Chapter 16
Asher
He's kissing her.
Brief. On the cheek. The kind of kiss a man gives when he's not sure he's allowed to give anything else. Even from this distance with the lights off, I can see Declan step back after—careful, respectful—like the last scene she’ll replay in her head before she falls asleep tonight.
She doesn't pull away.
She gives him a small smile at the end.
I watch the way she watches him go.
His truck rolls down the street and disappears out of the neighborhood. The engine in my car is off, the heater dead, and both of my hands sit uselessly on the steering wheel. My forehead falls to the leather because there's nothing else to do with my head right now.
The steering wheel is cold.
The seam of it presses a line into my skin, and I don't move.
I'm an idiot.
I'm a giant, six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound idiot who couldn't take don't tell anyone about us and turned it into an ultimatum in a candlelit bedroom in front of a woman who was, until very recently, willing to let me touch her.
I followed her. Here, there, back again.
I followed her home like a fucking—freaking, dammit—stalker in a movie I would walk out of, and now I'm slumped in a quiet car on a quiet street watching the porch light flicker.
There's no part of this that looks like a man who hasn't lost his freaking mind.
She's done with me.
And she has every right to be.
Declan is the best of us. He's the man you call when your dad's having chest pains, and you can't drive.
He shows up with a chainsaw the morning after a storm.
He fixed a kid's tire swing once and didn't tell the owners he fixed it.
He builds staircases by hand on weekends because he's the kind of guy who builds things to last.
I'm the guy who climbs out of windows.
I press my forehead harder into the wheel.
She's there, inside, right now. The kids are asleep. She'll wash her face and get into bed. Tomorrow she'll text Declan back, and I'll spend a week telling myself I'm fine, then show up at The Quack and pretend to be the version of me that worked before her.
It’s a good plan. Solid plan.
I'm putting it in motion tonight.
Pity party of one coming up right—
The passenger door flies open.
The dome light blinds me, and I startle so hard my elbow hits the door panel as I reach down for the bat I keep in here.
"Son of a—"
Audrey gets in and slams the door.
"...biscuit."
The corner of her mouth twitches, there and gone, replaced by something far more dangerous.
She's still in her coat, still in that tight little skirt she wore to Bellamy's. The wind did something to her hair, and her cheeks are pink from the cold.
Her eyes focus on me and narrow.
"You followed me."
She's not asking. She knows. She probably watched me do it the entire time, thinking the same thing I did. Freaking stalker...
I drop my forehead back onto the steering wheel, lifeless.
"Yeah."
She waits, like she's giving me a chance to make it worse.
I don't take it.
"You followed me to Bellamy's," she says, each word careful and pointed. "You sat outside for nearly two hours. And then you followed us back to Millbrook."
"Yeah."
Her hands are folded in her lap, tight. The skin over her knuckles has gone white, and I can see the tremor she's trying to keep out of her fingers. I know what that means because I've watched her try to hide the pain before.
I just sit there.
"Are you going to say anything else?" she huffs out.
"Probably not."
She exhales slowly through her nose, muttering something under her breath that would probably be funny under any other circumstance.
I sit up, my back peeling off the seat, and I turn to face her, one knee against the console. I brace myself for it: the verdict and the sentence.
She stares out the windshield.
"Declan is a good man."
Yep. I knew it was coming.
It still hurts.
"He wanted to meet in Millbrook to make it easier for me until I told him no. He paid for the coffee before I could reach for my purse. He drove me home because he didn't want me waiting on the curb with a headache."
She's listing, the way you read off charges. I watch her thumb dig into the meat of her other palm, hard enough that she'll find the mark there tomorrow and wonder where it came from.
"Audrey—"
"He was a perfect gentleman. He told me about the staircase he's rebuilding. He talked about his wife to give me a safe space to talk about my own loss."
She looks down at her lap.
The car is very quiet. The dome light has gone off. There's only the glow of the dashboard, barely lighting her face, and outside the streetlight throws a yellow square onto the hood.
She sighs.
"He didn't deserve this tonight."
What?
I'm a second behind her. I'm still bracing for the part where she tells me she's choosing him, and my mouth opens before I have anything to put in it.
She keeps going, her gaze still fixed on her lap.
"I didn't want him." Her voice is so low I have to lean in. "I never did."
Holy sh—
I stop myself. I don't say anything. I've lost the use of every word I had loaded.
