Chapter Two
Spencer
“Hang on!” I shouted from my kitchen, setting another muffin pan of strawberry cupcakes carefully on the cooling rack. Flour dusted my forearms like I’d been tossing it around instead of baking with it.
Wiping my hands on the dish towel slung over my shoulder, I navigated the obstacle course of my apartment—shoes I’d kicked off by the couch, a stack of library books I kept meaning to return, and the laundry basket I’d been constantly stepping over.
After three days of getting in my way, it was now considered furniture..
My apartment was small. A studio, technically, though the landlord had called it a “junior one-bedroom” with a straight face.
The kitchenette bled into the living room, which bled into the sleeping area, which was just a mattress on a platform frame pushed against the far wall.
Everything I owned fit in four hundred square feet, and most of it was secondhand.
But it was mine. Every scratched surface, every drafty window, every piece of chipped paint. Mine.
The knocking came again. Impatient. Two sharp raps followed by a pause then a third, like a signature.
My hand froze on the deadbolt.
I knew that knock.
It was a sound I never thought I would hear again.
I just stood there, my hand on the knob, while feeling my home shrink around me. All of it suddenly felt like a stage I’d built for a version of myself that was about to get dismantled.
“Spence.” The voice came through the door, slightly muffled but unmistakable. “I know you’re home. I can smell your baking from the parking lot.”
Ken.
My ex-nightmare. The man who’d spent two years convincing me I was the problem and then another six months after the breakup convincing me he was the solution.
I pressed my forehead against the cool wood of the door, praying he would turn around and leave, but he never did.
“Come on, babe. Five minutes.” His voice grew soft and sweet, the one he’d learned how to weaponize against me. “I just want to talk.”
Five minutes that would end with me apologizing for something I hadn’t done and him leaving with a piece of me I couldn’t get back.
I pulled the dish towel off my shoulder and wrung it in my hands, my body remembering what happened when he didn’t get his way.
“I’m busy, Ken.”
“You’re baking.” A soft laugh through the door. “That’s not busy, that’s avoidance. You always bake when you’re stressed.”
The fucking audacity. Ken had been the reason behind my anxiety the entire time we were dating. The cupcakes were stress cupcakes. The muffins I’d made yesterday were stress muffins. The banana bread currently in the freezer contained enough stress carbs to feed a small country.
I’d been a hot mess since a certain blue-eyed biker had walked into The Cat Nap three days ago and rearranged my nervous system. I didn’t even know Crowbar, but here I was, stress baking because I couldn’t stop thinking about storm-cloud blue eyes.
Or that beard.
Those lips.
Or the quiet laugh that had made my stomach drop, then lift, then fill with something hot and needy.
I forced away the thought before I ended up baking half a dozen pies.
“Spencer.” Ken’s tone shifted, becoming even softer than before. “Please. I drove forty minutes.”
“Nobody asked you to do that.”
“I know. I wanted to.” A pause. “I miss you.”
Three manipulative words that he knew hit me in the exact spot where my armor was thinnest. I’d spent twenty-three years building walls out of sarcasm and deflection, yet Ken had found the one crack in my armor and poured himself through it every single time.
My hand rested on the deadbolt, barely registering the cold metal as my brain warred with itself.
Don’t open it. You know how this goes. He shows up, he’s charming, he says everything right, and you spend the next three weeks untangling the mess he left inside your head.
But what if he actually changed this time? What if you’re being unfair?
Ken never had to break down the door. He just had to make me feel guilty enough to open it.
I turned the deadbolt and swung the door open.
There he stood. Six feet of conventionally handsome, dark hair styled just so, with a jawline that belonged on a cologne ad. Nothing like the rough angle of Biker’s.
Wonder how Noodles is doing.
Ken was wearing the soft grey Henley I’d bought him two Christmases ago, which was a choice so calculated it made my teeth grind. His warm smile reached his hazel eyes. It appeared genuine, but I was well acquainted with the monster lurking behind them.
