4. Kaylee #2
I don't look at him. Not once. But I feel his gaze the entire night, hot as the fire and twice as dangerous, and when I finally leave and walk to the parking lot, my chest aches in a way that it shouldn’t over this man.
It's after six on Tuesday. The guests have cleared out for dinner, the crew's wrapping up, and I'm in the registration cabin finishing the week's booking confirmations when the door opens and Dean walks in.
He stops when he sees me. Like he didn't expect me to still be here.
"Sorry. I was just dropping off the activity logs." He sets a folder on the counter. "I'll—"
"Why?"
The word comes out before I decide to say it. It’s sharp and final.
He huffs out a breath.
"Why did you lie to me?" I push back from the desk, and my voice is steady, but my heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my teeth. "Why the fake name? Why tell me you were passing through? Why—" My voice cracks, just barely, and I clench my jaw against it.
He doesn't say anything. His face does that lockdown thing—jaw tight, shoulders squared, eyes giving nothing away.
"You owe me that much, Dean. At minimum. You owe me an explanation."
"I know I do." His voice is rough.
"Then give me one."
The silence stretches. I can hear the clock on the wall, the hum of my computer. Outside, somewhere distant, Rourke's laugh carries across the yard.
"I can't."
"You can't." I repeat, flatly.
"It's not—" He drags a hand down his face. "It's not that I don’t want to. I can't. It doesn't just affect me and you. There are people who'd get hurt if it got out, and that’s a risk I can’t take."
I stare at him. "What does that even mean?"
"It means—" His hands are fists at his sides, and he's looking at me as if he's being torn apart from the inside. "It means, I had reasons. I know that sounds like bullshit. I know you have no reason to believe me. But the lies weren't about using you. They were never about that."
"Then what were they about?"
He shakes his head. And something inside me snaps clean in half.
"You know what? Forget it." I grab my bag off the chair. "You had two weeks to come up with something, and the best you've got is 'I can't'? That's not a reason, Dean. That's a wall. And I'm done running into it."
"Kaylee—"
"No." I'm shaking now. The anger is so hot it feels like a fever. "You don't get to say my name like you care. You gave me a fake name and screwed me in your truck and didn't call, and now you want me to believe you had noble reasons? You want me to feel sorry for you because it's complicated?"
"I don't want you to feel sorry for me—"
"Good, because I don't. I feel stupid." My voice breaks, and there it is—the thing underneath the anger.
The wound. Raw and ugly and throbbing. "I feel stupid for thinking you were different.
For going home that night and checking my phone like some pathetic—" I stop and press my lips together.
Then I take a breath. "I'm done. I'm so done with this. "
I head for the door, and he moves. He steps into my path enough that I'd have to go around him, and our eyes lock, and his are—
Wrecked. He looks gutted and unable to hide it.
"Everything that night was real," he says, and his voice is a rough whisper. "I need you to know that. The name was a lie, but nothing else."
"That's not enough."
"I know."
We're standing too close. I don't remember closing the distance, but his chest is now inches from mine and I can see his pulse hammering in his throat. His breath is ragged and his eyes drop to my mouth for half a second and—
He rushes forward and kisses me.
Or I kiss him.
I honestly don't know who moves first. It doesn't matter. One second we're standing in the wreckage of a conversation that went nowhere, and the next his mouth is on mine and it's not sweet, not tender, not anything like the goodnight kiss in the bar parking lot weeks ago.
It's furious. His hand fists in my hair, my hands shove against his chest—pushing and pulling at the same time—and I'm kissing him as if I want to punish him with it, and he's kissing me back like he wants just that.
I bite his lower lip and he groans, and the sound zooms through my whole body.
I hate him, I hate him, and I want him so badly I can't breathe.
His back hits the wall beside the door. Or I shove him into it. Who knows. Who cares.
His hands find my waist, yanking me against him, and I feel how hard he is through his jeans.
It sends a jolt of heat straight through my core.
My fingers scrabble at his belt, as his hand slides down the front of my jeans without hesitation, just his rough fingers sliding into my panties, and when he finds me wet and swollen, the groan he lets out is guttural and broken.
"Fuck you," I breathe against his mouth, and it comes out like a moan.
"Yeah, fuck me," he says, stroking me, and my knees buckle.
I get his belt open, his zipper down, and my hand wraps around the thick, hard length of his cock. He hisses through his teeth.
