Chapter 12
Alex
We gotin my SUV and started driving, getting the hell out of Tennessee.
The sun was high and hazy in the sky. It looked like it should be warm but it was another cool February day, the breeze damp. Traffic was heavy as we left Nashville.
I drove. Kat had put sunglasses on and she sat quiet in the passenger seat, looking out the window. I tried not to glance at her repeatedly, wondering what she was thinking.
That had been…intense, back there in our hotel room. Unexpected. Wildly, insanely pleasurable. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d lost control like that. Maybe never.
The air had shifted between us, and I couldn’t quite read it yet. It wasn’t awkward—we’d been intimate too many times for that, no matter how long ago it was. Some of the edge had come off of my simmering anger, and in its place was—what?
Regret? Longing?
I was bad at emotions. I always had been. When you’re a little kid and your dad hits you, you learn to lock your emotions down. You learn that feelings are a problem that has to be solved right now, in this moment, or else. So I was locked down tight until I met Kat, and then I didn’t know what the hell was happening to me. Hence, I didn’t handle it very well.
In my late twenties, long after my marriage fell apart, I tried therapy. I went to a lot of different therapists, convinced after a few sessions that each one was an idiot. I eventually figured out that it was me who was the idiot, so I started paying attention in the sessions instead of arguing all the time. It turns out, if you actually listen to someone who knows more than you do, you can actually learn something.
So at thirty-five, I was finally a little bit wiser than I’d been in my twenties. I thought I actually might have a handle on some of this being-a-grownup shit. And then? Kat happened. Again.
Kat leaned forward to turn on the radio, and I watched the motion of her long, lean arm from the corner of my eye. Physically, something about her always made me go haywire. She was unlike any other woman I’d ever seen. Aside from the golden-brown skin and black hair, she was taller than a lot of women and physically strong, even when she didn’t work out regularly. Her legs were long, her hips were unapologetic, and she had sleek biceps, which she probably kept tight by slinging drinks and lifting boxes of booze every night. She wasn’t dainty or blushing or soft, and she definitely wasn’t blonde.
To me, she was sexy as hell.
“I have a confession,” she said, breaking into my reverie as she tapped through the radio stations. “I hate country music with a passion.”
“Sure,” I said. “So logically, you moved to Nashville.”
“It was for a job,” she explained. “The job didn’t pan out, but I was already in town, so I got the job at Knoxy’s. And I ended up having to listen to country every night. It was pretty much hell.”
“The bands were that bad?” I asked.
“Yes.” She leaned back in her seat again, frustrated with the bad options on the radio. “But that isn’t why I hate country music so much. A lot of people like it, I get it. I know it’s hip to hate country, but that isn’t why, either. It’s because every time I listen to it, I know my grandfather would have a lot to say.”
I nodded. Kat’s grandfather was Cherokee. “He’d have a lot to say about cowboys, you mean.”
Kat snorted in reply.
“I don’t blame him,” I said. “How is he doing, by the way?” I’d never met Kat’s grandfather, but I’d heard a lot about him.
“He died ten years ago,” was Kat’s answer. “I’m surprised that didn’t come up in your snooping about me.”
It hadn’t, in fact. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “He was important to you.”
Kat adjusted her sunglasses and looked out the window. “After the divorce, after the break with my family, I left town and went to Oklahoma to stay with my grandfather on tribal land. His health was declining fast, so I stayed with him until he passed. I was there for almost a year.”
I wasn’t tracking her yet then. “It sounds bittersweet,” I said.
“It was. I got to spend a lot of time with him, learning what he had to teach me. My family had never wanted me to be in contact with him. Getting free of them was the best thing I ever did.”
I couldn’t help my curiosity, because I had no idea why the woman who had let her parents control our divorce had suddenly abandoned her family and left everything behind. “What happened?”
She knew what I was asking about. Her expression behind the sunglasses went hard. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We’re trapped in this car for ten hours, Kat. You may as well talk about what happened with your family.”
“So we’re going to use this time to go over old pain?”
“We just fucked against the counter in the hotel room, so I think we already crossed that bridge.”
Kat rubbed a fingertip over her lower lip. I knew it was an unconscious move, and I knew she was remembering her lips on my cock. I was remembering it, too. I’d be remembering it every day until I got very, very old.
Finally, as if she’d made a decision, she said, “Tyler got high one night. We were home alone. He attacked me.”
What the fuck? “Attacked you how?”
“I don’t really know what he had in mind, because I locked myself in the bathroom and called 911 while he banged on the door, swearing he was going to break it down and teach me a lesson I wouldn’t forget.”
I ran a hand through my hair. She’d been attacked by her own half-brother, that piece of shit. “When was this?”
Kat shrugged. “After the divorce. A year later.”
“And what happened?”
“My mother and stepfather came home just as the police came. They covered for Tyler, said it was just an argument between Tyler and me that got out of hand. They sent the police away, and of course they left, because my stepfather is who he is, and no one wants to embarrass him. They brushed the whole thing off. Tyler didn’t even get a slap on the wrist. They didn’t make him apologize to me. They told me I was being hysterical, and that I must have provoked him.”
That sounded like the Sloanes. They were all about appearances over everything. It was why they had hated Kat marrying me so much. “So they picked Tyler over you,” I said.
Kat flinched, as if she hadn’t expected me to say it quite so bluntly. “It wasn’t a surprise, was it? He’s my mother and stepfather’s son, while I’m just the leftover from my mother’s first marriage. Tyler was the one who was going to succeed. He’s also white. They didn’t want to get in the way of his doing great things.”
“And you’d already fucked up by marrying me.”
She flinched again and shook her head. “Alex.”
“What?”
“I just…” She trailed off, then rubbed her eyes behind the lenses of her sunglasses. “Don’t say it like that. That our marriage was a fuckup.”
“That’s how your parents saw it.”
“Yes,” she admitted, her voice low.
“And that’s how you saw it, too, at the end.”
She sighed tiredly. “I saw it that way for a while,” she admitted. “And then I spent time with Grandfather, and he taught me that the things that happen to you—they shape you. They make you who you are. Even the things you think are bad at the time. His words were, ‘The things that try to damage you—they just mean you’re forged in fire.’”
I drove in silence, my eyes on the road. Forged in fire. It was a good description of Kat. A good description of myself, too.
Both of us were forged in fire in our different ways. It was probably why neither of us could bend.
“But enough of my shitty past,” Kat said, pushing her sunglasses up into her hair. She turned to look at me, and even the purpling bruises on one side of her face were beautiful. “Do you ever hear from Damon?” she asked.
I flipped on my turn signal and pulled into the exit lane, aiming for the roadside stop up ahead. “We’re pulling over,” I said, not answering her question. “I need to take a piss.”