Well now so do I.”
She turned and walked back out the door, not sparing a glance for Jessica who stood there naked and sobbing out apologies as she left.
She couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid. So gullible as to believe that a man like Red could ever be just hers. She should have known from the beginning that he wouldn’t have stayed faithful. Hell, David hadn’t been able to stay true to her and he’d been a boring old veterinarian. How could she expect a hard living, motorcycle riding, gang member, werewolf to be able to keep his dick in his pants. It was downright unreasonable on her part.
Twice. Twice she’d walked in on the men she’d loved with other women. Twice. Once was a mistake, twice was the start of a habit.
But she wasn’t going to sit around and blame herself anymore. She might be a bad judge of character but they were the ones with the character flaws.
She started to ask Demon where they were going, but then she decided she didn’t care. She didn’t care if they never stopped riding again. She didn’t want her feet on solid ground. She wanted to fly away and never look back. Fly away from everything she’d ever done wrong, from this new world she hadn’t wanted to discover, from everything. That’s what she’d thought she’d done when she’d come to Three Rivers, but it looked like her history was repeating.
It didn’t matter where she went, until she got herself together she was going to keep making the same mistakes. The same errors in judgment, like trusting Red. Or Jessica.
Sidney laughed at herself. She had really thought that this could be a new beginning for her and Jessica. That they could form the kind of bond that they hadn’t been able to when they’d been growing up. But Jessica was Jessica and she always ended up showing her true colors. Though, Sidney had to admit, it was entirely possible that she hadn’t known Sidney and Red had been together. It wasn’t like Sidney had felt like dredging up the whole screwed up history and talking it over with Jessica with so much else going on. But was it too much to ask that she not start screwing people the first few minutes after she’d gotten into town?
Demon slowed the bike and pulled them to a stop. They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the night. Dark trees lined each side of the rural road, with no lights for miles and the only sounds were the ones the forest makes.
“What are we doing here?”
“Come with me, you’ll see,” he said.
Sidney followed him down an almost invisible trail that took them a little ways into the woods before breaking into a clearing.
“Over here,” he grabbed her hand and pulled her along as they got closer to the edge of a hill.
It wasn’t a hill, it was a cliff with a steep drop, and laid out before her in twinkling lights was Three Rivers made miniature by distance.
It was beautiful and any other day she would have appreciated the view so much more. But tonight no beauty was going to be able to penetrate the anger and resentment that was welling up inside her.
“Growing up, this is where I came when I wanted to be alone and think,” Demon said, looking out over the town. “I came here a lot.”
“Thank you for bringing me here, but I don’t want to think. I’ve done enough of that to last a lifetime.”
“Sidney,” he ran his hand through his hair, “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m going to say this.” He paused, like he didn’t know if he really wanted to say anything or not. “Look, Red isn’t normally like this. I don’t know how long you two were together but you’ve got to know that this isn’t him. I mean, yeah he’s an asshole to me, but most of the time he’s a decent person. It’s just this thing with Big Dog, it’s like it took over his life. He became obsessed over it and nothing else mattered, not even you.”
“You’re saying that if all the stuff hadn’t happened with Big Dog, he wouldn’t care that
Learning to Kill: Stories