1 #5
“You don’t get to take what I survived, when you don’t know what I survived, twist it into a personality flaw, and throw it at me because you’re mad I didn’t love you back in that moment.”
The silence after that was vicious.
Easton’s face changed just enough for me to know he understood where he had stepped, even if pride kept him from looking down at the blood.
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“No, you just aimed close enough and hoped it hit.”
Ryan’s voice came low from the bar. “Wade.”
Easton’s eyes didn’t leave mine. “You think I’m the only one who knows where to aim?”
“No.” My laugh came out thin and sharp. “I know I aimed first. I know what I said that night. I know I hurt you, and I know I earned your anger. I do not owe you endless access to punish me in public because my apology didn’t come until after you severed the tie between us.”
His hand flexed around the glass. “You apologized after I stopped being useful.”
That hit me to my soul because he knows nothing.
I lifted my chin even though my chest felt cracked open. “You really believe that?”
“I believe what you showed me.”
“I showed you panic.”
He nodded. “And I showed myself to the door.”
“And you slammed it so hard the whole house shook.”
The old heat flared between us, ugly and alive. It wasn’t tenderness, not yet. It was too angry for that, too bloodied, and too crowded by everyone watching and every word we had failed to say when it could have saved us.
It was still heat. Still connection. Still the awful truth that Easton and I could turn a sports bar into a battlefield because we had never learned how to stop wanting each other after the war started.
Briggs broke the silence with the delicacy of a man dropping a piano down a staircase. “I feel like I should pay extra for dinner theater, but I’m scared to move.”
Nobody laughed.
Rider sighed. “Briggs.”
“What? I said I’m scared.”
Charm stood, all soft hair and lethal eyes, and came around the edge of the bar area like she had decided politeness had expired. She took the wing baskets from my hands with gentle force.
“Table twelve?” she asked.
I blinked at her. “You don’t work here.”
“No, but I can identify hungry men and emotional catastrophe. Go breathe near the ice machine before you commit murder in referee stripes.”
“I’m fine.”
Charm’s face softened, but her voice stayed firm. “Ay, you’re shaking.”
I looked down and saw my hands trembling.
She was right.
Damn her.
I curled my fingers into my palms, then looked back at Easton because letting him see me break would finish something I wasn’t ready to bury.
His eyes had dropped to my hands. The cruelty was gone, replaced by something worse—regret.
I hated that more than the anger.
I stepped back. “Enjoy your night, Captain.”
“Aura,” Easton said, and my name in his mouth scraped across every place I had tried to heal wrong.
“No.” I lifted my chin. “You don’t get my name soft after that.”
His mouth closed.
Bliss’s eyes filled behind the bar, but she didn’t interfere.
Cade looked like he wanted to drag Easton outside by the back of his jacket.
Ryan’s face was unreadable except for the muscle ticking in his jaw, and Charm stood beside me holding two baskets of wings like she would throw them at the first man who breathed wrong.
I turned toward Bliss. “I’ll come Friday.”
Her eyebrows pulled together. “You don’t have to decide right now.”
“I just did.”
Easton went still.
I looked at him because I wanted him to hear every word and hate all of them.
“I’ll be there for Cade’s first game back.
I’ll be there for Briggs and Rider and the rest of the Fury.
I’ll be there because my best friends asked me to sit beside them and because I support the team even when its captain acts like pain gave him an exemption to be cruel. ”
His eyes burned into mine.
I smiled, and this time there was nothing pretty in it. “You don’t get to decide if or when I disappear.”
For a long second, Easton didn’t move. The bar roared around us, but the space between us stayed silent, charged, and ruined.
Then he picked up his water, took one sip, and set the glass down with careful control.
“I never said I wanted you gone, Clarke.”
The words hit too softly for the damage they did. My throat tightened, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing it. “No. You just treat me like I am.”
I walked away before he could answer, before Bliss could stop me, before Charm could follow, and before the shaking in my hands became something everyone could see.
The kitchen doors swung open hard beneath my palm, heat and fryer smoke rushing over me as I stepped into the narrow back hallway and pressed one hand against the cool metal shelf beside the walk-in.
I stood there until my breathing steadied, the ache in my chest stopped trying to climb out of my mouth, and the girl who had once loved Easton enough to almost be brave crawled back inside where she belonged.
Then I wiped beneath my eyes with the heel of my hand, checked that my mascara had not betrayed me, and went back into the noise.
Because I was Aura.
I didn’t disappear just because a man finally saw what damage I carried.