He opens his mouth to respond before clasping his lips together. My fingers grab his buckle, feeling the cool silver beneath my hot touch. I’m too close to him now. The heat from his chest is worse than standing in the sun on a forty-degree day.
If I leaned forward an inch, my lips would touch the black and green designs beneath his throat. Each breath I inhale is thin, yet I don’t back away. Lowering my eyes, I stare down the trail of dark hair and thick, ridged skin to where his buckle is. Slowly, I lift two of my fingers to touch the grooved skin above his jeans.
He sucks in a breath, and his abs tighten. My forehead falls forward to his chest, welcoming the sear. I take a long, wavering inhale and find the prong behind his buckle. When I push it, the belt falls open, and I let it go. Neither of us makes a move.
The silence is loud enough to scare me.
“Get in bed,” he rasps.
I tilt my head down, my nose touching him. For a second, I let my eyes close. He doesn’t touch me or tell me to back off. Not even when I busy my empty hands with the ends of his belt and squeeze, pulling just enough for his hips to shift forward.
“I sent you another letter.”
The air trapped in my lungs expels as I stiffen but don’t pull away. “When?”
“Two months after the one you mentioned earlier.”
“I didn’t get it.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he warns, his voice barbed.
I pull back far enough to look up at him, trying to make him see the truth in what I’m saying. “I’m not. I didn’t get another letter. If you really did send another one, I don’t know what it said.”
“It’s not anif, Tilly. I did fucking send it. Don’t try to make excuses for the choices you made.”
“What? I’m not making excuses for shit. I don’t have anything to make excuses for in the first place.”
He retreats before I finish. The walls come back down, and suddenly, he’s guarded to the tits, shutting me out. Frustration wells inside of me so high I choke on it.
“You fucked off out of my life without a word and then went and got married. It wouldn’t have killed you to let me know that you were at least in a relationship before your family was boarding a plane to attend your wedding,” he attacks, his slightly bumped nose curling. “Isn’t that something best friends tell one another? Or was one letter enough to make you completely write me off?”
I flinch, feeling every well-aimed word pop the bubble wrap I’ve rolled my heart in. “Stop. You know that isn’t fair. We weren’t best friends anymore! You made that decision for us. This mysterious letter you’re talking about doesn’t take away the hurt you caused me.”
Moving quickly, he grabs his shirt from the chair and works his arms back into it. I fist my hands and let him, even as I debate ripping it off again. He only does up the middle two buttons before heading for the door. I feel every clink of his belt like a slap across my face.
“Where are you going?” I ask, following.
He opens the door and steps outside without answering. I freeze in the threshold, looking down at my bare legs. And once I lift my eyes again, he’s gone.
Fuck my life.
20
ROWE
I’m driving too fast.
The truck’s speedometer keeps climbing, climbing over a buck-twenty. I pass the eighty-kilometres-an-hour speed sign and ignore it, unable to ease my boot off the pedal. With the windows down, the wind whips against my skin and fills the truck with so much noise I can continue ignoring the voices that were begging me to turn around.
Dim lights up ahead hold my attention, demanding that I let up on the gas. The turnoff for Wickett Ranch is close enough that if I don’t stop, I’ll fly past it. Wringing the steering wheel, I glance at the truck’s screen and see her name flashing again. I’ve lost count of how many times Tilly’s called since I left, but each time riles me more.
I’m being a hotheaded fuck. My feelings are butthurt, and I’m doing everything in my power not to dig too deeply into why. It’s what I always do. My father must be proud of how impossible I find it to reason with my own feelings instead of punishing myself for having them in the first place. His short temper waspassed down genetically, I’m damn sure of it. I don’t care if that’s not technically biologically possible.
If I believe that Tilly truly didn’t get my last letter, then the better part of a decade I spent convincing myself that I hated her was for nothing. I was only in my early twenties at the time and had spent months exposing my innermost thoughts to my best friend’s twin sister, only to have her reject the rawest version of myself I’d ever been. Yeah, that stung. And it got worse when I got out on parole and was kept in the dark about the man she’d supposedly fallen in love with.
I built everything off my initial hurt and nurtured it into a resentment that I’ve let poison my mind. She wasn’t supposed to come back here, let alone without her husband. I wasn’t supposed to be stuck with her again, forced to get to know the woman she’s become over such a large portion of our lives.
And the worst part of it all is that if she’s telling the truth, she has more than enough reason to hate me right back.
