“I just saw you two hours ago, Mike,” Violet laughed.
“Two hours too long,” Mikey said. “Jessie, did you know Violet and Colton used to?—”
Violet pushed a belabored sigh through her upturned lips and closed her eyes.
“Oops!” Jessie cut him off and tossed back the rest of her drink. “Looks like I need another drink. Let’s go to the bar.”
Mikey hesitated until Jessie tugged his arm with pleading eyes. He grumbled as they walked away, “Why’d you slam your drink?”
With a shallow breath, my focus turned to Violet. She lifted her palms to ask for a hug, one hand threaded around a white wine glass. Her smile sent an ache to my chest. She was nervous. “Hi.”
I opened my arms and stepped toward her. “Hey, Vi.”
I told myself I’d be cool when I saw her. I said I wouldn’t immediately launch into some campaign to get her back into my life. Because even though she hurt me all those years ago, she was the one I compared everyone else to. I didn’t go for the whole playboy lifestyle that sometimes comes with my profession, preferring to sink into deeper relationships. But none of the relationships after Violet felt as satisfying. Was that because I was holding back and protecting myself from getting hurt, or because those women just weren’t the right ones?
It didn’t matter, because the one I never forgot was right here. For the first time since that one awful night, I folded Violet into my arms.
It’s fascinating what my body remembered. How she fit. How she smelled, a new perfume but still her skin’s familiar scent. How my hand was too big for the space between her shoulder blades when we hugged, but I could press my middle finger in to touch her spine anyway. I clamped my jaw to keep from planting a kiss somewhere I shouldn’t, a place I didn’t have a right to anymore.
Violet took that right from me.
The room was loud, but all I heard was her soft, nervous laugh.
It had been years. A whole lot of years.
As much as I tried to forget, tried to move on, I remembered everything about her. It wasn’t fair. Soul-crushing and breath-stealing.
I squeezed one bonus time and stepped back, holding her smooth elbows in my hands for a moment before I let her go. Of course, she would be the kind of person to moisturize their elbows. “You look good, Vi.”
She tipped her head to the side and twisted her lips. “You do too, Colt.”
Remember, Colton. She left you. She broke you. You can’t beg for anything. You don’t even want to. Have some dignity.
I shoved my hand in my pocket to keep from lacing my fingers with hers. I busied my other hand with lifting my whiskey tumbler, but Vi didn’t miss a beat. She rushed to clink her glass to mine. I held her gaze as we sipped, disappointed when she broke it.
“So, give me the rundown,” she said. “What are you doing? Where are you?”
She hadn’t looked me up? Hadn’t asked Kitty where I was, what I was doing, whether I was single? I felt like the wind got knocked out of me.
I cleared my throat. “I’m, uh, in Ohio. Columbus. Hockey still.”
Violet smiled and a shot of warmth ran through me. “Good on you. You like it?”
“As much as always. A few teeth shy of when you last knew me, though.” I ran my tongue over the teeth in question, filled in with prosthetics for the moment.
“Oh, no, they finally got your teeth,” she moaned. “You were on such a good streak of keeping them all.”
I leaned in. “Yeah, but now I have the party trick that I can take my teeth out. Want me to show you?”
“No!” she hissed. She grabbed my wrist to stop my hand, eyes sparkling. “I know this room is full of hockey boys, but please keep your teeth in. The resort might ask us to leave.”
“What about you? Lose any teeth? Cure cancer?”
Violet bobbed her head. “Still have all my teeth, and I have yet to cure cancer. But I’m still in Boston studying cancer.”
My gaze flicked over her, looking for some indication of how she felt about it. “PhD? MD?”
“PhD.”
