“I’m very talented,” I say, and hear how tired I sound.
Footsteps scrape at the other end of the hall. “East.” Nash’s voice. Not a command. A lifeline.
I don’t look away from her. “Yeah.”
“You’re done out there,” he says, and it isn’t a question.
I pull back first. The air between us cools by degrees; losing her heat is an immediate ache. “Enjoy your night,” I tell her, and the words taste wrong. “Frankie’s inside.”
Darla’s chin lifts. The guard goes back up. “I know exactly where she is.”
I want to tell you I know exactly where you are and have known since we were eighteen, stupid, and laughing in the middle of a road. But I don’t.
I step away and hold the door. Nash stands just inside, one palm on the frame, unblinking. He smells of gun oil and soap, his gaze fixed on me, not her, as we pass. He assesses the damage as if conducting an inventory.
“Enough,” he murmurs when we’re side by side again.
“Wasn’t starting anything,” I lie.
He doesn’t bother with a reply. His hand finds the back of my neck for a second, a steady weight. It’s not comfort. It's a correction. The only kind I’ll take from him. I’ll stand here ‘til the ground stops tilting.
I walk straight to the nearest pool table, needing the familiar weight of a cue in my hand. My palm is still raw from the brick. My body is still strung tight with things I don’t let myself touch. Across the room, Frankie has Darla at a high-top. Frankie says something that makes Darla roll her eyes and almost smile for real. It hits harder than anything I drank tonight.
“She’s not yours,” Nash says from beside me, reading me like a damn book.
“I know,” I say.
“So stop acting like she is.”
I break the rack, sending balls scattering across the felt. A chaotic, uncontrolled mess that feels a lot like the inside of my head. I line up a shot, my hand resting on the green felt of the table, and I hold still, waiting for the slight tremor in my fingers to stop. It doesn’t.
“I promised him,” I say, the words so quiet I’m not sure they leave my mouth.
Nash hears it anyway. “Then keep it without burning down the room.”
His gaze drops pointedly to my hand, to the tremor I can’t seem to control. He lets out a short snort, the closest thing he gives to a laugh.
“And you can start by trying harder,” he adds, his voice a low, dry rumble.
The words are a direct hit, a blunt and accurate assessment of the mess I’m in. I line up the shot on a stray ball. The angle is there, clean and stupid. It fixes nothing.
My promise to him and my wanting of her used to be two separate things, a line I could walk. Turns out they grew from the same soil—grief doesn’t let go; it just changes shape. But tonight, standing in that alley, the line blurred. Now they feel like the same damn thing: a single, relentless pull toward a woman I can’t have. And I’m not sure which one is going to tear me apart first.
Chapter 6
Darla
Thebackdoorclicksshut, a sound of finality that echoes in the sudden, suffocating quiet of the alley. I’m left standing with my back pressed against the rough brick, watching them go. East doesn’t look back. Every step he takes feels like a subtraction, like he’s peeling another layer off me until I’m raw and see-through. The solid set of his shoulders is a wall, a clear and deliberate rejection that makes my chest ache. Nash walks beside him, a silent shadow, then they’re gone, swallowed by the noise and smoke of the clubhouse.
I stay where I am, frozen. The cool night air feels thin and sharp in my lungs. The brick is cold against my back where his body heat used to be, a phantom warmth that my skin stillcraves. If I close my eyes, I swear I can still feel him there—the heat, the pulse, the almost. My lips still tingle from the ghost of his breath, from the promise of a kiss he snatched away at the last second. The memory of his eyes, dark and warring with a grief I know so well, is a brand on my mind.I shouldn’t want to kiss you, but I do.
My breath hitches. Liar. He pulled back. He always pulls back.
I knew this would happen. I shouldn’t have come. But Frankie had insisted, with that look in her eye, the one that says her ‘senses’ told her I had to be here, and you don’t argue with Frankie’s senses. She knew this was a possibility, a risk. Coming here, to his world, meant walking that same tightrope over the chasm of our shared past. It meant being near him again. And being near him has always been a dangerous, beautiful, impossible thing.
It feels just like prom night. The silence presses so hard it hums. It’s too easy to fall into memory when the present hurts this much. The memory crashes over me, unbidden and sharp.
The air back then didn't smell like damp earth and stale beer; it smelled of cheap hairspray and the sweet, cloying scent of gardenias from my corsage. We had slipped out the side door of the gym, away from the pulsing music and the suffocating heat of the dance floor. East was complaining about his tie, his fingers fumbling with the knot.
