Chapter 4 A Responsible Adult Would’ve Said No #4
But before I can ask what he means, he’s kissing me, and I forget everything except the taste of coffee on his lips and the way his hands feel like home.
The morning it all ends starts exactly like every other morning.
Kade wakes before me and orders room service while I steal five more minutes of sleep in sheets that smell like him.
We eat strawberries and drink coffee that costs twenty dollars a cup because we can.
Because in this bubble we’ve created, consequences don’t exist.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks, same as always.
“Anywhere with you,” I answer, same as always.
His motorcycle purrs to life in the hotel’s circular drive. I climb on behind him, my arms around his waist, my pink heels hooked behind his calves. The familiar position feels like putting on my favorite sweater.
We take our usual route toward Red Rock, but something’s different today. Kade’s shoulders are tense beneath my hands. He keeps checking his mirrors like he’s looking for something specific.
“Everything okay?” I ask when we stop at a red light.
“Fine.”
But his voice carries an edge I’ve never heard before.
The tunnel is part of our regular route. Nothing special about it, just a stretch of highway that cuts through rock on the way to our favorite breakfast spot. We’ve driven through it plenty of times.
Today feels different.
Kade accelerates harder than usual. The speedometer climbs past eighty, past ninety, past safe. I tighten my grip around his waist but don’t ask him to slow down. Whatever’s got him spooked, he knows better than I do how to handle it.
That’s when I see the car in his mirror.
Black sedan, tinted windows, gaining on us fast. Too fast. Moving with purpose rather than coincidence.
“Kade—”
“Hold on.”
He drops into a lower gear and the bike shoots forward like a bullet. My stomach drops as we weave around cars that blur into streaks of color. The tunnel walls flash past in gray concrete smears.
The sedan matches our speed. Closes the distance.
And then it doesn’t just follow us.
It aims for us.
The impact comes from the side. Metal against metal, physics and momentum and the cruel mathematics of force. The bike goes sideways, and my world becomes a kaleidoscope of spinning concrete and chrome and sky.
Time stretches like taffy. I’m flying through air that tastes like burned rubber and gasoline.
My mind, crystal clear despite the chaos, catalogs everything with weird detachment.
The way my pink heels come off my feet. How my wedding ring catches sunlight as my hand reaches for something to grab.
The sound Kade makes when he hits the guardrail.
This might be it, I think with strange calm. This might be how it ends.
But you know what? If this is how I die, at least I lived.
Really lived. Four weeks of pure possibility and pleasure and love so intense it felt like drowning in champagne.
Most people never get that. Most people spend their whole lives waiting for something half as real as what Kade and I found in a casino at two in the morning.
The concrete rises to meet me, and everything goes black.
The dream is over.
Time to wake up.
Except waking up is always the worst part.
Because for that moment when I’m suspended between sleep and reality, I forget.
I forget what happened after. I forget about waking up in a hospital to find my husband gone.
I forget about the looks of pity that Raven gave me at my bedside when I tried to tell her that No!
I got married! He was real! I forget about how when I finally was discharged, the nurse gave me a ziplock bag of everything that was recovered from the accident, and down at the bottom of it, scratched and bloody, was his ring.
My ring. I forget what it felt like to put it on, just one last time.
To feel the weight of it against my finger.
How in that moment, instead of it making me feel safe and loved, it just made me feel hollow.
And then it all rushes back, and the pain of it is almost blinding.
My eyes flutter open, and I’m staring at the ceiling of my apartment.
I’m not on my bed. I never am when I wake up from this dream.
The floor is hard beneath me, and my shoulder aches where I must have landed.
It’d been so long since I dreamed this dream.
So why return now? Did it have something to do with talking to Chad?
I turn my head to see the black Versace shoebox tucked under my bed.
The gold lettering peeks out from the layer of dust on top of it.
Everything I have from that night is in that box.
Not the shoes; those were never recovered.
But receipts, my marriage license, the ring.
Everything that proved to me that, yes, it was real, if only for a moment.
For a second, I reach for it, but as my fingers brush the lid, I recoil.
I refuse to go back down this road. The one that ends in heartbreak and sobbing and far too much self-pity. I push myself up off the floor and shake the cold sweat from my body.
I am Amanda Bennett.
And I don’t cry over men.