She drags her mouth from mine, her eyes drugged with desire beneath heavy lids, and lets her words slash out at me. “I don’t want you.”
“Don’t you fucking dare lie to me again! I deserve better than that. Tell me! Tell me that again!” I shout at her with one of my hands gripped in her hair and the other digging into her hip.
She doesn’t say a word. She just stares with tears filling her eyes until she whimpers. “I can’t, Tanner. I can’t.” But afterward she leans forward and presses her lips to mine in the most tender of kisses. It’s like a drug and a poison to me, pulling me further under its haze and hurting me all at the same time.
“You can,” I urge, my own voice thick with emotion when she brushes another kiss on my mouth, but this time I can taste the salt of her tears on her lips, and my chest constricts at whatever is going on that I can’t comprehend.
“I can’t,” she says again, but her words don’t match her actions because her hands find their way beneath the hem of my shirt, her touch branding my flesh so that I know even when I walk away it will be like a tattoo there, permanent and painful.
I know before our lips meet again, before my hands slip beneath her shirt and skim up the line of her spine, before I let her undo the buttons on my jeans and slide her hands inside my waistband, before she tells me she “can’t” again that this is such a very bad idea. That I’m going to end up hurt and reeling with one more memory to cling to and to be haunted by simultaneously. That this time around I’m just as guilty as she is because I’m knowingly cheating with a married woman.
But I can’t stop myself. It’s impossible to hold back. With the taste of her kiss on my lips and the scent of her perfume in my nose and the feel of her skin against mine, I hope that if she can just feel me again, remember what we have together, if we can have just one more moment, then she’ll know it’s me who she wants.
Me who she’ll choose.
Me who will keep her safe and her eyes dry from tears.
Our breaths are shaky, our kisses are bittersweet, and unspoken emotion swells between us as we help each other undress just enough so that we can race with unsteady hearts toward the ultimate pleasure that I’m pretty sure will result in more pain. But I push the rational thought away, quiet her lips telling me she can’t over and over with my own.
We move in hurried but meaningful motions: my hands pushing her pants down, her hands stroking my dick. My fingers spread her open, the groan in my throat when I find her soaking wet. Hands skimming over warm flesh, the weight of her breasts in my hands, the creak of the console as I lift her hips up and she parts for me. The adamant repeat of “I can’t” morphing into a soft sigh of need when her muscles tense as I push into her.
And that singular sensation, my hard cock sliding into her resisting muscles undoes me. Consumes me. Blinds me from seeing the truths that I don’t want to face. That this is a good-bye to rival all other good-byes. Our kisses have communicated it all along, and now our bodies do the same through slow strokes, the tilt of her hips up to meet mine as I grind into hers, the bite of her nails in my shoulders, our unsteady breaths as we break momentarily from a kiss only for her to repeat her mantra before I kiss her again to stop her protests.
I move my hips slowly at first, the emotion and sensation almost too much to bear because how can we be this close and yet so far from how we used to be? But I find as much comfort as I can in the familiar little things: the gasp she emits when I brush my thumb over her clit, the texture of her tightened nipple against my tongue, the tensing of her thighs around my hips.
She won’t look at me, though. And I can’t have that. Can’t have her trying to shut me out now, so I still my hips when I’m buried to the hilt in her, leveraging her weight against mine, and bring my thumb and forefinger to her chin so that she’s forced to meet my eyes. Only when she holds her face steady, emerald eyes drowsy with lust but glistening with tears, do I continue the slow withdrawal from her body and then the bittersweet thrust to join our bodies again.
She comes in a violent shudder, her muscles tensing around me and my name on her lips for the first time since we started, but her voice sounds thick from the tears lodged in her throat.
“Beaux.” I groan her name as a blinding flash of heat surges through my body and possesses my movements so that when I grind into her one last time, I lose more than just my orgasm to her. Oh fuck. I lose so much more, but thank God I’m blinded by my climax so that I can’t think about it just yet.
We remain motionless for a moment, our bodies connected in the most intimate and carnal of ways, our arms wrapped around each other and our heads resting on opposite shoulders as we try to come to terms with what just happened and what I feel deep down I know is going to happen next. I’m afraid to speak, afraid to move, because once I do, I know I’ll never get this moment back.
“Beaux,” I murmur into her shoulder, “please… I need to understand.”
“We shouldn’t have done this,” she whispers. “You need to go.”
“How can you say that? How can —”
“Just please go. Forget I ever existed.”
I snap my head up painfully, eyes searching hers for answers she won’t give me as I try to dredge up the promise I made to myself before I walked onto the flight: to walk away and never look back if she rejected me. The hard thing is my feet are rooted in place, just like my heart.
“I could never forget you. Never.” I grit out words that have never been more true in my life. My hands come up to frame her face tenderly, her bottom lip trembling with the emotion I feel but don’t think I can show her because then I’d just give her another piece of me I’ll never get back.
And she already holds too many pieces of me as it is.
