A throat clears. Dakota’s. I turn just in time to catch the angry look on her face before she pivots and walks around the table, passing by me without a second glance. Her father follows, but he nods at me as he goes.
“Did you need something, Jericho?”
“Tomorrow?” she asks, adjusting the stupid face she was making. “What time?”
I look down at my boots and cross my arms, thinking about what a shit show this has the potential to turn into.
“Eight a.m. Meet me at the property.”
She balks at the early time, but doesn’t complain.
I follow Dakota and her dad out front, and Jericho walks beside me. It irritates me. She’s making it look like we know each other better than we do, as if I haven't known her the same amount of time I’ve known Dakota’s dad.
Jericho goes to her car, a fancy black two-seater, and Dakota and her dad walk to a white sedan. I let Jericho go with a terse wave, and walk closer to Dakota.
“Eight tomorrow morning,” I call out to her back. She whips around. Her expression is one of polite, cool interest, but it looks crafted. Like she painted it and set it on her face like a mask to conceal what she really feels underneath. If it weren’t for the hand fisted at her side, I’d be inclined to believe the façade.
“Great,” she says, nodding. “I’ll be here.”
I turn around and go back to the house, but I don’t go inside. I stand in the shadow from the stone pillar and watch that little sedan bump its way over the dirt road, kicking up dust.
The night I met Dakota, her face had imprinted on my heart and soul, even though I hadn’t wanted it to. We’d met at two in the afternoon on a hot summer day, and by three a.m. I thought I’d memorized most of her expressions. I saw flirty, silly, funny, happy. As we laid in the bed Jason told me was mine for the night, she talked about her parents and what a naïve young girl she’d been to leave home so early, and I saw sadness.
Which is how I know that beneath the anger I saw flashing in those brown eyes just now, I glimpsed her sadness.
And I’m the asshole who put it there.
6
Dakota
I’ve doneeverything I can to calm myself down. Deep breathing, meditating, punching the shit out of a pillow. Turns out, none of those things work when what you really need to do is confront the person who either doesn’t remember you or is pretending not to. And, oh, by the way, he’s also a potential seller of heretofore exclusive property and you’re the hungry buyer.
Wes Hayden.
WesfuckingHayden.
He looks like a slightly aged version of the man I met one hot summer afternoon five years ago, which is to say he’s unfairly gorgeous. No man should have eyelashes that dark and long, or lips that full and nibble-worthy. And if that shirt he wore rolled up over his forearms gave anything away, it was that he’s still covered in ropy, thick muscles.
Just thinking about him makes my body come alive. My hand brushes over my stomach, the pads of my fingers tracing the path his fingers traveled when they touched me.
There isn’t a single thing I don’t remember about that night. He was quiet, hiding somewhere inside himself, a soldier released from duty for the first time in over ten years. I wiggled my way into his arms and his mind, and he opened up.
We’d had an incredible afternoon, and when the sun went down the night got hotter. Skinny-dipping in the lake was the first of our shenanigans. It was followed by sneaking past the party in our dry clothes and soaking wet hair, and finding a shower in the house. We made use of the shower, the bathroom counter, the floor, the bed.
Wes towered over me, and his hands were huge. He lifted me as if I were made of nothing but feathers, and all I could think washere’s a real man.
I’d never been with anybody in such a primitive way, in a way that was raw and needy, and lacked civility. We took what we wanted from each other.
We never went back to the party. We stayed in the room, and we alternated between talking and sex, a pattern that kept us up until the sun was close to rising. Eventually, exhaustion won and we fell asleep. When I woke up, Wes was gone.
I’d gone to the party with two friends, one of whom lived on the other side of the lake, so I walked back to her house in flip-flops and my borrowed sorority shirt. I was too embarrassed to admit to her that I cared about Wes ghosting me, so I told her it was something we’d agreed on before we’d hooked up. “No strings attached,” I’d said. For what it’s worth, I don’t think she believed me. I may have been a wild child, but there was something about sex that was sacred to me.
But apparently not to Wes. He doesn’t even remember me.
Rolling over, I give the second pillow on the hotel bed one more good punch, then a second for good measure, and stand up. I can’t lie in here wallowing anymore. I’ve already left a Dakota-sized dent in the mattress.
I run a brush through my hair, swipe under my eyes for mascara that ran during my breathing and punching, and pluck my purse from the chair in the corner. On my way down the stairs, I fish my phone from my pocket and video call Abby.
