Page 129 of The Toy Maker

The next fewdays consisted of calling the leasing office to terminate my lease, canceling my subscriptions, putting my furniture in storage, and digging out the clothes I thought were lost from the back of my closet. By the seventh day, my apartment was nothing more than a suitcase and a glittery lamp I bought in the fifth grade.

Gray clouds hung in the sky all morning. A storm was rolling in, and I was hoping I wouldn’t get caught in it. I shut the porch doors, opting not to freeze from the winter weather.

“Seventy-five degrees and partly cloudy, my ass,” I grumbled to myself.

I checked my phone for a text from Tristan; he would be arriving in his brand-new dad car any minute. It was aptly chosen by his heavily pregnant, lovely wife.

Just when I started to relax, there was a knock on the door.

I walked over, assuming it was Tristan. But then I remembered that my creepy landlord kept insisting that I have a going away drink with him. My hand was on the knob when I asked, “Who is it?”

“Jason.”

His voice made me nauseous but also filled my body with warmth, kind of like my first sip of vodka when I was sixteen. “Please let me in.”

I stood there for a moment, my finger resting on the handle. Letting him in would be inviting him back into my life—the very one he had made so clear he wanted nothing to do with.

“You should leave,” I sighed.

“Not until you let me come in.” He sounded frantic and out of breath, like he had run the whole way here.

“Then you’ll be waiting a long time.” I said, hoping to hear footsteps fading in the distance.

“Tara, I?—”

I cut him off before he could finish, “I don’t want to hear what you have to say anymore. Leave me the fuck alone.”

There was silence, then footsteps. My heart throbbed from the adrenaline of sending him away.

But before I calmed down, there was another knock. This time at the porch door.

I whipped around, expecting to see a tree limb or a bloodthirsty killer, but instead, I was met by two shimmering green eyes.

Jason.

I sucked in a breath, my chest tightening. The rain had turned into a steady downpour, soaking his hair, his clothes, until he was drenched to the bone. Strands of dark hair clung to his forehead, and rain droplets ran down his sharp jawline like melted silver. He looked like a mess—or at the very least, like he hadn’t thought this through.

I gathered the nerve to ask, “What the hell are you doing out there?”

“I need to talk to you,” he shouted through the glass between us. His breath was ragged, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

“You’re insane.” He had climbed three stories to my porch like some kind of lunatic.

He didn’t even try to deny it. “I know.”

I shook my head, taking a step back. “You could’ve died.”

Jason huffed out a breathless laugh, but there was no humor in it. “Maybe. But you weren’t answering your damn door.”

I wanted to be angry. I wanted to scream at him for pulling a stunt so reckless, for showing up when I was trying to move on, for making me care when I desperately didn’t want to anymore.

But all I could do was stare at him.

I looked past him to see if there were any rope ladder-like vines for him to Romeo his way back down on. “I told you to leave, and I meant it.”

“Please just lis?—”

“Fuck you.” I wished I hadn’t already taken the curtains down.