Free The Common Thread by Jaime Maddox Page A

unhappy. She’d read all about mood disorders and knew all the signs and symptoms of diseases such as depression and adjustment disorder, and she could never justify the use of an antidepressant medication in her particular case. She didn’t have a loss of appetite, no change in sleep pattern (with the exclusion of this strange night), no loss of interest in sex (although she had a paucity of available partners at the moment), no loss of interest in the things she liked to do. No, it wasn’t depression.
    So what was it? Her job was stressful, but probably no better or worse than most people’s. It had been her good fortune to be adopted by a family with plenty of money, and she had no worries there. Did she need to get laid?
    She didn’t think so. She’d never had anyone special in her life—ever, really, so she was used to being single. Her relationships tended to end quickly and badly, because she had no patience for other people’s drama. Her vision didn’t include the spectrum of color; things tended to be clear-cut: black or white. Choosing between extremes was much easier than separating shades of gray. Right or wrong, good or bad, attractive or unattractive. That’s the way her mind seemed to compartmentalize. Either she liked someone or she didn’t, and if she did, she wanted to spend time with them. If not, forget it.
    While this way of thinking made much of life simple—it didn’t work well in relationships, where compromise was key. Nic knew she was a failure in that department. She accepted it, and it didn’t even bother her anymore. The idea that she’d probably spend much of her life alone, with occasional flings to spice up the flavor of her days, had occurred to her, and she was okay with it. She could do flings. She could enjoy a few weeks or a few months of dinners and movies followed by nights of passion. What she couldn’t do was become comfortable with someone in her space, and that was what a relationship was, wasn’t it? Allowing another human being into the most intimate recesses of your life. Into your thoughts and plans, into your home and your car, into everything that was neat and orderly, creating a big mess.
    The ease with which others accepted the trivial infractions of privacy mystified Nic. It really bothered her that her girlfriend wore her socks, the ones with the black trim around the cuff, because she like to wear those with her black running shorts, and she couldn’t if her girlfriend had worn them and left them in the pile of laundry. Her favorite mug was just that—hers. How frustrating to reach into a cabinet for something and not find it in the place it had always been—to find dirty dishes in the sink and a wet towel on the floor. All of these things overshadowed the joy of the dinners and the movies and the sex. So, inevitably, the relationship would end, and Nic would find herself alone again, but content in her neat and ordered universe. And she really, really was okay there. Wasn’t she?
    The thought of a relationship caused her to once again to envision Rae. What had Rae meant when she’d answered “fifty” to Nic’s question about Jordan? She picked up her smokes, walked back into the bedroom, and slipped beneath her thick, soft comforter. Grabbing her smartphone from its charger on the nightstand, Nic connected to her search engine and typed. “How many countries are there in the world?”
    “Wow,” she said aloud. No one agreed, it seemed, whether to count Taiwan. She didn’t care to read why. But if you did, the number was a hundred and ninety-six. Could Rae have seriously been talking about the world? Was it possible she’d been to a hundred and forty-five (or a hundred and forty-six) countries? “I’ll never know,” she said as she powered down the device and put it back in its place.
    Her thoughts turned again to Louis. Why had he behaved like such a jerk with Rae? Or was he right—was she the jerk? It didn’t matter. They’d been