Chapter 10
TEN
Dakota
The shower didn’t work. I hadn’t expected it to, but I’d secretly hoped that by washing Roe’s scent off my skin and scrubbing his taste from my mouth that I could easily forget my massive lapse in sound judgement.
That wasn’t the case, however, and as soon as I opened the bathroom door, the smell of sex still lingered heavy in the air, bringing everything back in technicolor.
Wrapped in nothing but a towel, my hair still dripping water down my back, I moved through the room, opening the windows to air the space out, before returning to the bathroom.
I ran the brush through my hair with more force than necessary, but the agitation that had been riding my shoulders since Roe left had only grown stronger.
I twisted my damp locks into a bun on the top of my head and secured it with a clip, then I took the little handheld mirror from my makeup kit and lifted it as I turned to put my back to the bathroom mirror.
Then I did something I hadn’t done in years.
I looked at the ugly rose that marred my skin.
The very one I’d been able to forget existed. At least until Roe reminded me.
I hated that stupid rose.
Not because it was done poorly. The artist that did it might not have had the same skill as the men in my father’s club who tattooed, but he’d still done a decent job. I hated it because of what it represented.
I’d still been in the midst of the honeymoon phase of my relationship with Adam when I confessed to him late one night what the words on the back of my neck meant.
I should have known by his reaction that he was all sorts of wrong for me, but I’d stupidly let myself think that the jealousy and possessiveness that followed was a good thing.
I convinced myself that it meant he was passionate about it.
That he really did love me as much as he always insisted when he said he couldn’t live without me.
Instead of seeing all of those for the red flags they really represented.
After months of him pushing and pushing, I added to the giant, steaming pile of stupid decisions by letting him convince me to cover the tattoo that had once represented everything to me.
I just couldn’t take hearing, “you’d get rid of it if you really loved me as much as I love you,” once more time.
And I was just desperate enough to make Adam happy that I allowed him to choose the tattoo that would cover it.
“I think you should get this one,” Adam said as he pointed at the red rose in full bloom, thorns protruding from the clipped stem still attached. “You love roses, Koty, baby.”
I didn’t, actually. I wasn’t a fan of cut flowers in general—it never failed that they’d die too quickly, leaving me a little melancholy as I thew them out.
I much preferred living plants. But roses, especially red ones, were my least favorite.
And I was even less of a fan of ‘Koty’, the nickname he’d christened me with.
Hindsight was twenty-twenty, as people loved to say, and it was hard not to hate myself for not seeing all the signs in the beginning, for falling for Adam’s shit. I just hadn’t seen it while I was in the thick of it.
I let out a weary sigh, dropping the arm that was holding the mirror, as Roe’s words from earlier came back to me.
“You think that fucking rose on your back means I’m gone, you’re dead wrong, baby. You might have tried to erase me, but I’m still there, underneath. All you managed to do was hide me.”
God, I hated how right he was. Those six words still tingled beneath the rose like phantom limb pain. Especially now.
Self-hatred surged through me, heating my insides like a match being held to a flame.
Tossing the hand mirror back into my open toiletry bag, I stomped back into the room and started jerked drawers open, angrily yanking on a pair of cotton shorts and a t-shirt.
Then I went about stripping the sheets off the bed like the Egyptian cotton had personally offended me.
With a grunt, I bundled up all the linens and slid my feet into the flipflops beside the door before storming off toward the laundry room.
I was determined to wipe every single trace of Roe from my room at the Inn, and that required fresh sheets.
After stuffing everything into one of the washing machines, I added soap, hit the correct buttons, and slammed the lid closed with finality.
Please let that work. I sent my plea out into the universe as I stepped back out into the fresh air and sucked in a much-needed breath.
For the first time since Roe showed up at my door, I realized the sun had fully set at some point, and a wave of calm washed over me as I dropped my head back to take in the sky full of stars.
Each one like a paint speck on a midnight canvass.
