Allison Hewitt Is Trapped by Madeleine Roux Page A

of her.”
    Ted puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. I don’t know what to do. If I cry it’s like I’ve accepted she’s not coming. I won’t cry, I won’t. I need to focus, focus and lead.
    And so the meeting goes about how I expected.
    No one in particular is jumping at the idea of leaving the apartments quite yet. Phil brings up the possibility of finding lost family members among those assembled in the university gymnasium. Janette finds his idea promising and exciting. Matt points out that a single mother carrying a child and traveling ten miles through dangerous country was an anomaly, not something to be expected. This, of course, is his way of saying that it was highly unlikely that Phil’s chubby, well-meaning wife (or their two kids) had made it the more than ten miles from their tan rambler to the university. Phil throws a bit of a tantrum, but something tells me he felt Matt was right.
    Ted, who has spent most of the meeting glowering at me from the corner of the living room with his glasses still skewed slightly to the right, corners me after the others have left to start on dinner. We stand alone in the living room, the low, glass surface of the coffee table between us. I can see he’s gunning for a fight but that he’s hesitating to start in with too much heat.
    “It’s okay,” I tell him. “You can just say it. Go ahead. I know what you’re thinking.”
    Ted refuses to speak, his lips pursed so tightly they look like a starfish all folded up and suffocating. I can see the thoughts flickering in his eyes, the decisions, the careful weighing of the options. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and tosses his hair around like an impatient stallion.
    “I don’t want to fight,” he says.
    “Yes you do, and that’s okay. Just start now before I get too hungry.”
    “Fine,” he snorts. “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we had … I know you’re fucked up worrying over your mom, but I thought there was an understanding, you know? We hash things out and then take it to the group. What happened to that?”
    I kinda knew this was coming, but knowing doesn’t make it any less obnoxious.
    “It’s not a decision I can make, or we can make, get it? It’s a group decision, everyone is involved.”
    “Everyone?” he says. He’s lowered his voice to his serious register. When he starts to get angry his accent becomes thicker and his shoulders hunch over as if he’s readying for a fistfight. I don’t think it will come to blows, but he still looks like a warthog kicking at the dirt, coiled up, tensed, a ball of fire seething right in front of the gold-framed Thomas Kinkade print.
    “Right. Everyone. Everyone meaning you and Zack, right?”
    I didn’t know this would happen, but I thought it might. I cross my arms, puffing out my chest to mimic his ridiculous, dominant posturing. I keep silently insisting there’s no drama here. I keep telling myself this is about a power dynamic, not about Ted being a jealous, whiny little prick.
    “Does Zack know?” he asks, much more to the point.
    “Yeah, I guess so, yeah. But, come on, in my defense he wheedled it out of me.”
    “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
    “You know that saying, how does it go—I hurt you because I love you? Well, that saying doesn’t apply here.”
    “Is that one of your kinky sex games?”
    “Look, asshole,” I mutter, taking a big step toward him, “I’ll slap you again if I have to. Don’t make it seem so appealing.”
    I can feel it surging, that clash of the titans—hot, angry, boiling temper that’s just dying to rip right out of my throat and through the palm of my hand. I still don’t know where this is coming from. Best guess? Ted’s goddamn fucking attitude and the fact that my mom, the most beautiful woman in the entire world, is missing and maybe, just maybe, dead.
    “Fuck it,” I say, deflating. “This is a waste of time.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Do you think we should