Corey.
“I heard something happened, and I don’t know what, but I’m sorry it did. I also know I fucked up in putting you through everything with us. Hope things are as well as can be.”
I read that message probably a half-dozen times. At first, I felt shock. Then I felt anger. Then I felt relief. Then I felt…hope?
I tried to pick those apart one by one. So Corey, after all these years, still had my phone number? He’d never deleted it…maybe I’d misread him wrong? No, that couldn’t have been the case, which explained the anger.
How fucking dare he reach out to me right now. I presumed that Sam had told him, but how fucking dare he have the gall, after everything that had happened, to reach out to me and offer his support like nothing had ever happened between us. Had he not forgotten all the stalking? The taunting? The driving me out of Arizona? Was that just water under the bridge to him? Because while time had helped heal the wound, that didn’t mean the scar had vanished. It never would, probably.
But I was still standing, and that explained the relief. Relief that, even after all of that hell we’d gone through—no, that he had put me through—it seemed he still had the maturity to be a gentleman to me. He didn’t know what had happened, but all the same, for him to say he was sympathetic to this…holy shit. I wished he’d also said he was sorry in the sense that he’d screwed up, not just sorry for my situation, but he was a biker, not a therapist. I’d have to take what I could get.
And that left the strangest emotion of all.
Hope.
But for what?
That we’d get back together?
That seemed utterly preposterous. Outrageously stupid. Why in the fuck would I want to get back with him? Whether I stayed in Odessa or moved back here, the overwhelming majority of men wouldn’t be asshole bikers like he was. Theoverwhelming majority.As in, all but a couple dozen in Phoenix and maybe a few here and there in Odessa.
But when the times were good…
And when I could acknowledge, as I could now with the benefit of time and distance, that I hadn’t always communicated as well as I could have and had made some mistakes of my own…
Maybe there was reason to at least explore—
The door opened from Hailey’s place. I quickly stuffed my phone back into my suitcase. God forbid that Sam or Hailey see me texting with Corey—or get the appearance of it—and start asking questions. Sam stopped in front of me and looked at me.
At first, I didn’t turn my gaze up to him. Call it force of habit, I suppose. But I knew he wasn’t looking at me to mock me. I looked up and saw a set of tough, gritty, but soulful and sympathetic eyes.
“The club will do whatever you need us to do for your family,” he said. “And…”
He bit his tongue. It was like there was something else just clawing to get out—“I’m sorry,” maybe? But these were bikers. They didn’t apologize. At least, not to relative strangers.
“Good luck.”
It seemed so awkward, and yet I knew he meant it genuinely. He left a beat later. I was struck that though I still had the right idea of the bikers—tough men who sucked at showing emotion and, when they did show it, tended to do so through anger, aggression, and violence—I perhaps had the wrong interpretation. They were emotionally stunted, but it wasn’t because they were evil, at least not most of them.
Perhaps there was some good to be had.
Hailey came out a second later.
“Let’s hit the road,” she said wearily but with a bit more confidence than before. “Odessa isn’t next door, after all.”
* * *
I preferred living in the Southwest part of the country for the most part, but one of the few times I wished I was somewhere else was when I got on the highway.
Drab, colorless, without wildlife and vegetation, driving on the highway became an exercise in what song, podcast, or audiobook you could play to distract yourself as you journey through the roads. You could drive faster than some highways out east, but it wasn’t like a three-hour journey magically transformed into a one-hour one.
But for the first couple of hours, it felt inappropriate to play any noise. To play an upbeat song would defy the mood; to play a podcast or audiobook would be to distract our minds from processing the events of last night.
But all of that processing and mood was just silence. The two of us didn’t want to broach the conversation. It felt like we’d reached a safe space of sorts in the car and could just…let the mind go.
I found I kept wondering if I’d said enough when I’d left Odessa. I’d told them I loved them, but it wasn’t an especially emotional goodbye. It was akin to saying I was going to a friend’s house to spend the night; not exactly indicative of the possibility that I might see them for the last time. I—
“How are you feeling about Corey?”
