Shattered Bonds (continued)

“Lorie,” she said with puzzled concern. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. There’s no one else here.”

“They took him,” Lorelei explained. Her voice sounded eerily distant. “In the ambulance.”

“Where?”

Lorelei shrugged, looking toward the empty pathway, not at Kelly. “I don’t know,” she said. “The clinic, I guess.”

“Did you go there?”

Shaking her head slowly, Lorelei stared at the ground. “No.”

“Why not?”

Lorelei only sighed.

“I thought you two were—“

“We were.”

“Then why didn’t you go?”

“Were,” Lorelei repeated.

It took a moment for Kelly to comprehend her meaning.

“Oh.” There was a long pause and the Kelly added, “Then you aren’t going to go see him?”

Lorelei turned and stared at Kelly. She could not decide whether the young woman was stupid or just incredibly insensitive.

“I don’t know,” Lorelei admitted, surprising even herself.

The two girls stood in awkward silence for several long moments.

“You think he got beat up or something?” Kelly asked.

Lorelei breathed out a slow sigh. She did not want the girl to go away as much as she wanted her to shut up.

“I don’t know,” Lorelei replied quietly. “It looked like it.”

“Wow,” Kelly breathed. “I wonder who did it.”

Lorelei looked thoughtfully off into the distance. She had not gotten that far in her own thinking.

Sean had his share of both friends and enemies, she knew. Lorelei could believe, though, that any member of the latter group would attempt to inflect that kind of damage to him. She wondered if someone might have been jealous of her somewhat steady relationship with him. It had hardly been an exclusive arrangement, however—and that had been no secret either, she suspected.

Boys talk.

She had satisfied the desires of two or three other boys—or was it four?—during the past few months. Unless she was just completely repulsed by him for some reason, he would have had to do little more than to express an interest in her and he would likely have found her in his bed at the next convenient opportunity.

Was that it? she wondered. Someone who was unwilling to settle for less than exclusive rights to her body?

The thought disturbed her.

It’s not like we’d be married or anything . . .

She silently prayed that she was not somehow the cause of the brutality that had been inflicted upon Sean.