The One That Ran Away Page 2

  Amanda looked between them. This asinine movement ensured that Shannon’s attention was caught, and Jess officially entered the seventh layer of Hell.

  Because, after that, it was only a matter of time before Jess and Shannon made eye contact.

  It took Shannon longer to recognize Jess than the other way around. She had never been as invested in their whirlwind romance.

  Except when she did, her eyes lit up in understanding – and fear.

  “Heeey,” Jess said with an embarrassed smile, “long time no see. Shannon, right?”

  Shannon lowered her bag and took two large steps backward. “I… you… what?”

  Later, when Jess was more clear-headed and not suffering from shock, she would realize that this was bound to happen someday, fated or not. Oregon was a small state. She had never left, so was it really strange to think that Shannon hadn’t either? Or that she at least returned over the years? Where was the only major city? Portland, right? Where was one of the trendiest places to hang out on a Sunday evening? Northwest Portland.

  If not tonight, then perhaps next week. Perhaps in a year. At some point, their paths would cross.

  “Our meeting was written in the stars…”

  That was one of the last things Jessica Mills had ever said to Shannon Parker. She believed it more than ever now.

  Chapter 2

  Shannon

  She grabbed her tea as soon as it was ready and flew down the stairs, back onto the busy street. Nope. Nope. Not doing this. Not today, Satan. Shannon almost bumped into a pair of tourists taking pictures in front of a statue of a cow. They yelled at her to watch where she was going, but Shannon was in such a rush to get home that she didn’t care if they thought she was the biggest bitch in the world

  Gotta get home. Gotta throw up.

  That had not been… what was her name? Stop playing coy, fuckhead. You know who that was. Jessica. Jess. The girl who almost singlehandedly destroyed Shannon’s life eight years ago. The woman Shannon had done her best to forget.

  College. People did stupid shit in college. Girls fooled around. Co-ed shenanigans. Experimentation. A needy, long-ago night right before graduation. The world was a lot simpler back then, but it also felt like a noose around the tender neck. Who knew what would happen once the tassel was turned? Who knew what Shannon would be doing in ten years?

  She stepped though her apartment door and immediately pulled the scarf off her neck. Speaking of nooses!

  The apartment was sparse. Although Shannon hadn’t lived in it for more than a few months, it had never been emptier. Probably because Andrew had made off with half the furniture, clothing, and dishes when he moved out the month before.

  Shannon banged her head against the bedroom doorway. Her tea was still hot in her hand. Her jacket strangled her skin, making it sweat and boil against her body. A flood of memories she had never asked for hit her at once.

  She had never thought about Jess and Andrew at the same time, and she had dated that man for over three years. Four, total, if she counted their stint in college.

  “What are the odds?” she asked Decks, her Himalayan floofing in the reading nook overlooking Glisan Street. “She was there.” Shannon put her drink down on the nightstand and flung herself onto the bed. No. This wasn’t happening. The past hadn’t come back to bite her in the ass. Not right after Andrew left her.

  A box of his abandoned belongings still littered the corner of the small bedroom. Decks loved it so much that Shannon never had the heart to throw it out or donate the contents. An excuse. Decks wasn’t in it now. What better way to channel Shannon’s energy than to get rid of it now?

  Old photographs. Newspaper clippings about Shannon’s career as a freelance photographer, because fuck her now, that’s why. Broken cat toys. Broken toaster. Discarded textbooks and old manuals about his software engineering job downtown. Ties. Cufflinks.

  The watch Shannon had bought him for their final anniversary. I bought it with my first real earnings from my photography business. She had been so proud to afford a nice gift for her boyfriend. The man she saw herself marrying, if he would ever have her.

  Apparently not.

  She grabbed the box and marched through the one-bedroom apartment with renewed fervor. Behind the building was a dumpster, and it had Andrew’s name on it.

  “Get out!” The box landed with a crash in the bottom of the empty dumpster. “Get out. Stay out. I fucking hate you.”

