Ghosts ✔

021 • Kozik

Kozik wished that his computer skills also reached beyond opening an internet browser and typing an URL in the location bar, then he would have felt less useless than he was doing now. While Juice was trying to locate the call, Kozik aimlessly walked around the clubhouse. For a moment he stood still in front of the wall with the picture frames. More than half of his brothers were dead or in jail, he noted with a sigh. He thought about Happy. Should he visit his friend, tell him about the call? Or would it do him no good, especially when Dana hadn't escaped? For he had to admit in all honesty that the fact that she wasn't picking up the phone was disturbing him. Or was she somewhere on open sea, far away from every phone tower?

Suddenly he noticed that he wasn't alone. He didn't know if it was a sound that he had caught or that he was sensing someone's presence, but he turned around. After his eyes had darted through the dark room, they settled on a figure huddled against the wall in the farthest corner. In a whim he walked towards the stranger, softly sighing as he recognized the girl that Juice had sent away a few minutes ago.

"Hey," he said quietly, squatting in front of her. "Don't feel bad about it. He has these asshole moods throughout the year. It's a miracle you haven't experienced them before."

Wiping her eyes, she looked up to him. There was something fragile about her, something sweet, something he hadn't seen often around Croweaters. "Usually I can calm him down when he bursts into a rage."

Kozik's hands slipped inside his pockets, he had no idea what to say. "You know about Dana?" he asked after a while. 

She nodded, staring at her hands. "He showed me pictures and told me about her."

In surprise, Kozik raised his eyebrows. He hadn't expect to hear that at all. "He did?"

Biting on her lip, she moved her attention back to his eyes. "After my boyfriend died, I had trouble sleeping too. When I saw how tired he was, I wanted to help him. So we slept together – which helped him. We just slept next to each other, cuddled at most, and we never did anything more than that – until tonight. I know it was loneliness encouraging him to have sex with me, but I also noticed that it did something to me... that I might have developed feelings for him. If not – if not his snark wouldn't have bothered me so much." She crossed her arms in front of her chest. "It's stupid, 'cause I know he loves Dana. It's just... I never had feelings for anyone since my boyfriend died."

Kozik still didn't know what to say. She seemed to be a sweet girl, but he had other things on his mind than the life story of a girl he didn't know. "I'm sorry for you," he said eventually to the girl, who was still staring at him, a lost look in her eyes. "I think you should pick one of the others guys. There's no way  that Juice will be ready for a new relationship anywhere in the near future."

"Pick one of the other guys?" she repeated, in a tone sounding more angry than he'd expected. "What do you think I am, a Croweater?"

"Yeah..." he admitted.

"I'm not like that."

"Okay... whatever you want, girl." He shrugged – he couldn't care less about how she defined herself or how he should define her. "Sorry – got bigger problems on my mind now." 

He turned away from her and headed for Juice's room again. The only light was coming from Juice's laptop, to which he was staring with a pale face. Kozik's phone was lying next to him, goosebumps spread across his arms as he heard Dana's voicemail message. 

Kozik turned on the light. "Found something?"

"No," he sighed. "Couldn't trace the call."

A silence fell. The look in Juice's eyes told him that he had aimed all his attention to Dana's voice. Once more his heart squeezed at the sight of the desperation radiating from the young man. After swallowing a sigh, he sat down next to him. "You okay?"

Juice dropped his eyes. "I feel guilty."

"She said it was the first time..." Kozik tried to weaken his guilt, knowing that feeling wouldn't help him to heal. 

"It was. I don't know what happened. The past month... we grew really close." He swallowed, taking a deep breath. "But today..."

"Don't take it too hard. You needed a distraction, nobody will blame you for that."

"No, it wasn't like that," he muttered. "It was more. It felt... like I was trying to move on with my life. As if I was accepting that Dana would never come back to me. And right at that time... Dana called." He blinked away a few tears. The voicemail-message replayed. "I was giving up on her. While she was fighting for her life."

Kozik laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "She's gone for ten months, Juice, and you've been through hell. Don't be so hard on yourself. Maybe you made a mistake – maybe you didn't. She – she seemed nice."

"She is. She's nice, and sweet..." Juice muttered, wiping his eyes. "But she isn't Dana." He heaved a deep sigh. "I should apologize to her."

From the corner of his eye, Kozik looked at his brother. Fair is fair – the girl clearly had awakened something inside Juice that nobody else had done since Dana was gone, for despite his regular whims, Kozik had never heard him apologize to anyone, despite the consequences of his rage. "Yeah, I think you should do that. She was crying in the clubhouse."

Juice dropped his eyes. "Great. Right now there are only two women who mean something to me and I've hurt them both."

"You don't know if Dana..."

"I do," he answered shortly. "She knows my number by heart. I can't think of any reason why she wouldn't call me, unless she knows that Lotte is sleeping in my bed for weeks."

Kozik said nothing. He however doubted Juice's words. Dana knew Juice loved her, and that another girl would only be like pain meds because she wasn't around. She had surrendered herself to Maddox to save Juice – he could see her being angry, but not telling him about their kid? There was just something off...