We're both breathing as if we've been running, and his fingers are stroking through my folds exactly the way he did that night, because of course he remembers, he pays attention, because he's—
Don't think about what he is.
He works me with those rough, talented fingers—slow, then fast, then slow when I chase it, the tease—and I pump his cock in my fist, feeling him throb, his hips jerking forward into my grip.
His free hand grabs the back of my neck and he holds me there, mouth against mine, but not quite kissing…just sharing breath, sharing heat, eyes open and locked on each other in the low light.
"Come for me," he says, against my lips, husky and fractured, and the command is what breaks me.
I detonate with my hand around his cock and his fingers buried against my flesh, my whole body clenching and shaking.
I stroke him fast, as I come down from my orgasm, his pre-cum making him slick, and his climax hits in seconds with a choked groan. He spills hot over my fist, his fingers curling around the back of my neck.
For a few more seconds, there's nothing.
Just our breathing, rough and tangled.
Then reality crashes over us like a bucket of ice water.
I pull my hands away and he pulls his hands away. We stand there, barely a foot apart, and the space between us fills with everything we're not saying.
His eyes search my face carefully, almost afraid.
"This doesn't mean I forgive you," I say, voice rough.
"I know," he replies.
"This doesn't mean anything," I add.
Something sad flickers across his expression.
I grab a handful of tissues from my desk, clean my hand without looking at him, and pick up my bag from the floor where I dropped it. My legs are unsteady and my heart hurts.
I walk out without another word.
I make it to my car before the tears come.
I sit in the parking lot with the engine off and cry in the way I haven't let myself cry since that first Sunday—ugly and gasping…the kind that hurts your ribs.
Because I did it again. I gave him my body without getting a real answer.
I let the heat override everything I promised myself, and now I'm sitting in my car with his marks on my skin and wet panties and nothing else.
No explanation. Just another chapter in the ongoing saga of Kaylee Easton: the woman men enjoy for a few moments and then lie, leave, or both.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and drive home.
Imogen is already at my apartment when I get there. I don't remember texting her, but my phone says I did.
She takes one look at my face and opens her arms, and I walk into them and fall apart.
We end up on the couch. Wine poured. My shoes kicked off.
I make her swear…on my battered, coffee-stained, held-together-with-stubbornness copy of Pride and Prejudice that has been my most prized possession since I was fifteen…
that she won’t say a word to anyone, including and especially her husband, Brady.
She swears, and then the whole story spills out of me like water through a crack—the bar, the fake name, the passion in his truck, and everything up to now.
All of it.
The parts that are angry and the parts that I’m ashamed of and the parts I haven't said out loud because saying them makes them hurt even more.
"The worst part," I say, staring at the ceiling, "is that I can't even blame him entirely. He didn't force me. I wanted him. And I let myself have him tonight even though I knew—I knew—he still hadn't told me anything. What does that say about me?"
Imogen doesn't answer right away. She curls her legs under her on the couch and holds her wine glass with both hands, pressing her lips together. She looks at me directly, and completely without judgment.
"It says you're human," she says. "It says you wanted someone who wanted you back, and that's not shameful. That's natural."
"Well, it feels shameful."
"I know it does." She takes a sip. "But listen, the guy who doesn't call, who gives a fake name, who hits it and quits it?
That guy doesn't usually stick around at a job with the woman he screwed over.
That guy doesn't build roads in the dirt with a little boy.
That guy doesn't confess 'everything was real' when he could just let you hate him and make his life easier. "
I close my eyes. "Imogen."
"I'm not saying trust him. I'm not saying forgive him. I'm saying...whatever his reasons are, they might be legit. And those are usually ugly and complicated and don't come out clean."
I stare at the wine in my glass and feel the ache in my chest—dull and persistent.
She stays until the wine is gone and my eyes are swollen and I'm too tired to keep talking. She hugs me at the door, tightly, and then she's gone, and I'm alone with the crickets through the open window.
I wash my face. Brush my teeth. Stand in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror.
My armor is near ruined now…and the rawness spreads, exposed and tender. I spent two weeks building it, reinforcing it, and he took it apart piece by piece.
I know I can't pretend anymore. Not to him, not to myself. The anger was keeping me safe, and now it's dissipating, and all that's left underneath is the terrifying truth: I still want him.
Despite everything, I want him.
I’m a fucking mess.