  She didn’t know if that was more directed at her ex-boyfriend, or the woman she happened to bump into half an hour ago. Either way, she turned around to find one of her neighbors approaching with a garbage bag. The young man laughed to see how red-faced she was. Shannon promptly pushed passed him and went back up to her apartment.

  “Fuck you,” she muttered once more, and she wasn’t sure who she had mind. Decks hopped down from the reading nook and brushed against her legs. Shannon remained in the entryway of her apartment, reeling from how quickly everything had changed.

  Again.

  She needed to lie down. She needed to regather her bearings and convince herself that bumping into Jess Mills had been nothing but a weird dream. The kind that often haunted her when she was her most insecure.

  ***

  Memory #2

  I was busy. An overachiever. Since high school student council, I didn’t know how to fucking chill and enjoy my youth. There was always something to organize. Someone in need. A house on fire and a libido in need of sating

  Sophomore year, I was the head of my dorm’s council. I didn’t have the charisma to take over my university’s student council, but I could dominate my dorm. I could spruce up my résumé with proof that I loved to get involved and help others. One day, my mother always said with too much pride, I’d be a member of the UN.

  Back then, running the student activities in a dorm and hanging out with the RAs was enough.

  I don’t remember the first time I saw her. I don’t remember the first time she stopped and stared at me on her way to class. Is that what she says? That she was so smitten with me at first glance that her life changed forever?

  Fuck. I didn’t know that.

  It was December. Finals sucked the souls out of everyone, and it was customary to throw what we called a Steam Party the Friday before the first scheduled final. Let off Steam, they said, in a friendly and safe environment. I spearheaded the organizing alongside my favorite RA. She got the games while I personally went to Safeway and used the dorm funds to buy enough cookies and soda to give us all sugar comas.

  As the dorm president, it was my responsibility to go room to room and invite the residents to the party. While the RA hooked up the games and my friend and roommate Kelsey unpacked the cookies, I took my print-outs and started knocking on doors. I was already craving a cigarette, but had promised to not indulge until right before the party. I’d smoke enough during finals.

  The first time I became aware of Jess’s existence was when I knocked on the last door on the third floor. Her roommate answered.

  Jess leaned back in her seat. I had never seen a girl’s eyes grow so wide.

  She had long hair back then. Long, straight, and desirously feminine. Her blouse put all the attention on her large breasts and generous cleavage. She had the bluest eyes I had ever seen.

  I saw all of that from the doorway. I brushed off the shiver on my shoulders as a chill coming through the cracks in the emergency exit.

  Jess should’ve been another face in my dorm. Maybe a friendly face, usually a pretty face, and always a face I, the dorm council leader, was expected to recognize after seeing it. Regardless, she was another face. Another sophomore I would never have a class with. We had nothing in common besides living in the same dorm.

  Yet I ended up remembering her because of one fact: she and her roommate were one of the only ones to show up to the party down in the basement. She kicked my ass at DDR.

  She was always looking in my direction whenever I happened to gl
ance at her. You don’t forget a girl who does that.

  ***

  Shannon awoke half past midnight. Decks was curled up at her feet, his tongue painting a vivid picture against his fur as he gave himself the bath of the year. Why did I have to dream about her? Shannon slowly pushed herself up. She had never changed out of her clothes. She often wondered what the point was when nobody was around to care, anyway.

  Andrew often cared. He was always the first to point out that his girlfriend hadn’t changed her shirt in two days or washed her hair in three. He’s why I cut it shorter. Jess had shorter hair now. She had cut it junior year, although it was shorter now.

  What are the odds…

  Shannon was still hung up on that as she stumbled into her bathroom and grabbed her toothbrush. Her comb had been left on the edge of the sink earlier that day, forgotten when she was in a rush to meet a client. Surprised Decks didn’t knock it off. Shannon put it away while she brushed her teeth. It took her a few seconds to realize she had never thrown away Andrew’s toothbrush.

  Andrew.

  Jess.

  Two sides of the same ass-eating coin.

