Chapter Twenty
Raff
How the hell was I expected to go on acting normal when my entire fucking world felt like it’d been turned upside down and shaken?
Lula’s gaze watched her chopsticks as she dipped her bite of sushi into the soy sauce.
And me? I watched her face, wondering how the fuck she’d gone from so open and sweet and soft with me to completely shut down so quickly.
I mean, I knew that had been the risk. It was why I’d been keeping her at arm’s length even though I knew how much her attraction had grown. I wanted her to get to a point where she couldn’t just blame desire for her feelings toward me.
I guess I’d overestimated how close we’d gotten on an emotional level.
I didn’t know how much until she paused between bites to look past me and out the windows.
“I’m going to see if I can get a flight back to California tomorrow.”
My stomach bottomed out.
I sat back, putting down my chopsticks as the sushi rolled and sloshed around in my stomach.
I drew in a slow breath and held it until it burned. “Okay.”
“Okay?” she asked, brows lowering.
Was she expecting a fight?
Lord knew I wanted to. Fight. For her. But I also knew her well enough to know that she would only pull further away if I did that.
“Might not be able to get an ideal time or seat, but I’m sure you can find a ticket back home. You’re going to need a ride on the other end, though.”
“Did you have other plans for us?”
Oh, I had plans. Fifty years of them. But I damn sure couldn’t tell her that.
“Nothing special.” Except fucking her up and down the walls and through the floor.
“Good. I won’t be missing out on anything then,” she said, a false cheeriness in her voice that only made my stomach twist again.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that. You’ll be missing out on my devastatingly handsome face and charming personality.”
“A real loss,” she said, and for just a second, her real smile shone through.
“When we get back to the hotel, I’ll book you a flight. You can figure out everything you need on the other end.”
“Sounds good,” she said, voice a little tight. “I’m done here, if you are.”
She’d only touched about half of her food. I’d eaten even less. But I asked for a check and a box, paid, handed off the food to an unhoused man down the block, then led Lula back into the penthouse.
I lost her to her computer then. Presumably to get a ride squared away once I told her what time she would be landing in California. But she must have switched to work after that, because she had laser focus as she worked.
Not having anything to do myself, I made my way into my room, toed off my shoes, and dropped into bed, hoping to catch a nap.
The only problem?
My bed smelled like her.
The scent brought all the memories of her: over me, under me, moaning for me, crying out my name.
“Fuck,” I sighed, throwing my arm across my eyes and trying to think of anything else.
It was useless.
What could I expect when the thing I’d been fantasizing about for years became a reality? And it not only lived up to, but surpassed those fantasies?
“Ugh,” I grumbled, folding up, then climbing off the bed.
I grabbed some fresh clothes and made my way to the bathroom, keeping the water cool, then stepping under the spray.
Standing there, I cranked it colder and colder each time a thought of her popped up.
It wasn’t long, though, before there was no way to make it colder.
And my mind was still riddled with thoughts of her.
Giving up, I toweled off and climbed out before pulling on some fresh clothes.
When I made my way back out, Lula was still working on her laptop as the penthouse went dark around her.
I walked around, flicking on the lights.
The hotel suite was enormous, but I felt like it was packed to the rafters with everything neither of us was willing to say.
Lula, because she was afraid of her own feelings and how they didn’t fit in with her carefully constructed plans.
Me, because I was afraid of giving her anything she could use as an excuse to keep me at arm’s length.
So I sat down on one of the dining chairs, texting my brother until, eventually, Lula broke the silence.
“What time is my flight tomorrow?”
“One.”
“So, I should get there at around eleven to go through security,” she said, mostly talking to herself.
Her flight was actually at eleven-thirty. At a private airport. One last treat of luxury before she went back to living at Jack’s motel and eating sad grocery store prepared foods and drinking leftover coffee.
It was petty and ugly of me, but some part of me hoped that she would think of me each time—remembering the trips to cool little coffee shops or risking our gastrointestinal health at some sketchy-looking roadside food places that turned out to be incredible.
There was that old saying about absence and the heart growing fonder that I was choosing to put some faith to rest in. Maybe, as much as I hated it now that I knew how good it was to be together, what we needed was time apart. To miss us. To realize how good it actually was.