How long had it been since I lost myself looking up at the stars?
That was another thing that Adam had taken from me, calling my love of stargazing childish.
He didn’t understand how I could find enjoyment in laying outside and staring up at the dark sky for hours.
Then again, Adam had never been able to be still for very long, always anxious or agitated about something, his mind constantly spinning so fast that silence and stillness made his skin crawl.
He hid it all behind the guise of “looking out for me” claiming that it wasn’t safe for me to spend hours on end out in the dark. And just like everything else good in my life I managed to find for myself after leaving Ashland, I let him take it away.
Truth was, I made the mistake once of mentioning that Roe used to lay at my side and stargaze with me until the sun finally started to rise and made the blinking white specks impossible to see.
That was why he didn’t like it and why he was so determined to take it away from me.
Anything and everything that had to do with Roe was a sensitive subject for Adam.
He couldn’t stand that I’d been in love before meeting him.
One night, after yet another fight about my past relationships, I finally had enough and snapped back that we’d both had lives before each other and that he wasn’t being fair trying to get me to erase every trace of my past. That was the first time he hit me, and sadly, it was far from the last.
But I was done letting that bastard control my life, and I was taking back something that had once brought me joy.
Instead of heading back to my room, I veered off to the open field behind the inn.
It was more like a meadow, filled with pops of wildflowers in all colors that bloomed beautifully during the daytime.
The blades of grass tickled the sides of my feet not protected by my flipflops as I moved a few yards further from the inn’s blacktop parking lot, and lay down in the middle of the meadow.
Redbud Inn was on the outskirts of Redemption, just far enough from the town lights that the stars were easy to see.
I felt my breath leave me on a relieved whoosh as I rested back in the thick green grass.
Lifting my hand and closing one eye, I did what I used to do as a kid and traced the different constellations I could see with the naked eye.
I’d always wanted a telescope so I could explore further than the eye could see, but by the time I’d saved enough for a good one, I’d started dating Adam, and he convinced me it was a useless expense.
I traced Ursa Major and Minor, then Draco before moving on to my favorite, Cassiopia who hovered opposite the Big Dipper.
Something about the Greek myth of Cassiopia and her daughter Andromeda had always tugged at me.
The story went that, Cassiopea, the vain queen of Aethiopia, bragged that she and her daughter were more beautiful than the sea nymphs who served Poseidon.
As punishment for her boastfulness, Poseidon sent a sea flood, along with a monster named Cetus to destroy Aethiopia.
According to the oracle the king and queen consulted, the only wat to save their kingdom was to sacrifice Andromeda to Cetus.
In the end, Perseus swooped in and saved Andromeda, but Poseidon never got over Cassiopeia’s slight.
Something about the so called lesson of that fable never sat right with me, and as I got older I studied up more on the old myths.
I discovered that Greek mythology loved to make the females into the villains, and made the men into the big, strong heroes that saved the poor ladyfolk from their own self-destruction.
I called bullshit, personally, and it only made me love Cassiopea that much more, because there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with a woman knowing her worth and raising her daughter to do the same.
Though history was filled to the brim with cautionary tales just like that that.
I was convinced were created with no other purpose than to keep women down.
I chose to think of Cassiopea and Andromeda as confident, strong, self-assured women who were sick of taking shit from men. I could relate.
The crunch of footsteps on the grass and leaves pulled me back into the present just as a shadowed figure leaned over me, blotting out the stars in the shape of a person’s silhouette.
“You aren’t out here having a stroke, are you?”
Recognizing the voice I smiled, letting out a little giggle as I lowered my arm back down to my side. “No stroke. I’m just tracing constellations.”
“Oh, that sounds fun. I’ve never done that before,” Poppy Hyland, the owner of the inn, stated as she moved to my side. “Mind if I join you? Maybe you can point them out to me. I’ve never been able to spot them on my own. Then again, I’ve never been sure what I was looking for.”