  Shannon attempted to not overanalyze it. Just because Andrew had left her and not three weeks later she bumps into Jess in her neighborhood…

  “Fuck!” She tossed her toothbrush into the sink and spat out the toothpaste. While the water ran from the tap, she splashed some much-needed clarity onto her face. She also needed a shower, because sleeping in the clothes she had been wearing all day ensured that she smelled worse than Decks’s breath.

  The hot water wasn’t as refreshing as Shannon hoped. Didn’t help that she found more of Andrew’s crap in the shower, each item prompting her to pull aside the curtain to dump something into the trash. The bastard didn’t deserve to take up the precious space he wouldn’t be using anymore. God knew Shannon needed the room to stew in her thoughts, like she desired to stew in the hot water.

  He touched you.

  She touched you.

  Two sides of the same coin.

  She couldn’t get that surprising image of Jess out of her head. Cropped brown hair that showed off her lovely cheekbones and the blues of her sapphire-like eyes. Red plaid that accentuated her tomboyish personality and begged every woman in the room to look in her direction. Tight, black leggings. Really tight…

  Shannon hadn’t stuck around to say more than that garbled mess to come out of her mouth. She had been too shocked to say hello, let alone to a woman clearly on a date with her girlfriend.

  The past wasn’t supposed to come back to bite her in the ass like that. The past didn’t matter, after all. She had done things. Believed in falsehoods. Grown and matured until she was a damn adult and no longer the idealistic go-getter of her youth.

  Instead, I’m the most neurotic bitch in the room. She was good at hiding it. Clients left reviews praising her prompt arrivals, professional demeanor, and the friendly atmosphere she promoted whenever she did a custom shoot. Her friends kissed her in greeting and asked her for her expert opinion on their lives. Her family had been shocked to hear she considered getting a therapist. “Why do you need one of those? You’re not depressed!” Bullshit words from her bullshit mother.

  Only three people had ever been able to see through her façade. Boyfriend Andrew, best friend Kelsey… and Jess. For some reason, Jess had been so good at reading Shannon that it threw her for a loop the first time a girl she barely knew dropped so many truths about her personality. Eerie. Bizarre. Disconcerting.

  Yeah, that explained most of Shannon’s twenties.

  She texted Kelsey, the only person to remain a constant in her life since college. “You won’t believe who I bumped into at the teashop…” Shannon began, although she quickly deleted the message and put her phone away. No. Back to bed she would go. Hopefully, after a night’s sleep and some much-needed rest, she would have a clear head. She could convince herself that she never saw Jess. A dream. The woman had been a dream sent from the depths of hell.

  So… a nightmare.

  That was somehow fitting for the woman who made Shannon doubt everything she thought was true… including her own sexuality.

  Chapter 3

  Jess

  The thing about the days getting longer as the new year wore on was that it fucked with Jess’s head. Every Friday she hit up one of her favorite coffee shops in Northwest, got some work done, and jetted around five to do some grocery shopping and head home to Southwest. (An hour-long trek, but a girl was willing to make the commute if it meant she got more work done.) During Christmastime, this usually meant emerging from the dark, cool coffee shop to find pitch-black darkness hanging over the earth like an angry veil. Now, in the warming air of February, it was still daylight when she walked out of the café.

  She stood at the intersection beside Trader Joe’s, where a busker played guitar for tips and tourists traipsed about with their wallets hanging out of the back of their pants. The suspiciously long light made Jess get out of her phone and check the bus schedule. If she got in and out of Trader Joe’s in her usual record time, she could pick up the #77 bus down to Fifth and Pine, where either the #44 or the #12 could dump her ass at home. If she were lucky. Sometimes the bus came five minutes early, and she would be stranded unless she braved walking a few blocks in either direction to catch the #15 or the streetcar. I’ll have a bag full of groceries…

  Life was hard.

  Honestly, Jess obsessed over these details because it was better than letting her brain wander to where it really wanted to go.

  Shannon Parker. Sunday night. The most gorgeous, ephemeral storm to ever come blowing back into Jess’s life.

