Chapter 63

• Today at four p.m., she had lunch with the Dalys. The Dalys were prospective clients looking for a home in Wagner Terrace. It was a hip little neighborhood with a lot of ranch-style homes a few minutes north of where Darcy lived in South Broad. She was taking them to The Butcher & The Bee, where we’d eaten lunch my first day in Charleston. Later, she had to stop by the bank and her lawyer’s office.
• Yes, this was more than obsessive and bordered on stalkerish, but if I couldn’t be with her, what harm was it to imagine her as she made her way through her day? Or to take it a step further and imagine myself waiting for her in that Charleston single, all the windows and doors thrown wide to let in the crisp autumn evening air, and that big copper soaking tub filled with her favorite bath salts and oils, just waiting to soothe her work-weary body? It had been damn near five months, but I was still struggling to settle back into my normal, everyday life. I mean, shit. Did I even believe normal life was possible anymore? Everything felt too harsh, too sharp, razor-edged since I’d been home. Life, before I made love to Darcy, was only occasionally interrupted by brief bouts of daydreaming about her. Life after making love to her wasn’t a daydream anymore. I knew her taste. Knew the tone and vibrato of each of her moans. Knew how her pussy gripped my dick when she was close to coming. All of this, in addition to the things I already knew and loved about her? This knowledge of Darcy MacFarland was going to be my undoing.
• I was never more certain of that than when Jared swung open the door to welcome me into his new home.