Here With Me (Paloma's Edge) Read Free Page B

cleaned a house for most of the evening. She was usually doing her homework in our dorm room or with one of her study groups at a café, or in the library. But, passing up an on-call job, and earning more money, was too good of an opportunity for her to let go. She’d burnt herself out last year with her cleaning job and schoolwork. College was much harder than she’d thought. It was harder for me all around; I wasn’t in a graduating class of thirty-eight students anymore. At UM, I was truly one of many. I knew that Beth was a little freaked out about the decrease in her cash flow, now that she was working part-time, but she had to in order to maintain her G.P.A. She wasn’t taking the standard twelve credits to be a full student like I was.
    Chase had asked her to quit working. He wanted to support her, but she’d adamantly refused. It’d been the first and only time that I’d seen them argue. I understood her fear that she’d lose her drive to earn a living for herself and, thus, lose her passion to be self-sufficient. She also didn’t want to be like her mom, as men had primarily supported her mom and her until she started working in high school. Hunter was not only a full-time student like us, he was a linebacker, as well as a freelance graphic designer. His apartment was paid in full for the entire year. I really liked that Beth hadn’t forgotten about Jake or I as she and Chase were becoming more serious. Sure, she’d spent a lot of her free time with him, but she also made time for us. I wasn’t losing my best friend and my sister to her relationship with him.
    Dressed in her bathrobe, Beth grabbed her shower caddy and went to shower. When she came back, forty-five minutes later, I laid my head down on my pillow and watched Beth as she hung her towel and placed her caddy away.
    “How was the house?” I asked her.
    Beth blew out a breath and knotted her hair into a loose bun at the crown of her head. “The bathrooms were the rooms that required heavy duty scrubbing.” She cocked her head, peering at me with her sapphire eyes. “See anyone you know today?” A saucy grin curled her mouth.
    So she had communicated with Hunter today. I swore he was like her third best friend sometimes. My boss, Blanca, had been another person in an endless amount of people today who’d asked or talked about him. I’d bitten my tongue, before I’d unleashed a round of expletives. Blanca had assumed that Hunter was an ex of mine—according to her, I’d stared at him like a scorned woman. But I thought I’d been nice to him. Every co-worker of mine with a functional libido wanted to make nice with him. And I couldn’t simply pretend that Hunter didn’t exist.
    I inhaled sharply. “Did you tell Hunter to come to La Caridad?”
    “No. His boss wanted him to go there. It’s new and it hasn’t been empty since its opening.”
    I nodded and slightly changed the subject. “Jill wants his number. Would you mind giving it to me, so that I can send it to her?” I wanted to text it to Jill immediately, or else she’d think I was stalling.
    Beth took her phone from the top of her desk. “I’m going to run it by him.” She fell silent for a moment. “And you both speak Spanish. That’s something else you have in common with Hunter, besides me.”
    “I don’t wanna have anything else in common with him.” I sighed. “I think he means well, but he’s an addict and he cut Chase’s face. You’re not afraid of him?”
    “No,” she replied without hesitation. Her hands fell from her hips and we looked at the clock. She opened the door and we heard some girls saying hello to Jake.
    I’d taken his mattress from our closet and placed it on the floor when he entered our room. After Beth threw his sheets, a naked pillow, and a pillowcase on the mattress for him, she stepped on her tiptoes and gave Jake a quick kiss on his jaw. Then, he kneeled on the opposite side of the mattress and fit the sheet on the bed with