Love in All the Wrong Places

I stared at my phone, completely in a trance. It wasn’t until Travis had come out of his room and come over to me, violently shaking me before I was shaken out of my trance.

“C, are you gonna answer your phone or not?”

I just looked at him from my fixed concentration spot on my phone. I still had a glazed look on my face, still not completely comprehending what was going on. Travis just shook his head, reached over me to grab my phone off the end table, and answered the phone.

“Hey, Christy isn’t available right now. Call back later.”

Before he got the chance to hang up, Emmett started yelling at him. I could hear him through the phone from where I was seated. I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, but just looked at Travis with a slightly horrified expression. Travis had put the phone back to his ear and continued to listen to Emmett’s yelling. After a brief time, he cut him off.

“Dude, what the hell is your problem? Chill out ok. Christy is fine. I don’t know why she hasn’t called you, but she’s safe here in Nashville. Calm down.”

I saw Travis’s features relax a bit, and I no longer heard Emmett’s side of the conversation. However I had yet to fill Travis in on everything that had happened back home, which meant that he didn’t understand the danger of telling Emmett that I was in Nashville. I mentally cursed myself for neglecting to tell Travis about what happened in Chicago.

He then ended the call, and handed me the phone while shaking his head disapprovingly.
“C, man, who the hell was that guy? What was his problem?”

I bit the right side of my bottom lip nervously and said, “Well Trav, you see, there are some things that I need to tell you. One of the most important being that it is vitally important that Emmett never knows my whereabouts. I know it’s too late now. He can’t ever know the details of my location.”

He just looked at me dumbfounded. I motioned for him to join me on the couch. Now is as good a time as any to recount my story so he knows what is going on. He slowly sat on the couch next to me, and turned toward me, ready to hear what I had to say. I groaned slightly, and turned towards my left slightly to face him. I began telling him what happened, starting with my history with Emmett. I then continued to divulge about Dave, Jessie, Emmett, meeting Jake, Jessie’s sudden hostile nature, mine and Jessie’s fight, Dave kissing me, finding a leggy blonde in Jake’s apartment, and running away. After I told him, he just sat there in a stunned silence, taking everything in. We sat in a slightly awkward silence for about ten minutes before finally speaking up.

“Wow Chris, that’s some heavy shit. Sorry it’s just a lot to take in right now. Sucks that you had to go through all of that. So Emmett—his actions are pretty unpredictable huh?”

I solemnly nod in response.

“Hmm. Well, as long as you’re boarding with me, he won’t get within fifty yards of you if I have anything to do about it. I’ll make sure he never finds out your location the best I can.” He paused for a bit, concentrating on some thought. “This is a completely random question. Heck, it’s probably completely irrelevant and totally unnecessary to ask, but I am curious. Your roommate Jessie, is her last name McPherson by any chance?”

I looked at him wide-eyed and nodded ever so slightly. How the hell does he know my roommate? What exactly is her past? I was determined to figure out how the hell Jessie keeps having all of these connections to guys that I meet. I mean c’mon. Freaking Nashville? How does that happen? How does a random street musician know my roommate? There has to be something that she’s not telling me. Something about her past that somehow relates to pretty much every guy I come across lately. Or is it actually random? Now I was becoming paranoid. Is this some part of a larger plot she has planned? Are these seemingly random guys, actually part of some twisted story that she wants me to play a part in? All I know is that my life isn’t a freaking play and I’ll be damned if I let her treat me like a puppet. I needed to get to the bottom of whatever the hell was going on and figure out exactly how she knew the guys I kept running into.

I sat there fuming for an unknown amount of time before I realized Travis was waving his hand in front of my face, trying to get my attention. I finally turned to look at him, still seething with anger at Jessie.

“Woah Chris, didn’t mean to make you angry, I was just curious. I’ve only ever known one Jessie, and we go way back. The way you were describing her reminded me of the Jessie I knew, which was why I asked.”

“Tell me Trav. How exactly do you know Jessie?”

He smiled in nostalgia. “Aw man, we go way back many years! She used to live next door to me! We were babies together, granted I was a couple years older. Our moms used to hang out and we’d have ‘play dates’ together. She moved away when she was about twelve. Haven’t seen or heard from her since. Sounds like she hasn’t changed much; still the same fiery, stubborn girl she was growing up. Glad to know she hasn’t changed.”

Okay, so this was actually just a coincidence. I happened to run into an old neighbor of hers. In a small city like Nashville, that’s not too hard to believe. Most of the people here, outside of those that relocated to make it in the music industry, have lived here their entire lives. So this wasn’t as strange. I’m still wondering however, how she knows Jake. I’ll have to look into that. I do realize now what she meant, but how could she possibly know that unless she’s dated him herself? She told me about all of her past relationships, or so I thought. She has become quite the mystery as of late. A mystery that needed to be solved as soon as possible.

