What else could I have expected? Guys seemed to lack manners because they worried so much about what other people thought, and obviously, Tristan wasn't an exception to that. It was ridiculous of me to expect him to be any different from what seemed to be every other guy on the planet. In fact, he was one of the worst.

He fucked girls on video.

I thought that if I said it enough, I might become desensitized to the words and general idea.

As soon as the idea echoed through my thought process, I felt like vomiting. He just wants a friend. Tristan told me that he wanted to be friends and most friends didn't talk to each other everyday. Right? I had no reason to be jealous or upset. My cat's loud purring distracted me from my man-hating. Matlock, named after my favorite old TV lawyer, was a big, white, siamese-mix that showed up on my doorstep last Christmas. He was a hermit and kind of a bastard at times, but I'd grown to love him.

Said bastard was walking over my keyboard like he owned both the computer and me. I belonged to him, not the other way around. I had to push him off my laptop, otherwise he'd try to sit on it or lick the screen like he'd done so many times in the past. He hissed at me for kicking him off before sauntering over to the other side of the couch and flicking his tail back and forth.

He reminded me of Josh in cat-form.

I had to force myself to open up my Christian files to work on my newest book. I'd been publishing my own murder-mysteries for about a year and a half. I sold them under my penname, Sophia Nylund, after two of my favorite Golden Girls. My dad used to blame my lack of grandparents as the reason why I liked to watch shows with seniors through middle and most of high school. I wasn't making enough money to quit my day job but even if I would've been, I didn't think I would. I liked my kids. Maybe in a few years I'd think differently, probably when children became the spawn of Satan in general, and I hated them all.

The sound of my phone beeping unexpectedly made Matlock hiss at it.

New Message

Magellan

Showed up on the blank screen of my phone, and even though I should have taken my sweet-ass time unlocking the phone, and then reading his message, I didn't. The little white box just said:

Please tell me you aren’t busy.

Hmm. I wrote back a simple: No, when I should have written yes so he didn't think I was sitting around waiting for his call— when I was.

Less than thirty seconds later, his name was across the screen again.

Please take me to urgent care?

Chapter 18

I officially hated the navigation feature on my phone.

I should have known better than to trust it to get me to Tristan's house as quickly as possible. For some reason, the navigation always took me somewhere completely random that was most definitely not the location I wanted to go to. It'd been close to an hour since I'd gotten his last text message that included his address, and informed me his front door was open. After driving across town, several wrong turns, braking at every street sign with hopes that I could see the reflective lettering in the night, I finally parked in front of a Craftsman-style house that matched the address in the text message.

Did he live here by himself?

The house was close to twice as large as the home I'd grown up in, and the neighborhood was one of the nice, upper-middle class subdivisions I'd seen on television. Thinking better of just standing on the street and gawking at the gray house with white trim, I made a beeline for the door and raised my fist to knock before remembering that the front door would be unlocked. He was really vague after the initial text message, insisting that he was sick and needed to go to the hospital.

"Tristan?" I called out, closing the door as quietly as possible behind me.