  She was convinced it was a dream. Then again, most of her memories of Shannon felt like dreams now. That’s what happened when a woman matured between her college years and full-blown adulthood. “Ah, yes… Shannon. I remember her. Boy, I really had it bad for her, huh? Typical straight girl stuff.” Jess wasn’t completely convinced that it was Shannon she saw at the teashop almost a week ago. That was preposterous. A manifestation of her brain doing… things. Yes, things! That was it. Jess’s family had a terrible history of mental regressions and other health issues. It was only natural that the moment she hit thirty, Jess began hallucinating.

  She looked up, catching sight of the first star of the evening. The night would be clear. The Super Blue Blood Moon (or was it the Super Blood Blue Moon?) a week ago had almost been missed, although an astrology buff like Jess made sure to set her alarm so she could behold the most awesome sight since the solar eclipse.

  Astral bodies up to no good tended to bring about… change. Some mythologies suggested they brought spirits with them as well. Charles Dickens would say that the image of Shannon was a ghost of Jess’s past. Or maybe she was a specter of unfortunate things to come.

  It wasn’t her. Jess removed her shopping bag from her backpack the moment she stepped into the supermarket. Just another woman who looked like her. Shannon had a strikingly soft face. It didn’t matter if she changed her hair color. Her style was the same. Her presence was undeniable.

  Yup. Jess was losing her mind.

  She slammed her backpack into the bottom of the grocery cart and steered it toward the produce department. Bananas. Apples. Potatoes. Her brain went through a mental list, hoping it would stop painting pictures of Shannon.

  Even though her damned brain loved painting pictures of Shannon Parker, also known as Aphrodite and occasionally doing business as Lilith, the feminist demon who escaped the Garden of Eden with a pair of bat wings. I love Lilith. Red hair, shutting down the patriarchy… That bushy hair Shannon sported in the teashop was like gazing into a kaleidoscope from the ancient past. Except she always had that effect on Jess, didn’t she?

  That’s why it had been so hard to let her go. Three years of Jess telling herself that there were other women out there who could steal her soul like Lilith – uh, Shannon – had. A year of throwing herself at a man, in the ho
pes that pursuing a bisexual life would help purge her mind of that one woman she loved with all her heart. Escaping the country, because this one held too many memories.

  None of that would have affected me so much if you hadn’t…

  If Shannon hadn’t reciprocated Jess’s unrequited love that one. Fucking. Time.

  Good for her, opening Pandora’s Box in Jess’s heart. Not like she needed every quadrant working at top functionality anymore. That was for well-adjusted individuals, not lesbians still crying over that One Straight Girl from college.

  Jess took a deep breath in one of the aisles. Her basket was half full of items she grabbed while on auto-pilot.

  She turned the aisle to check out the frozen stuff. Fried rice. Burritos. Turkey burgers. That was it. That was her mission.

  Bumping into an actual angel was not part of the mission.

  Jess stopped dead in her tracks the moment she saw Shannon from behind. No. Nope. That wasn’t her. That was a lookalike. Another doppelgänger. Some woman who had killed poor Shannon and stolen her skin. Not. Shannon.

  The worst part? Knowing that their encounter Sunday night had been real. That this woman, bending into a freezer to grab bagged shrimp was back in town and ready to break hearts once more.

  Jess attempted to turn around before she was sucked into that vortex of shit and shame. Yet the aisle was crowded at half-past five, and an elderly man in a trench coat and fedora had blocked Jess’s way so he could decide between regular and gluten-free waffles.

  Unfortunately, that meant Jess had no choice but to keep going forward. With any luck, Shannon would remain enamored with fish and not bother to look over her shoulder. Instead, Jess glanced at her, catching a glimpse of Shannon’s hot pink bra strap slipping down her arm.

  ***

  Memory #3

  It was a dull evening in the dorm. I sat with my roommate Sara, watching TV on the large screen down in the basement. The lights were off to create a theater-like atmosphere. Occasionally, other residents walked behind us, on their way to the laundry room. They always looked over to see what we were watching. The sad thing? I remember. It was Dodgeball, of all mid-2000’s movies.