I Don't Need Your Blue Roses Anymore novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Two in the Morning

"No," I said into the phone. "Nobody rings her. I'll go to her mother myself, in person, when I know what to say."

"That's fair," the man said. "Nine by midnight, Miss Wardell."

"Thank you."

"Your mother said that too," he said. "Every time. Thank you, and she was the one who'd paid."

He hung up, and I sat with the phone in my hand.

By half past one I had spoken to four people in four different voices.

Nate had made a pot of coffee on a camp stove from the van.

Nobody else was left to call.

The kitchen was dark except for the lamp he had plugged into the wall.

My quilt was in the trunk of my car, with my passport and my laptop, and he went out and got it without being asked.

He spread it on the floor and sat down on one end, and he did not look at me.

I stood at the window with my arms crossed.

Down the hall, in the lamplight, the front door stood half blue and half white.

"I want to say something about the rule," I said.

"The hobby rule."

"I'm taking it back."

He was quiet.

"Anneliese."

"I'm not asking you to say yes to that. I'm saying I take it back."

"You left a man five days ago," Nate said, carefully. "You're tired. You've been handed a week that would flatten anybody. I think you'd like to stop being alone in a room, and I'm the person who's here."

"That's exactly what I'd tell a friend."

"Yes."

"You're the person who's here," I said. "You're also the person who asked what I wanted and waited. I'm done pretending those are two different men."

I crossed the floor.

I knelt down on the quilt in front of him.

I took his face in both hands, and my fingers were still faintly blue.

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