And I wait.
Not long—not long at all—for the headlights to flash in my rearview, for the car to pull to a stop behind me.
I wait until I’m sure it’s him before I open my door and climb out.
Normally, I wait for him to speak, to approach, to bridge the gap, ease the edges of my fear so I can talk to him without feeling like an idiot…or like a woman.
One of those is scarier than the other.
Any guesses which?
Because the thought of being a woman again—not a little sister, not a friend, not a teacher…a woman.
That’s scary, a role I haven’t been able to accept.
But something changed tonight.
Maybe it’s that I’m tired, that I don’t want to be here on the side of the road.
Maybe it’s that I touched him.
My pulse speeds at the memory of how the roughness of the bristles on his jaw felt on my fingertips, how the heat in his eyes both rubbed over my skin like sandpaper and set every nerve on fire, making me yearn for so much more.
How, for a second there, I was a woman again.
So maybe…it’s that I walked away from him hoping I would find myself in this exact spot.
With him.
Not knowing—okay, or maybe not wanting to accept—which is the truth has me forgetting to be nervous.
I plunk my hands on my hips and scowl at Colt as he walks over to me. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
His steps hitch but he recovers quickly. “Car trouble?” he asks, ignoring the assertion.
Or at least I think he’s going to.
But instead of going to the trunk, waiting for me to pop it because he knows exactly where I keep my spare tire, he pauses a couple of feet away. “And I don’t think you’re stupid, baby.”
Heat and fear.
Need and terror.
He doesn’t touch me, doesn’t box me in.
But he does keep looking at me and here, under the star-filled sky, the safety of the shadows, the quiet of the darkened world, I find I can look at him right back. At least until something ripples through his expression, a devastation that’s so complete, so vast, it feels like a knife has been plunged into my stomach and yanked up, tearing me wide open.
Or maybe that’s his quiet words.
“You’re scared of me.”
Not a question.
A fact.
“Yes.”
More devastation that wounds me as much as I’ve just wounded him.