That said, I was planning a route back to Shady Valley that wouldn’t take as long, while still managing to get some of the guns I promised Slash.
I figured I could hit up three decent sales and knock out ten-hour driving days, putting me back in Shady Valley in roughly three days instead of five or six.
It wasn’t a long time, but it might be long enough for Lula to miss me.
Besides, I had to have a big sit-down with the boss man to talk about everything that had gone down. And deal with whatever anger he was going to have toward me about it. Not to mention the lecture I was going to get from my brother about keeping shit from him.
But all that would be worth it if I finally got Lula to realize that, while it might not look like it on the surface, we did fit.
“I think I’m going to go take a shower,” she said, closing her laptop.
“Okay.”
She paused as she got to her feet, and I could feel the look she shot at me—the kind with pinched-brow confusion.
Because I never passed up on an opportunity to say something cheesy about asking if that was an invitation or that we should be mindful of water restrictions and bathe together.
I just didn’t have it in me to pretend right then that I wasn’t upset about the distance, that I wasn’t worried about the future.
At some point, she packed up what was left of her things hanging around, then went to her room. Neither of us seemed inclined to order dinner, just go off to our separate spaces and overthink everything.
Or, at least, that was what I did.
I dropped into bed eventually but maybe only got a broken hour or so of sleep before the sun was streaming through the windows, dragging me up with sawdust-dry eyes and a heavy feeling in my chest that I was trying to ignore.
Everything was still quiet in Lula’s room, so I took a quick shower, got dressed, and headed out to grab breakfast and the biggest coffees I could find for each of us.
By the time I got back to the suite, I could hear her moving around in her room and smelled the scent of her body wash wafting through the penthouse from her shower.
When she emerged, she was back in her boss-bitch mode: hair in a slick back, light makeup, and one of those sexy librarian dresses she always wore to work—all skin-tight and hugging every curve, but with a modest bodice and a hemline that cut just above her knees.
I loved every version of Lula I’d met. But the more I got to know her, the more I saw that the person she projected herself as in Shady Valley was more of a persona than who she truly was.
She wanted to be seen as confident, competent, independent, and successful.
And she was all those things. But she was so much more too.
It was a real shame that she didn’t let anyone see that.
“Went out to grab breakfast,” I explained, like I wasn’t already spreading out the evidence.
“I figured. Oh, thank God,” she said, lunging for the coffee when I held it out to her.
“Didn’t sleep well?” I asked, forcing my face to stay passive when what I wanted was to smirk because I knew her bed smelled like me, that there was no way she’d rested there all night and hadn’t thought about me. About us.
“Not really, no. You look rough too.”
“Must’ve been something in the air.”
For a second, I saw something soft flash across her gaze, but she banked it down too fast to be sure.
We spent breakfast in painfully awkward silence, each of us trying a few times to bat some topic of conversation out, but the other seeming incapable of doing anything but strike out. Until, eventually, we just gave up and ate, cleaned up, then went to get our things.
“Are you excited to be back on the road again?” Lula asked as we climbed in the back of the town car Teddy sent, the privacy partition already up.
Thirty-something hours by myself with nothing to do but remember how much nicer it was to have her at my side, how amazing it felt to have her over me, under me, crying out for me? Yeah, I was really fucking jazzed up about that.
“Eh. This is the work part,” I said, shrugging it off. The movement made me frustratingly aware of how close we were sitting, how her soft skin brushed against my arm.
“I thought you liked your work.”
“Sometimes.”
I saw in my periphery the way she glanced at me, how her brows furrowed. She was used to the fun, light, easygoing side of me. The one who could twist even the most serious situations into something funny.
But like her, I had layers. And sometimes they weren’t as easy to hide under that fun-loving persona.
When I was about to say goodbye to the woman I’d been in love with for years, but just got to have for a few precious moments, only to get it ripped away right after, yeah, that was one of those times.
I saw her open and close her mouth twice before she finally found her voice. “Are you mad at me?”
I sucked in a deep breath, trying to choose my words carefully because I knew how much those cost her to say.