Chapter 5 #2
“Do you remember prom?” she asks so quietly I almost miss it.
My breath hitches. Every fucking second. “Every mile,” I say.
That stops her. She looks at me as if I’ve said something I shouldn’t have. Maybe I have.
“Fresh air,” I tell myself more than her. “This place is a furnace.”
She slides off the stool and lets me lead the way down the short hallway, past the framed photos of fallen brothers, to the back exit that sticks in summer.
The night air doesn’t hit so much as it settles.
It’s a heavy, humid blanket that does nothing to cool the furnace in my chest. The only sounds out here are the frantic chirping of crickets and the low, angry buzz of the club’s neon sign out front.
Its sick, red glow bleeds around the corner of the building to paint the alley.
I hold the door with my palm so it doesn’t slam.
She leans against the brick and tips her head back.
The security light paints her hair pale silver.
For a long moment, she just stands there, her eyes closed, breathing.
She’s pretending I’m not here. Or maybe wishing I wasn’t.
I watch the slow rise and fall of her chest, the pulse beating in the delicate skin of her throat.
“I’m not here for you,” she says into the dark, softer now. “I don’t want this to get confused.”
“Too late,” I say, because lying feels worse. “It was confused seven years ago.”
Her eyes snap open. “Then un-confuse it.”
“I’m trying,” I say, and I mean it like a confession.
The silence stretches, loaded with the weight of seven years of unspoken words. My brain cycles through the exits, and none of them let me breathe. I put my hand on the wall near her shoulder. Not touching. Just close enough to feel the body heat pulsing off her like a warning.
She doesn’t move. She doesn’t flinch. Her gaze drops, and she watches my mouth. It’s not on purpose. It never is. The body reacts when it desires what it shouldn’t. The air crackles, the space between us shrinking until it’s nothing but a single, charged inch.
A siren wails somewhere far off. Tires hiss on the street. The club music thumps through the wall.
“I shouldn’t want to kiss you,” I say, and the words come out rough, scraped raw from my throat. I take a breath deep enough to hurt, waiting for sanity to show up. It doesn’t. “But I do.”
Her breath stutters, a tiny, almost inaudible sound. “Then don’t.”
I lean in anyway, a hair’s width, my control fraying. Her scent—that sharp citrus and something else, something just her—fills my head. Her lips part slightly.
And memory slams me.
Gravel under my knees. The metallic taste of blood in the back of my throat. His last breath, a wet, rattling sound against my ear. A vow I can’t put down.
My hand curls against the rough brick until the grit bites into my palm.
The sharp pain is a necessary, violent anchor.
My jaw locks until I taste copper. Control’s a punishment I keep giving myself.
I stop. My entire body goes rigid with the effort.
I stop because stopping is the only thing I can give him that counts.
Her fingers lift as if she’s going to touch my chest. They hover in the charged space between us, trembling slightly. Then they fall.
“You make a mess,” she says, her voice a quiet accusation.
“I’m very talented,” I say, and hear how tired I sound.
Footsteps scrape at the other end of the hall. “East.” Nash’s voice. Not a command. A lifeline.
I don’t look away from her. “Yeah.”
“You’re done out there,” he says, and it isn’t a question.
I pull back first. The air between us cools by degrees; losing her heat is an immediate ache. “Enjoy your night,” I tell her, and the words taste wrong. “Frankie’s inside.”
Darla’s chin lifts. The guard goes back up. “I know exactly where she is.”
I want to tell you I know exactly where you are and have known since we were eighteen, stupid, and laughing in the middle of a road. But I don’t.
I step away and hold the door. Nash stands just inside, one palm on the frame, unblinking. He smells of gun oil and soap, his gaze fixed on me, not her, as we pass. He assesses the damage as if conducting an inventory.
“Enough,” he murmurs when we’re side by side again.
“Wasn’t starting anything,” I lie.
He doesn’t bother with a reply. His hand finds the back of my neck for a second, a steady weight. It’s not comfort. It's a correction. The only kind I’ll take from him. I’ll stand here ‘til the ground stops tilting.
I walk straight to the nearest pool table, needing the familiar weight of a cue in my hand.
My palm is still raw from the brick. My body is still strung tight with things I don’t let myself touch.
Across the room, Frankie has Darla at a high-top.
Frankie says something that makes Darla roll her eyes and almost smile for real.
It hits harder than anything I drank tonight.
“She’s not yours,” Nash says from beside me, reading me like a damn book.
“I know,” I say.
“So stop acting like she is.”
I break the rack, sending balls scattering across the felt. A chaotic, uncontrolled mess that feels a lot like the inside of my head. I line up a shot, my hand resting on the green felt of the table, and I hold still, waiting for the slight tremor in my fingers to stop. It doesn’t.
“I promised him,” I say, the words so quiet I’m not sure they leave my mouth.
Nash hears it anyway. “Then keep it without burning down the room.”
His gaze drops pointedly to my hand, to the tremor I can’t seem to control. He lets out a short snort, the closest thing he gives to a laugh.
“And you can start by trying harder,” he adds, his voice a low, dry rumble.
The words are a direct hit, a blunt and accurate assessment of the mess I’m in. I line up the shot on a stray ball. The angle is there, clean and stupid. It fixes nothing.
My promise to him and my wanting of her used to be two separate things, a line I could walk.
Turns out they grew from the same soil—grief doesn’t let go; it just changes shape.
But tonight, standing in that alley, the line blurred.
Now they feel like the same damn thing: a single, relentless pull toward a woman I can’t have.
And I’m not sure which one is going to tear me apart first.