Chapter 17 Tahoe
SEVENTEEN
Tahoe
There’s a brunette in the kitchen when I walk out of the bedroom, a towel wrapped low around my waist. She’s wearing a T-shirt, the curve of her naked ass peeking out of the bottom. Her legs are short and lean as she leans forward to look on a bottom shelf inside the fridge.
Aidan gallops into the room from the other bedroom. Gallops. Like a fucking horse. He blows a noisy breath through his mouth and nose before he neighs.
“Please take the pony play to the bedroom,” I say, wincing. It’s been a while since we’ve been in this kind of situation. Not since before Bronze Bay. To say the guys are going balls to the walls with the freedom in a big city is an understatement.
Aidan cackles and pulls the dark beauty into his arms. She leans back to kiss him, and I have to look away. “You can come be a stallion in my stable if you want to,” she says, breaking up their kiss to talk to me. The brunette winks.
“Yeah, man. I’ll share,” Aidan replies when I don’t. It’s more of a growl. It doesn’t tempt me in the least. Not anymore. I’m convinced the only things that do it for me are the ones I’ve sworn off.
Shaking my head, I brush past them to grab a bottle of water from the hotel fridge. “While it’s an offer that’s hard to refuse, I’m going to have to bow out gracefully,” I say, making my way back to my room. “Use a saddle, Aidan,” I call out before closing and locking my bedroom door behind me.
Their laughter carries through walls, and it reinforces the lonely, awful feelings coursing through my body.
I take a long swallow of the water as sweat beads on my chest and arms. I just went for a run in the bustle of NYC, and the shower didn’t cool me down.
It didn’t do anything to clear my head either.
My comrades are on a Tinder rage, and I’m hung up on a woman, trying to come to terms with what that means.
Caroline was supposed to be here with me.
This was supposed to be it. The time of my life.
When I finally gave in and let myself have what I’ve been lusting after.
Instead, I’m masturbating twice a day in a penthouse suite while thinking about the woman who I’ll never have.
Not in the capacity that I thought I would.
My brothers decided to come early with me because I wasn’t able to cancel the hotel reservation, so they added several rooms. To fill the rest of the day, I’ll need to distract myself.
I need something. I want to forget that I fell so hard for a woman so effortlessly I didn’t realize it until now. Until I couldn’t call her mine.
A few loud raps sound on my door, followed by Leif’s baritone voice telling me to let him in. I throw on a pair of jeans that are on the floor next to my bed and slink over to let him in.
“You’re a fuckin’ mess, dude. Aidan is across the hall screwing a celebrity lookalike, my room looks like a brothel, and here you are,” he says, waving his hand to my room and then me. “Working out and moping like a sorry sack of shit.”
I run my hands through my wet hair a few times to dry it. “I have to see her every day. It’s a small, fucking town.” Deviate from the real problem. My feelings. At any cost.
“Go back to San Diego. Ask for a transfer to another satellite base. They’re popping up everywhere now. They wouldn’t tell you no.” The thought of moving makes my stomach sink.
Shaking my head, I say, “I like it there.”
He comes in and cracks open the minibar and fishes for a bottle to down.
“You need to get over the chick, then. You can’t possibly be that hung up on her,” he says.
It’s a question, though, not a statement.
He’s eyeing me in the way we look at bad guys we’re questioning, trying to seek out truths inside blatant falsities.
Without taking his gaze from mine, he screws off the top of a mini bottle of Jack and downs it.
“I’m in love with her,” I reply. When it’s this obvious how miserable I am, there’s no sense in lying about it.
“I thought you might say that,” Leif says, setting the empty down on a dresser. “I called her.”
Narrowing my eyes, I respond, “You called who?”
He shrugs, like it’s just a mundane everyday occurrence, a wide grin playing across his chiseled, severe face. “The root of all of this unnecessary drama.” Leif finds another bottle of the same and tosses it to me. “Stella.”
My head swims, and the jagged hole inside my chest feels a little wider. The sweat beads faster now, rolling down my chest and the sides of my face. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I ask.
A bang from Aidan’s room ricochets throughout the suite.
Then a loud neigh. I block it out in favor of fury as I step toward my friend.
“Drink it. She’s in the lobby waiting for you,” Leif says, nodding at my hand.
