A Way Out

Chapter 6

White. All I had seen for the past hour was the white painted wall in front of me. On that white wall, I saw the events of the night playing like an old movie over and over again. No sounds, just vision. Everything had been fine at first. The feeling of carelessness had been present for a couple of fleeting minutes, and Jake took that away from me. He had taken so much away from me.

There had been a time when I was at ease. A time when my hands didn't tremble the moment an unknown person touched me. Ever since Jake and I had been together, I closed off. Raleigh once called me a bubbly girl, but Jake took my bubble away. Popped it right into thin air. I realized that he had molded me into someone I had never been and never wanted to be. Still, that was the girl that sat on the couch right now as she stared motionless at the wall in front of her.

Even the door slamming shut didn't tear my gaze away from the wall. The door of the living room flew open and Raleigh dropped everything she was holding on the floor before she raced towards the couch I was sitting on and pulled me in her arms, engulfing me with safety.

"What the hell, Eve? What happened? That guy you were with told me you rushed out of the club after something made you panic. I was so worried." She placed her hands on my shoulders and pushed me back a little so she could look into my eyes. Her blue eyes studied my face for a second, looking for clues of my sudden departure. "Eve?" she tried.

I looked at her with a blank expression on my face. The numbness within my body spread to every fiber of my being and resulted in me not feeling anything for a moment, which I was grateful for. "Jake," was the only thing I said to her.

Raleigh's eyes widened, and I could see that familiar anger boiling up. The blueness in her eyes swarmed into a navy color and stormed ferociously. Her hands tensed on my shoulders and I could tell she had a hard time fighting back the anger. "What did he do?"

I looked at her for a second before I said, "He put his hand around my neck." The way I said it sounded so casual, when in fact it wasn't. My body had shut down and drained itself of all emotion. I wanted to protect myself from any other pain at the moment, and my mind and soul chose this as the right way to do it.

What surprised me was that Raleigh didn't flip out. Instead, she took me in her arms and soothingly rubbed my back. "He's dead," she gritted through her teeth.

That night when I laid in my bed and stared up to the ceiling, I allowed the emotions I  successfully pushed away for the entire night to enter, and before I knew it tears flowed down my cheeks. There had always been a feeling of safety. Although Jake was the biggest prick on earth, I never felt unsafe until tonight. Until Jake wrapped his hand around my neck, sending a shockwave of fear into every crevice of my soul.

Thank god for Donovan Dane, I didn't want to know what Jake would've done if he didn't show up. Again, he'd shown kindness and saved me from a situation I didn't want to be in. But what now? My move... Did I even have the guts to step into the building I had passed so many times on my way to work? It wasn't just someone from the company who invited me, no, it was him. He owned the fucking place.

As the thoughts kept spinning through my head, I felt a splitting headache build up. This was going to be a hell of a long night.

"You look like shit," Cassie pointed out when I walked in the next morning.

"Thanks," I murmured. I put my apron on and got the shop ready for opening. I hoped I could dodge any further questions, but Cassie knew me too well.

"Want to tell me about it?" she asked with her hands on her hips. I looked at her and noticed that her red hair flew in every direction you could think of, matching the chaos spread on her apron as it had stains all over it. Cassie had always been like a big sister to me, and she taught me to work hard. She was someone I could go to with the things I didn't want to tell Daley. What happened last night was something I didn't want to tell either of them. They would both flip out and do things they would regret later on.