“I’ll walk away, Beaux. I’ll walk away and never look back if you ask me to… if that’s what you want. It’ll kill me because I don’t understand, but I’ll do it for you. God, I’d do anything for you right now,” I plead as my voice breaks with the weight of what I’m saying to her. “Just please tell me this wasn’t all a lie. Please tell me the nights we spent on the rooftop and the laughs we shared and the sex we had wasn’t just a joke to you. I need to leave knowing that what was between us wasn’t all in my head.”
“Tanner…”
“Can you give me that? Can you answer me so that I have something to hold on to?”
In an unexpected move that startles me, she takes my hand and places it on her chest over her heart with hers on top of mine. “Can you feel what I’m thinking?” she asks as her heart beats an erratic staccato beneath my palm. When she looks back up, her eyes are filled with tears, and one slips off her cheek and hits our connected hands. I bend my knees so that we’re face-to-face and she can’t escape from answering me with words. “I meant what I said about everything,” she whispers, and it makes my mind whirl.
About loving me? About not being able to be with me? About what? I want to shake her shoulders and insist that she answer all of my questions, but I know it’s no use. I know how stubborn she is, know how she’ll close down. Well at least I think I do, because I thought she loved me too and now she’s pushing me away.
My jaw is clenched, and my pulse is pounding a useless tempo because I’ve lost her. I close my eyes for a brief second to gather the wherewithal to walk away, angst slowly giving way to anger and resentment that she gets to make all the decisions here. “Don’t do this, Beaux,” I whisper more for myself than for her.
“If you ever loved me, you need to do this for me. Walk out the door and don’t look back.”
“I lov—”
“Shh! Not now. Not like this,” she says as she puts a fingertip to my lips, her head shaking side to side. “You need to go.”
There are so many words I want to say to her, so many things she needs to know, but as I start to lower my hands from her face, disbelief burns like a cannonball in my stomach. I grab her cheeks without warning and press my lips to hers in a kiss teeming with need,
want, desire, desperation, and good-bye.
Once I break off the kiss, hoping it tells her everything I haven’t said, because I know I could keep at it forever, I stride from the house, heart on my sleeve and a hole in my chest. All without meeting her eyes for a last time or saying another word.
Let her think about that kiss on the nights when she’s lonely.
My feet eat up the sidewalk. Then finally I slide into my car and bang my fist against the dashboard. It would be so much easier to walk away if the sex had been savage and carnal and full of spite. A quick fuck to work each other out of our respective systems so that we could move on. A little piece of physical satisfaction to mask the anger and hurt vibrating beneath the surface. It would have screamed that we weren’t meant to be together. That we were a fucking flare of desire that had already hit the high point and was crashing to the ground, burning itself out.
But it wasn’t. Not in the least. We made love. It was slow and emotional and so real that I can taste more than just her kiss still. So it’s that much harder to walk away because you can’t fake that. You can’t connect with someone on every level like that and have it be a goddamn farce.
It gave me hope. A false hope. And false hope is the worst kind of all.
I made a promise to myself to walk away if she pushed. Well I pushed back when I shouldn’t have, tried to help her, love her, be with her, anything with her, and now I have to walk away and never look back. So I choke back all of the emotion within me that threatens to come bubbling out. I won’t allow it.
As I drive away from the perfect little Stepford house growing smaller in my rearview mirror, all I keep thinking is that looking back is all I want to do.
Fuck the popular theory that if you love something, you should set it free; I came back and look how that turned out.
Whoever said love is like war, easy to begin but hard to end, knew exactly what he was talking about.
For the next couple hours I drive aimlessly, losing my way and not caring if I find my way back because frankly I have nowhere to go. I vacillate between thinking what a huge mistake it was coming here and knowing that Beaux does love me.
How in the hell can I walk away from her without more of a fight?
When my phone rings, my hopes surge that it’s her calling me to come back. Seeing Rafe’s name, I ignore the call, in no mood to speak to him. He calls one more time. Then my phone alerts a text. When I look down, my curiosity is piqued when I see the code 9999, the one that we’ve used over the past five years for him to tell me that a story’s about to break and he wants me on it.
I stare at the screen for a few minutes. The fact that I’m interested but the buzz of adrenaline I thrive on is thready at best tells me that my head is elsewhere. I contemplate ignoring the text and heading back to Beaux’s house, but know I’ll kick myself later if it’s something huge that I passed up for a woman who’ll no doubt reject me again.
Even though my heart’s not in it, and my head is warring over whether I’m giving up too easily on Beaux, I dial the phone to return his call.
I was raised to fight for what I believe in and to not give up until I get it, so what do I do now?
“Tanner.” Rafe greets me, his tone curt and his impatience more than obvious.
“What gives?” I ask before realizing this is the first time we’ve actually spoken in more than ten days, and a part of me cringes at the sound of his voice.
“What the fuck are you trying to pull, Tan?”
Whiplash hits me full force because I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Come again?”
“You’re in Kansas?” He yells into the phone as my hand falls off the steering wheel and into my lap while the shock and confusion over how he knows I’m here rifles through me. “You couldn’t let it go, could you?”
