Alpha Tiger

Chapter 1-4

She hadn’t seen his face, but she hoped that it was handsome. She thought she might have caught a glimpse at him, but she couldn’t say for sure and it had to have been a profile of his face. Oh well, maybe she would see him at the block party that they were throwing, she thought. She didn’t know, though and it wasn’t like she was on the hunt for a man. After all, wasn’t that where all of this had gone so wrong?

“What’s going on?” her mother asked as she shut the door to the garage. Danni frowned and flinched at the sound of the question and as her mother made her way back into the dining area and sat down at the table, she took her glasses off and put them on top of the tablet that she had left at the table. “My daughter, Miss Independent, doesn’t just show up at our house without a phone call and without a reason, ever. So I want to know why my daughter has run away to sanctuary and I want to know right now.”

“I think Chris and I are through,” Danni said with a heavy heart. It was surreal to say it out loud and it made her sick to her stomach. There had been so much time and so much energy invested into that relationship and to hear that it was all going down the tube was something that made her nauseous.

She thought that she was going to scream at the sound of it and it worried her. She looked at her mother and she could feel the bile building in the back of her throat as she thought how she was going to get out of this. How was she going to explain all of this to her mother? How was she going to explain this to herself?

She didn’t want to go into details, but she knew that there was something that she had to face and as she looked at her mother, she knew that all the hurt and all the fear was boiling up into her expression and she hated that she was that weak, that she couldn’t hold it back. Her mother looked at her with the kind and compassionate eyes that she had always had for Danni, even in the hardest times of her life.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” she said without needing any further explanation. She knew that Danni would talk to her when she was ready to talk and that pushing for another explanation or for more was only going to make it harder for her daughter.

Danni was grateful for that and she knew that there was nothing that she could ever do to repay her mother and she was so happy to just have this moment of repose.

“Me too,” Danni said, not expecting to say those words. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Any time dear,” she said, walking around the table and kissing her daughter on the forehead as she hugged her tightly. “I’m off. I’ll be home after six. I don’t know what your father said, but he’s usually wrong. Six o’clock, and I’ll expect dinner on the table.”

“You got it,” Danni laughed, quickly wiping away the tears that had escaped from her eyes.

There was no way that she was going to start crying because if she started, there would be no stopping it and it would just keep coming and coming and coming. She stood up and walked her mother out to the garage and waved goodbye to her and closed the garage door behind her as she walked back into the house. For some reason, she couldn’t take her eyes off the Jenkins’ house. Whoever the new neighbor was, she was absolutely interested in him.

It wasn’t just a fleeting curiosity, but something else. It was hard for her to place.

She couldn’t believe herself. Already, she was looking to move on after one night of being away from Chris. She shook her head and walked into the living room and started to pace, wondering what she was going to do with herself. If she was going to just spend a whole bunch of time by herself, then her thoughts were going to take over her mind and she was going to be strangled by them, suffocated by the regrets and the scenarios that might have been.

No, she needed to find something to do with herself that didn’t involve going insane in this house by herself. She looked back out the window at the neighbor’s house and she wondered what he looked like.