I needed some time to walk around and be alone with my thoughts. I told Travis that I was going to walk around town for a bit to clear my head. He asked if I wanted him to accompany me. I told him I didn’t, and grabbed my purse, keys, phone, and headphones.

I padded down the stairs of his ratty apartment and once I got outside, I took out my headphones and looked through my music to find today’s walking music. I settled on listening to The Technicolors. They are pretty rad if you ask me. They have a pretty sweet psychedelic rock sound for a band that’s been around only a couple years. I just needed some awesome grooves to listen to as I lost myself in my thoughts around downtown. I turned on “Alive Ever After” and began to walk. I will say the beauty of Travis living in such a crappy apartment is that we still got to live downtown and it was never more than a few blocks walk to whatever we needed. Truth be told, we rarely used his car when we went to his gigs, which were slowly becoming more and more frequent.

I put in my headphones and started wandering down the sidewalks of downtown. I figured that I would pick up some Chinese take-out on my way back so we could have dinner. I hadn’t walked very far from the apartment when I pulled my phone out of my pocket to text Travis to see if he wanted me to bring back take-out and what he wanted to eat. I was mid-text when I ran into someone, knocking them to the ground. I stopped and looked down to help this stranger up.

“Oh man, I’m so so sorry! I should’ve looked where I was walking! I didn’t mean to knock you over!” I reached my hand down to help the guy up.

He dusted himself off, and grabbed my hand to get up. As he got up off the ground, he said, “No, don’t apologize. I wasn’t watching where I was going. Completely my fault miss.” He looked up at me and I looked up at him, and we stared at each other wide-eyed as I plucked my headphones from my ears.

“Dave?!?”

“C?!? Is it really you?” He asked, amazed that he found me.

“Y-yeah. It’s really me. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’ve been looking all over for you! I felt so bad about what happened at the park that day, and I wanted to explain everything to you. It was wrong of me to surprise you like that. I know you were expecting that to be Jake. But do you think you’ve cooled off enough now to hear me out? There’s a lot that we need to talk about…” he trailed off.

He was my best friend after all, and as I looked into his eyes, I could see the sincerity and hurt in his eyes as he spoke and waited for my response. I was about to respond and tell him yes, when I heard the front door from the apartment complex fly open, and Travis running as fast as he could towards us. Without so much as an introduction or explanation, he ran up to Dave and punched him as hard as he could in the face, knocking Dave backwards.

“You son of a bitch! You stay the hell away from her! Do you understand me? No one treats Chris like shit and gets by with it! I don’t believe you, you pretentious douche bag! How the hell did you get to Nashville so quickly huh? Were you already here? I know we only talked on the phone for a short amount of time earlier, but at the time I had no idea who you were. You don’t get to be around Christy, so you just stay the hell away from her! Christy, c’mon!” He then forcibly grabbed my left arm with his right hand and started pulling me back towards the apartment.

I resisted against his pull, and finally put the pieces of what just happened together. Travis mistook Dave as Emmett. Here we go. “Travis, hey, stop pulling me. It’s not what you think.”

“What do you mean it’s not what I think? This douche was trying to rape you again!”

“No he wasn’t! Trav, calm down! This is just Dave!” I should’ve shown Travis pictures of what they looked like instead of just describing their appearance. Unfortunately, based solely on the generic visual descriptions I gave Travis, Dave and Emmett looked identical. Side by side they look absolutely nothing alike; however they both had short, dark brown hair with a medium build. Sucks that that description fits a majority of the male population.

Travis just stared back at me with a horrified expression, then looked down to Dave, who was now sitting up, holding his nose to keep the bleeding down. “Shit dude, I’m so sorry! I thought you were Emmett!” He then drops my arm and uses that hand to help Dave up off the ground. Here dude, I live right in this building and you can come up and clean off. Sorry again for the rash actions. I happened to look out my window and saw y’all talking on the sidewalk. Based on the descriptions Chris gave me, I thought it was Emmett talking to her instead of you.”

Dave just started laughing and looked at me. “Do you really think I look that much like Emmett?”
I rolled my eyes and told him no. With the hand that he wasn’t using to stop the nose bleed, he draped that arm around my shoulders, and brought me in for a side hug as we walked into Travis’s apartment and up the stairs. We had walked up the two flights of stairs side by side and waited in the hallway as Travis unlocked his door.

When he walked in, Dave grabbed my arm and held me back. “Christy, I really need to talk to you. As soon as possible. A lot has happened since you left and I would prefer that we talked alone.”
I stared at him questioningly, and responded slowly, “Ok, what’s up?”

He sighed deeply, looking down at his hand still on my arm, before slowly looking me in the eyes. “Well, I don’t know how else to say this other than coming right out and saying it. Uh, C, Jessie is dead. She was found in a pool of blood on the living room floor of y’all’s apartment.”