around the classroom, and before I was just fortunate to have a job and to look after kids, but now, I was getting annoyed because I was spending more time maintaining shit than actually doing stuff with the kids.

The job description said I’d be helping with the lesson planning and work with individual students that needed extra help or attention.I wasn’t doing any of that.

Wiping dust was stupid, and Patsy was a dickhead.

By the time school ended, I was a despondent mess. I walked the streets of Georgewel, trying to find beauty in the things I loved about it. The colours weren’t as vibrant as before. It was like Locke blew through the town and took the colour with him.

That evening, I sat on the porch again, staring out at the empty streets. I waited for him as the hours ticked by, wondering where he was. Then I gave up and went to my room. I crawled under the covers, melancholic and confused. He was here. In this town. But he kept his distance from me, and it felt like a cruel punishment.

If he was searching for Lenny, I wanted to know about it. And between his searching for Lenny, I wanted to know what he was doing, too. I suddenly wanted to know everything he was up to. How had I gone this long without knowing? The need to know was an addiction once you started down its path. For crying out loud, I wasn’t asking for much. I just needed a play- by-play. What did he do this morning after he left me? What did he have for lunch?

What the fuckity fuck was happening to me?

I had allowed so much time to pass, and I’d done so because I had an ability to lock away my feelings, but just like Aurora, they were pounding down the door with a force I couldn’t fight against.

Questions fired off at me.

Eighteen months was a long time. Had there been another woman? Had he felt tempted? What had he spent his time doing?

I knew Dominic’s case had taken tremendous work, but outside of that, what did Locke do when he had spare time? What were his thoughts like? What did he feel? Would he consider himself a happy man? Or even just content? Was he funny? Did he crack jokes to his friends? Did he even have friends? I knew Conor was important to him, and that dickhead guy Jem, too. Dominic was obviously someone special to him because they grew up together and look at what he’d done to get him out.

Yes, this wanting to know was a sick obsession that was now spreading across my chest like a virus. Holy shit, I needed it to stop, but my mind wouldn’t quiet down. It just kept going. The wondering and needing to know and—

Oh, my god, was this what it had been like for him this entire time?

“It’s called karma,” Aurora whispered, though she didn’t make her presence known, but I could hear the smile in her voice. “All it takes is for you to surrender.”

“No.”

“It’s going to happen.”

“This is why I hid,” I groaned.

And like a shot to the chest, she retorted, “You should have run.”

Tell her to run.

Run.

Run.

“Hide.”