“Actually you should empty the minibar as fast as you can. Don’t look at me with that rage face and your balled-up fists, man.
You know as well as I do that she’s the hang-up.
The reason you can’t be happy. The ice bitch.
The queen of blue ball happiness blocking. Instead of fighting me, thank me.”
Looking to the ceiling, I yell. It’s a war cry of frustration. My breaths come quicker. “I’m not going down there.” I drink the Jack.
Leif tsks. “She didn’t want to see you either, and she’s still down there.
Instead of fucking a redhead with the stage name of Jessica Rabbit, I’ve spent the past twelve hours tracking down Stella.
Do us all a favor and at least speak your peace.
We have to work tomorrow, and we need you there with us.
” Leif taps the side of my head and then wipes off my sweat on the side of his pants.
I drink another Jack, then another. I pace the room, and Leif talks to me.
About things I haven’t brought up for half a decade.
Horrible things that make me feel. Did I stop to consider the fact that Stella and our past could be the hang-up preventing me from moving forward and taking what I want without thought for the future?
Maybe for half a second. Some memories are too painful to bring up even if they further the dissection of a current problem. What if Leif is right?
“Put on a fucking shirt,” Leif says. I’m still sweating, but I pull on the first shirt I find on top of my bag. The mirror in front of me shows an image of a stranger. Sweat immediately bleeds through the black cotton fabric.
“I hate you so much,” I tell him, shaking my head. “This is the last thing I need right now.”
“It’s one of the only things you need right now. Give me some credit. How long have I been your friend?” I shake off his fact. It doesn’t matter right now.
I pace once more to the window overlooking NYC, the place that stole her from me in the most dubious, sneaky way.
There wasn’t closure. There was a deployment the next day and a Dear John letter in the form of an email.
I looked at the email every day for ten months.
I woke up on the first of the eleventh month, and instead of reading it, I deleted it.
Buried it. Tried not to think about her or what I lost again.
It worked on most days, and on others, I obsess over the failure.
At the thought of the failure, anger rises. Just enough to force my feet forward, one ahead of the other, to the elevator and down to the lobby of the five-star hotel. I’m a fucking mess, and the fact that this is happening right now is hard to fucking swallow.
I see her from the back. She’s sitting at the round bar in the center of the lounge, her blonde hair hitting just below her shoulder blades. It’s shorter than it was the last time I saw her, but after spending years with her, she’ll always be someone I recognize anywhere.
She senses my presence, swiveling in her chair to face me. She looks older, the skin on her face a little less glowing than I last remembered.
I swallow down the last of my hesitation and approach with leaden feet and a pounding heart. “Stella,” I say, my voice cracking.
She looks down at the gin and tonic in front of her instead of looking at me. “What is it, Tyler? I can’t believe I’m here right now.”
Okay. Patience. I won’t kill Leif. Not today, anyway.
He has my best interests at heart even if he’s a fucking moron.
Her cell phone beeps on the bar, and she looks at it sighing.
“My husband,” she says, waving the screen at me.
“Worried because I left the house to visit my ex-boyfriend.” She waves an arm at me.
“Why he’s intimidated by you, I have no idea, but dear Lord, make this fast.” She sips her favorite cocktail, sighing in annoyance.
I laugh. That’s what you do during awkward pauses when you have no clue how to respond. “You wrote me a fucking email, Stella,” I growl lowly. “Why?” Might as well get what I came for, right? The ten months of holding onto broken promises requires this to survive.
Her lips, ones I’ve kissed so many times in the past, purse.
Looking at her doesn’t feel like I thought it would.
She’s not some mirage, she’s just a woman who I once loved, and it brings awareness to one fact: Stella doesn’t hold a fucking candle to Caroline.
My stomach drops. I brush my brow with the back of my hand.
The bartender catches my eye, and I point to the drink in front of her and hold up the number one with my finger. He squints his eyes, and I remember my own messed-up eyes. He nods and begins fixing me the drink I detest the most.
“Is that really what you want to know? It was easier that way. We were so entwined that a clean break was needed. A new life presented itself in New York, and you were always going to do…what you do,” she explains, looking around to make sure we’re out of earshot.
“You can’t possibly need closure. That email explained everything and then some.
I’m not a woman to leave without cause. It was time to part ways. ”