“You can what-if yourself until the cows come home, but one thing will still stay the same. You could’ve died out there today.”
Her mouth curved into a, humorless. “You ever try telling your brain that when you’ve been shot at, and someone you care about takes the bullet for you?”
“More than once,” he said. “It doesn’t listen, but eventually, it settles. It has to.”
Her gaze flicked up, sharp and searching. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
He couldn’t deny it. He wouldn’t. That would make him a bigger dick than he already was. “I have.”
“Why?”
He rubbed a hand across his jaw, the rasp of his stubble grounding him. “Because you scare the hell out of me.”
“I don’t know how to take that.”
Buddy poured another two fingers and sipped, letting it burn. “You’re thirty. You’ve got this whole life stretched out ahead of you. I’ve already lived mine. Or at least the part that mattered.”
“That’s crap,” she said with the kind of sharpness that cut a little too deep.
“It’s truth.” He leaned back against the counter, glass hanging from his fingers. “You ever tell someone you’d give them everything, and then realize you already gave it all away to a job that didn’t give a damn if you lived or died?”
She frowned. “Careers aren’t people. They don’t have feelings. They’re what you do, not who you are.” She lifted her tumbler to her lips
She had him there. He stared at the whiskey. “I’m talking about my marriage.”
Fallon coughed on her drink. “You mentioned that once in passing, but you’ve never talked about it.”
“Not many people know I was ever married, especially in this town. Hell, I never told Chloe, though she probably knows since she and I met shortly after Callie and I divorced.”
“That’s a shocker. She’s a close friend. I’m surprised it was never discussed.”
He shrugged.
“You brought it up, so I take it you want to tell me about it.”
That was insightful. And true. “We met right out of Quantico. She wanted kids. I wanted to save the world.” He chuckled. “She got tired of sleeping alone, tired of me chasing monsters while I became one. One morning, she told me she was leaving. Said she didn’t love me anymore. Said she was pregnant with another man’s child.”
Fallon’s expression didn’t change. Her eyes did. Softer. Sad. But there wasn’t an ounce of pity. Nor was there resentment or anger. Emotions he’d gotten used to the few times he’d told the story.
“I didn’t even fight her,” he continued. “Because she was right. I’d already left. I just hadn’t had the decency to pack a bag.”
He polished off his drink and set it aside. “I fell apart. Got sloppy. Almost got fired. Almost got killed—more than once. It took over a year to crawl out of it, and I swore I’d never do that again.”
“You mean fall apart,” Fallon stated rather than questioned.
“No. I mean the whole love, commitment, marriage thing. It gutted me and not in the way you think. It’s not that I didn’t know what I had until I walked out the door, because I did. Callie was—is—an amazing woman. But I was the job. Needed the job more than I needed her, and that’s why I fell apart.”
“I don’t believe that,” Fallon said. “A man doesn’t dive into a stupor for that long for nothing. You were mourning.”
“Maybe, but I was also accepting something about myself. That I wasn’t cut out to be a family man. I never had it in me, and I nearly stole that from her.” He’d told himself that for so many years that he believed it, besides parts of it were true. He could’ve given up his job if he tried. But he never really tried to be a good husband. That was the part he could never say out loud. “You want to know the messed-up part?” he asked. “You’re the same age Callie was when she walked out. Same damn age. And I’m standing here wanting something I shouldn’t. I don’t have anything to give you that isn’t temporary. You deserve more than that.”
Fallon’s hand tightened around her glass. Her eyes didn’t leave his. “That’s not your decision to make.”
He opened his mouth, but she cut him off—quiet, steady.
“You tell yourself it’s noble. That you’re protecting me or saving me from heartbreak, but it’s fear. You’re scared of losing again, so you left before I could even decide if I wanted to stay. Before we knew if one kiss meant anything at all.”
That hit him harder than he would have expected.