"I sat across from him for two hours and watched him be kind to me. And I couldn't make myself feel anything. I drank coffee that hurt my head because looking up at him hurt worse."
She presses her thumb to her left eyebrow, her hand still shaking.
"I don't want anyone else, Asher."
Somewhere in my chest, something gets up off the floor and remembers how to breathe.
"Why'd you go?" I say, quietly. "If you didn't want him."
She looks out the passenger window. "To spite you. Because you wouldn't promise me you wouldn't see other people. Because you drew a line, and I had nothing else." She lifts her face. The dashboard light catches the wet line under her lashes, and I watch her try to blink it back and lose.
"I tried to give him a chance. I really tried. I sat across from a man any sane woman in my position would marry... and I felt nothing." She swipes the corner of an eye with one hand. "The whole time I was thinking about a car parked outside."
I take that one in, slowly. The streetlight flickers. Somewhere two streets over, a dog barks once and stops. I watch the side of her face and the small muscle in her jaw, the wet corner of her eye she keeps wiping with the side of her thumb.
Her face pinches. "You're still not going to say anything?" she asks, frustrated.
"Sorry, I'm just... processing."
I sit with it. Declan, who I have personally watched help an old woman with her groceries in a parking lot when nobody else was looking. Who built a tool to make other people's kids better hitters. Who lost his wife and unborn child and still answers the phone every single time a friend calls.
"How bad is that migraine?"
"Awful,” she says, pressing her fingers to her head. “Why?"
"I need to know that you're thinking straight."
She punches me in the arm. "Unbelievable. I have zero patience for any jokes tonight."
I rub the spot where she punched. "That's what I mean. You know who I am, how I am. And you still want to be with me?” I shake my head. “There are documentaries that warn about staying away from stalkers and psychopaths."
A small sound escapes from her. Not quite a laugh, but closer than nothing.
"I know."
"Do you?” I run a hand through my hair, turning so I can see her better. “You could have any man you want, Audrey. Any man out there. Declan or someone impossibly better. And I couldn't even be mad because you deserve the best."
She finally turns and looks at me. "I know." Her gaze shifts to the center console. "But they're not you."
Something does a slow turn in my chest. The feeling I went looking for after the grand slam—the one that wasn't in the tunnel, that wasn't there with my father's hand on my shoulder, that wasn't there driving home along the lake—it's here.
Right here. In a parked car on a Millbrook street with a woman who won't look at me.
Love.
I haven't said that word out loud. Not to anyone. It sits there in the dark like a small animal that walked into the road, and I choose not to look directly at it. Not yet.
She must know I'm so useless with words tonight that she just continues. "I'm not done being mad."
"I know."
"I'm furious with you."
"Audrey, can I—"
"You sat in a car like a—"
I cross the console.
There’s no finesse in it. My knee hits the center too hard, and my hand finds the back of her head, pulling her to me. I get my mouth on hers and the rest of the sentence dies in her throat, turning into a small sound I will carry around in my head for the rest of my life.
She kisses me back.
Hard. Both her hands come up and grab the front of my jacket, pulling me closer to her. I'm halfway over the console with the seatbelt buckle digging into my hip, unable to get close enough.
She breaks the kiss.
"Now," she breathes. "I want you—"
"Come here."
I sit back in the chair.
She's already moving, one knee up, the other catching on the console. Her coat’s too long, and my hand’s at her waist, trying to help but just getting in the way.
She makes a frustrated sound that almost makes me laugh, and then she's in my lap with the wheel at her back and the roof too low for her head.
She pulls her coat off in a tangle and tosses it onto the passenger side's mat.
"Tell me we have time," she says against my mouth.
"We have time."
"The kids—"
"It's fine, Audrey. They're inside, asleep right there. We have time."
She nods. She's already working at my belt and my zipper, getting my cock free.
I push her skirt up over her hips. Hook her underwear with two fingers, and she shifts her legs awkwardly so I can drag them down.
My hands are shaking. Hers aren't much better.
The wheel is at her back and there's no room.
I toss her panties somewhere, and my elbow catches the horn, a short, polite chirp into the empty street. She laughs into my mouth.
"Sorry. Sorry."
"Shut up."
"Yes, ma'am."
Then she sinks down on me, and the whole car goes quiet.
Everything stills.
I don’t want to move. I want to remember this.