Chapter 22

CHAPTER 22

" E rin?" Giovanni woke to the piercing sun cutting through the curtains of Erin's bedroom. Her side of the bed was cold. "Er?"

The house was quiet. He fumbled out of bed, his damn back muscles already screaming as he shuffled into the bathroom.

"Babe?" Where was she?

Once he circled the house, certain she wasn't inside, he checked the driveway. Her car was gone.

Maybe she just went to grab something at the store. But after thirty minutes and two unanswered calls to her cell, he knew that wasn't what this was. Last night was bad. For once, she wasn't the one acting out of line. Actually, she'd been so in control of her emotions lately, he hoped she knew how much he recognized her effort.

Why had he yelled at her?

The look on her face when he raised his voice at her broke his heart. He was an idiot. She spent her whole life getting yelled at and worse. He never wanted to see her look at him like that again.

He tried her cell again, but the call dumped into voicemail. "Erin, it's me. It's—" He winced. "—noon. You're not here. Where are you? Call me."

He waited at the house until four that afternoon. Soon, it would be dark. She hadn't answered any of his calls or texts and he couldn't sit around any longer with his thumb up his ass.

He drove around town, looking for her car, but didn't see her anywhere. He stopped off in O'Malley's, but it was Sunday and the place was dead.

Should he go back to her house or go home? He really didn't want to be around his father. Now that he was working at the lumberyard, his dad had all this unwelcome wisdom to share. It made Giovanni want to scream.

He drove around, burning a tank of gas looking for her. He'd called her more than twenty times and she wasn't getting back to him. When he circled her place again, her car still wasn't back.

"What the fuck, Erin? This isn't cool. Call me so I know you're alive and not in a ditch somewhere." He hung up the phone. It wasn't a completely unreasonable worry, considering the night they got together. Once the sun set, the roads would get icy, and he didn't want her out driving alone.

He had no choice but to go home. He wanted to wait for her at her place, but the more he replayed their argument, the more he thought this might be her way of asking for space.

Last night when they made love, there had been a chill in more than the air between them. She was cold and it had nothing to do with her and everything to do with how he'd snapped at her. He had felt her body, but couldn't reach her mind.

Now he realized, despite her intimacy issues, how much she'd opened up to him over the past several weeks, because the moment she cut herself off, he felt it.

He just needed to find her. Then he would gladly talk to her about anything she wanted.

When he got home, he couldn't sleep. He called her one last time.

"Erin, I'm sorry. You're right. I should quit, but I don't know what to do right now. Everything's a mess, and now you're mad at me. I don't care about the job. I care about you. I want to talk about your day and hear what you did. I know I haven't been myself lately, but… I'm not going anywhere. Neither are you." Not without me, at least. "Please call me or at least text me to let me know you're safe. I…" He swallowed, not wanting the first time he told her he loved her to be on her voicemail when they were obviously in a fight. "…miss you."

He put his phone on the nightstand and it buzzed a minute later with a text notification from Erin. His relief was short lived. I'll call you tomorrow, it read.

Great, now he could spend the next twenty hours dreading whatever that meant.