One More Time by Caitlin Ricci Page B

held up one of his hands, stopping me. “I don’t. I just figured we could watch a movie, have a beer, eat some cookies. As friends.”
    I relaxed a little because I’d been wrong and my earlier thoughts were right. Caleb wasn’t interested, which was fine. I was still interested in him, but I could handle rejection and besides, friends were always good to have. “Sure. A movie sounds good.”
    We were done with dinner, so I put some cash down on the table and started to get up.
    “You don’t have to do that,” Caleb told me.
    I shrugged, because paying for dinner didn’t really bother me. “It’s fine. I’ll meet you back at your house, then?”
    “Sure.” I followed him out, waved to Roxie, and then watched him get in his SUV before I got into my patrol car. He really needed to get those tags looked at, and I figured I’d mention it at some point, but no one in Thornwood would give him a ticket for that. We didn’t really give tickets. We talked to parents, gave hard lectures on speeding, but unless someone was actually being reckless, no one on the force gave tickets to the people in town, and if it warranted a ticket, it usually meant we’d be taking them to jail too. Which was a pretty long and fairly boring drive to the nearest big town with holding cells. We didn’t have any in Thornwood.
    Getting to his house from the diner took less than five minutes, about the same amount of time it took to get anywhere in town. It was pretty late, so I went slower to watch out for any deer that might cross the road. Most people took it slow, but every once in a while we got some people who enjoyed speeding through our little town. The people who got lost on their way to gambling up at Black Hawk and Central City and ended up zooming through town were some of my favorite tickets to write. People rarely considered the road to be residential, but the truth was there were plenty of kids in town who played by the streets or tossed balls across the road to each other, even after I’d told them not to a dozen times before.
    I parked next to Caleb’s SUV and stretched my legs to catch up to him as he walked up the steps. A movie sounded good and would probably give me the distraction I needed tonight. I hoped so anyway.
    Half an hour later, I was restless, and though the movie was supposedly a pretty good one, I could barely focus on it. I curled my fingers over my knee and tried to force myself to relax. Maybe getting a guy in Denver wouldn’t be such a bad thing. At least then I could exhaust myself with someone. I didn’t want to do that, especially tonight while my thoughts circled around Simon, but I didn’t know what else to do in order to get my racing heart under control. I felt caged, like I needed to stretch out or go for a run or… just something to get myself back under control.
    “You okay?” Caleb asked a few minutes after I’d made the decision to leave but hadn’t yet figured out a polite way to excuse myself.
    I started to nod, then finished off by shaking my head. “Not really. Look, I’m sorry I came over. I’m not in a good space right now. I should probably go.”
    He looked disappointed as his expression, one of mild curiosity, turned into a frown. He nodded, though, and I got up from the couch. “Okay. See you later?”
    “Of course.” I was at the door, and I should have just opened it and gone right back outside. But… I ran my hands through my hair. I was too messed up for this, for friends, for hanging out. Caleb was nice, and as a friend he could have been great. But I didn’t need a friend right then. I needed someone to screw and never have to look at again. I needed someone who would let me treat them like a sex toy to vent my frustration about what had happened to Simon, about losing the only person I’d loved. And even if the accident hadn’t been my fault, in my mind I could hear Cassandra screaming at me the way she’d done that first night in the hospital. It was all