“What in the fuck are you talking about?” I shout back, my mind coming up blank on how he knows I’m here. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going or what I was doing.
“Don’t try and play me for a fool, man. Beaux. You tracked her down? What in the hell were you thinking?”
I open my mouth and close it before something I can’t take back comes out of it. “Rafe… you don’t understand. I’m just —”
“You’re just getting a restraining order filed against you is what you’re doing.”
My head whips up in complete bewilderment because there’s no way he just said what I think he said. “What are you talking about?” I feel like we’re having two completely separate conversations, and neither of them looks promising for me.
“I just got a call from Beaux. She’s filed a restraining order against you.”
“What?” I feel like the word screams through my head in a tornado of bewilderment, but my voice comes out even and quiet.
“Yeah. She wanted you to know that if you show up at her house again you’ll be arrested because she’s already filed one against you.”
I laugh long and hard, the edges of the sound tinged with hysteria that I won’t even deny as I sag against the seat, my head dropping back as I attempt to fathom how we went from the intimate murmurs in the foyer of her house to the tearful good-bye after sex to me being threatened with arrest. I’m at a complete loss and in utter shock.
“She did what?” I finally say into the phone as I try to piece together what in the fuck she’s trying to prove here.
“I’m not joking, Tanner, and I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you’re scaring me. Forget what I said before when I was talking as your boss and ordered you to come home. Listen to me right now as I speak to you as a friend. Dude, you’re losing your shit. You just tracked down a married woman, visited her house when she didn’t want you there, and did who knows what, but whatever it was is bad enough for her to spend the last few hours taking legal action to prevent you from doing it again. It’s called stalking, Tanner.”
“Stalking?” I say as I run a hand through my hair. This entire conversation is comical on so many levels, considering I believe I accused her of the same exact thing those first few days after we met when she was everywhere I turned. The irony is just too good to be true. “Oh that’s rich.” I’m dumbfounded as the laughter won’t subside. “She’s out of her damn mind.”
“Yeah, well maybe you should knock it the fuck off. Honestly, dude, I think you’re way off base here. Not acting like the person I know at all, but what do I know? Maybe she’s the crazy one. Maybe you need to get the fuck away from her. What if she accuses you of something worse?” he says.
“Not Beaux. No way. She wouldn’t do that.” I reject his implications immediately. He wasn’t there, doesn’t know what just happened… but then again I was, and now she’s filing a fucking restraining order? I pinch the bridge of my nose, welcome the pain of it as I try to wrap my head around the incredible highs and staggering lows of the day, and shut out the thoughts that he’s planting.
“I sound like a broken record, but you need to get on a plane and get home. She’s banking on the probability that you’ll be rational and listen to me. That you’ll leave Kansas and her alone or else she’ll go to the boss men next time, and you know what that means.” He blows out a frustrated sigh.
“I’m trying to figure out when it became your job to manage my private life, Rafe.”
“Well when you keep risking your job for a piece of ass who’s obviously playing you and going to get you fired, then it’s my job.”
“Are you threatening me?” I shout incredulously, purposefully ignoring the first part of his statement and the need to defend that she was so much more than just a piece of ass.
“If she goes to the brass and it comes down to it, man… I’ll have to fire you.”
“Then fire me,” I challenge. The buzz is already gone for me anyway.
“Really, Tan? You’re going to throw away all of your hard work and killer career for a woman who doesn’t want you? Who lied to you?”
“She does want me, though.” I cringe when I re
alize I spoke my thoughts aloud. “Something’s off here, Rafe. My gut instinct tells me that —”
“Stop! Please just stop and come home. It’s one thing to throw yourself into the fire when you’re trying to save something, but there is nothing to be saved here. Do you really want to be burned at the stake for nothing?” he rants as I fall silent and try to digest everything and question parts of my own sanity. How long am I going to chase a woman who loves me but obviously won’t let me into her life? “Tanner?” Rafe’s concerned voice breaks through my musings.
“I’m on sabbatical, remember?” There’s resignation front and center in my voice as I end the call without another word. Let him worry about what I’m going to do next since it’s none of his damn business. Fuck. I blow out a breath and rest my head against the steering wheel to try to come to grips with my warring thoughts and what he said.
Nothing makes sense, and yet I gave it all I’ve got. I can’t keep throwing good after bad no matter how much it hurts to walk away.
But that’s what I’m going to do. It’s what I have to do. I’m not a man who grovels. I’m a man who falls in and out of love at the flick of a switch, a paradox as Stella called me, and so I’m just going to get my shit from my hotel room, hop on a plane, and leave everything I thought I wanted behind so that I can force myself to fall back out of love.
It can’t be that hard to do. I’ve done it a hundred times before.
Even I don’t believe my own lies this time.
Chapter 28
“A
re you seriously going to pass up that wave, Thomas?” the voice calls out behind me in a tone that has me rolling my eyes and raising my middle finger to my brother-in-law when he paddles up behind me.
“It wasn’t good.”
“That’s what you said about the one before that and then the one before that. That photographer still have your dick in a twist?”