“Hey.” He said it like he was genuinely glad to see me. I saw through the act. Ken wanted something and was pouring on the charm.
His hands were tucked casually inside his pockets, posture carefully nonthreatening. “Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Spence—”
I moved to close the door, but his hand caught the edge, applying just enough pressure to hold it open. I am such a fucking idiot.
“Five minutes.” He gave me that wounded look that used to gut me. “That’s all I’m asking. After that, if you still want me gone, I’ll leave.”
“I wanted you gone eight months ago. The restraining order was pretty clear on that. You’re not allowed to be here.”
Something flickered behind his expression, but vanished too fast for me to read. “The order expired yesterday.”
Christ. He’d been counting the days, waiting for the legal barrier to dissolve so he could show up at my door. And I’d been stupid enough to open it.
Because I’d allowed my loneliness to override my survival instincts. That’s what they would etch on my headstone. Here lies Spencer Hayes. Zero survival instincts. Even less common sense. General Patton calls him an asshole in his hour-long eulogy. The fish honor Spencer with a one-bubble salute.
Get out of your head and pay attention to the active threat standing right in front of you.
“That doesn’t mean the invitation renewed.” My voice held steady. I was proud of that. But internally, I was shaking like crazy.
“I know.” He held up both hands, palms out. I’d seen those hands put a hole in my wall. I’d felt them grip my arm hard enough to leave finger-shaped bruises behind. The gesture meant nothing. “I’m not here to cause problems.”
If he wasn’t, he would’ve walked away when I tried to close the door, not force me to keep it open.
I leaned against the doorframe, blocking the entrance with my body. Not that I could physically stop him if he decided to push past me. Ken had six inches and seventy pounds on me. But the doorframe was mine, and I planted myself in it like a fence post.
His jaw worked. I watched the muscle jump, the telltale sign I was walking a very thin line. In the old days, that look would’ve sent me backpedaling, softening, rewording everything until the sharp edges were sanded down.
We weren’t in the old days anymore.
“You look good,” he said, switching tactics with the smoothness of someone changing lanes on an empty highway. His eyes dropped to the flour on my arms, the frosting on my chin. “Tell me what has you baking.”
Storm-cloud blue eyes surfaced in my mind. The leather. The toothpick. Noodles playing in a metal band. I’m not most people. An ache started in my chest.
“Work?” Ken smiled like we were old friends catching up. Like the last time we’d been in the same room hadn’t ended with me locked in a bathroom calling 911 with a split lip and broken arm. “Remember that time you made four batches before your nursing exam?”
An exam I’d failed because of him.
He always remembered the good parts, polished them up, presented them like evidence that what we’d had was worth saving.
He never remembered the parts that came after—the fight about the dishes that turned into a fight about my friends that turned into his hand around my throat while he explained, very calmly, very reasonably, why I was the problem.
“Ken.” I said his name like a period at the end of a sentence. “I’m not doing this.”
“Doing what? Having a conversation?” He tilted his head, and the hallway light caught his eyes in a way that would’ve made nineteen-year-old Spencer weak in the knees.
Twenty-four-year-old Spencer had sturdier knees.
Still a bit shaky maybe, but they knew when to lock.
“We were together for almost three years. I think that earns me five goddamn minutes.”
“It earned you a court date and mandatory anger management counseling, which you never attended.”
His hand moved fast, gripping my arm and yanking it so hard, pain screamed down my left side, making me cry out. “You never did know when to shut your fucking mouth.”
A door slammed shut down the hallway. Ken turned to look. I used the distraction to yank my arm free and do the same, quickly securing the locks. I was shaking so badly I should’ve fallen part. My arm throbbed, and when I tried to lift it, a whimper escaped.
“This isn’t over, Spence,” Ken said from the other side. “We promised to be together forever. I’m holding you to that.”
I grabbed my phone from my back pocket and called the cops as I listened to his receding footsteps, terrified he wouldn’t stop until I was dead.