“I don’t know,” I say as I stop in the middle of the barn and turn around in circles looking for Fallon. My hands fist in my hair. “We can’t find her.”
“What do you mean you can’t find her? She was with you!” Jade yells over the music.
“Yeah, and now she’s not. Fuck! This isn’t good,” I growl out.
We continue searching the place from top to bottom and at some point, someone cuts the music as people join in to help us search. I ask as many people I can if they have seen her and all of their answers are the same: they haven’t. If I said I wasn’t frantic, I’d be lying. That feeling of something not being right is starting to consume me. The fact that Fallon doesn’t appear to be at this party anymore is making me downright fucking crazy.
I stand at the entrance of the barn, looking around as I grab my hair again. I don’t know where she could be. Where she could have gone.
Cason and the others appear in front of me.
“Anyone find anything?” Cason asks the group.
“Nah, man. Nothing,” Jordan says.
“She ain’t here, bro,” Jones says.
Goose and Crank both shake their heads. Jade just stares at me, her own panic evident in the way her eyes are bulging.
Cason turns back to me with the fear from earlier now haunting his face.
“We don’t know what happened to her.” He grabs my shoulder. “She could’ve left.”
I turn to Cason, “What are you trying to say?”
“We knew she was a flight risk from day one. We’ve found nothing telling us anything different, man. Nothing.”
Cason drops his truth out like she isn’t a sister to him. Like they hadn’t gotten close in the last few months. As if she didn’t know more about him that his own blood did. And just like that, I explode. I feel it in my chest, like each muscle shreds apart, like each rib cracks and breaks, like each layer of my skin peels back so my whole chest rips wide fucking open to the point I can’t hold back anymore.
Cason doesn’t understand what he just did, but he’s about to.
“This is how you treat family? Fallon was family. Is family. You really think she’d walk away from us? From her mother? From me?” I step into his face and grab his collar tight. I’ve never stepped up to my cousin, my brother, but I won’t take this bullshit from him. He knows she’s not a flight risk. He knows when she ran, she ran for her life. The fact that he can say this to me right now is fucked up. He’ll get right, or I’ll make him right. He might be my brother, but I won’t hesitate to set him straight. His stare bores into my eyes; his are hardened and cold. Instantly, I know he’s not letting himself feel anything right now. Because he’s scared?
When did that happen?
“Jesse!” Jade screams as she grabs onto my arms and tries desperately to get me to let go. “Get off of him.”
Cason stands straighter, matching me for everything that I am. I see the calculating thoughts rolling through his head. His jaw ticks, and his teeth grit. Cason doesn’t think first; Cason acts, then thinks. He balances out the way I calculate every move. But tonight, right now, he’s thinking. And if it isn’t in the right direction . . . No, it will be. I need my brother. I don’t want to think about what it would be like without him having my back.
Jade continues to pull at my arm. She pulls until I finally let go. Cason is saved by my overwhelming need to get the fuck out of here. I can’t be here. I can’t be without her. I have to find her. I get to my car quickly, turning it on and putting it in drive before I have the door fully closed. My foot presses hard on the gas pedal, and the tires dig a nice sized hole in the field as they spin into the dirt before finally gaining traction. The car speeds off down the road, away from the party and all the useless assholes still standing around.
Only one single thought runs on a loop in my head as I race off into the night:
I need to find her.
“Where the fuck are you, Fallon?” I hiss out as I slam my fist into the wall, not giving a damn about the hole I’m leaving behind. Fallon’s been missing for almost twenty-four hours now, and I’ve got nothing. No leads—not even a sliver of an idea as to where she is. I turn and slide down the wall, letting my head fall back and close my eyes. After taking a deep breath, I open my eyes and prop my arms on my knees. I look up to the bed that I haven’t touched all night. The bed we’ve shared every night since the dance. The bed I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in without her last night. The sheets are spilling off Fallon’s side of the bed onto the floor, exactly as she left it yesterday morning. She always steals the covers from me in the middle of the night and somehow, they almost always end up half on her and half on the floor, just as they are now. It usually aggravates me when I wake up cold, but right now I would give anything in this fucking world to have her home and pulling the covers from me. I don’t want to go back to a world without her in it. There’s no way I would survive, not after knowing what having her is like.
Where. The fuck. Are you?
I rub my chest trying to ease away the ache that won’t stop. It just keeps pounding in there, growing bigger and threatening to swallow me whole. I don’t know what to do or how to find her. I can’t put together a single fucking solid thought about what happened last night. It’s all jumbled. I was getting a beer, and she was there—I left her standing right there. Then Jones stopped to talk to me, and when I turned around, she wasn’t there anymore. It was only a second; I turned my back for just one second.
That second may have cost me everything.
I have to think. I have to find her. I have to fucking find her.
I slap my hands to my temples, attempting to conjure at least one cohesive thought. I grab onto my hair and pull just enough that it stings. The actual pain of the welcome sting doesn’t make up for the missing piece of me but it helps ease the guilt that threatens to consume me. If only I hadn’t left her alone. I shouldn’t have left her.
Think Jesse. She was there. Then she was gone.
I pull harder, until the pain is searing into my brain.
I turned my back for a second. A fucking second.
Jones didn’t see anything. That dude is a saint; if he’d seen something, I’d know. I found Cason huddled in the corner with that chick. Jade was with Adam the entire time. Where could she have gone?
I look around and realize somehow, I’ve ended up standing and pacing with my hard grip still very much in my hair.
She was in the barn. Someone had to have seen something—anything. There were so many people at that party. There is no way she walked out of there without someone seeing her. At least one person had to have seen her leave.
Who the fuck was around? Think Jesse. Fucking think.
“Nice hair, man.” A shirtless Cason is leaning on my doorframe in his ball shorts. “Did you sleep at all?”
“What do you think?” I grit my teeth. “Don’t ask dumb questions.”
“Well this seems to really be helping you a fuck ton.” His gestures with his hand to my state of general disarray. “Being tired and off your game. She’d want you to take care of yourself.”