If I were to look down at my chest right now, I’m sure there would be a giant, gaping, empty hole where my heart should be. An asinine thought pops into my head—if I have no heart, then how can it be breaking right now? How can something where there is nothing feel so much pain? It’s crushing and gripping and devastating, and I hate JD at this moment for making me feel anything after five years of desolation and numbness.
My eyes turn glacial when I look into his navy-blue ones—love and hate co-mingling into one big ball of seething anger as I grow increasingly incensed by the second. I feel more alive in my anger right now than I have felt in the past half decade. It’s like a dying ember inside of me on its last flicker is flaring back to life, hate providing the oxygen it needs to grow. I’m suddenly transported back in time to six years ago—the day I punched JD in his too-gorgeous-for-his-own-good face—and I am helpless to stop history from repeating itself as I rear my fist back and let it fly.
“Fuck!” I yelp when my fist connects with his jaw.
I think I may have broken my damn hand. JD hisses, touching the side of his face.
I whirl around at my two friends, my body shaking with adrenaline and pent-up rage. Prescott is still sitting in the booth, a look of shock on his face as he openly stares at JD behind me, but Dustin looks guilty as hell, so he’s the one I focus my ire on.
“You knew?!” I yell at him. “You knew he was coming here? You set me up?”
That gets Prescott to snap out of his trance. One look at Dustin’s guilt-ridden face tells us everything.
“D, what the fuck, man?”
Dustin reaches for my hand, but I snatch it back.
“Rory, let me explain.”
“Shut the hell up!” I shout, which has Pete coming out from the kitchen and barreling toward our table.
“Aurora,” JD entreats softly at me.
I can’t do this. Not here. Not now. Oh, God. What do I do?
I step up to JD, the closeness of his body and his scent strangling me with memories. “Fuck you,” I snarl at him, and run as fast as I can out the diner to the sounds of several male voices shouting after me.
Chapter 32
God, she is so gorgeous, I think when she turns to face me, eyes blazing. Aurora has grown more devastatingly beautiful since I last saw her. Her blonde hair is shorter, coming to fall just past her shoulders. Her crystalline blue eyes are the same, but more potent with the emotion raging behind them right now. She looks thinner than before, but more curvaceous. My hands are twitching with the need to touch her.
As soon as I came into the diner and my eyes locked on her sitting with Dustin and Prez at the back, I couldn’t tear my gaze off her. I hungrily drank in the sight of her like a man dying in the desert. Five long fucking years since I saw her last. Five long years I had to dream of this day. Of wanting to hold her in my arms again. Touch her. Press my lips against her supple, porcelain skin. Plunge myself into her heat until it consumed us both. Whisper how much I loved her, over and over again, until my voice grew raw.
“Fuck you,” Aurora hurls at me before running like a bat out of hell to get as far away from me as quickly as possible.
“Aurora!” I’m about to go after her when Prez jumps up and gets in my face, shoving me back.
“You son of a bitch!” He pushes me back again. “Stay away from her!”
The man I remember as Pete who owns the diner aims a finger at me. “Son, I don’t know why you’re here,” he says to me, “but this is a place of business. Take whatever fight you guys intend to have and move it the hell outside.”
He turns and motions for a waitress to get back to work.
“Yeah, we’ll take it outside. So I can kick your sorry ass,” Prez threatens me. “As for you, you sneaky shithead,” he says to Dustin. “I’ll beat your ass later.”
A phone starts ringing and Prez curses under his breath, picking it up from the booth table. “Knox,” he says when he answers the phone.
Knox? Why the hell would Prez be talking with Knox?
Dustin comes over and grips my shoulder. He was the first person I called as soon as I knew I was coming back home. Prez might be the more carefree and easy-going of our group, but Dustin was the more rational, less emotional one. I knew he would be the person more receptive to listening to what I had to say and give me a chance to apologize. It was an awkward conversation at first. I could tell how much my leaving without warning hurt him. He even told me as much. Not just leaving but stopping all communication.
I didn’t have a choice.
Dustin and I talked for a long time, and it felt good. I spilled my guts about why I left—well, some of it. The person who deserves the entire truth is the woman who just ran away from me like I was the plague. But being able to voice even a tiny fraction of what went down and why I left, gave me such a sense of relief. I’d kept the secrets locked so tight the past several years, I was choking on them. I needed to release it. I needed to have someone in my corner for once. Someone to understand why I had to do what I did.
As we talked, Dustin remained silent and just listened. He didn’t ask questions or try to give advice. He just listened, and by doing so, proved to me that our friendship hadn’t died. That I hadn’t lost him for good. After I told him my plans to come back home, he cautioned me that things were not going to be easy coming back. I left a lot of burned bridges. We danced around the subject of Aurora. Whenever I tried to ask him a direct question about how she was doing, he would turn evasive and cagey. The only information I could pull out of him was that she wasn’t in a serious relationship, which made me want to drop down on my knees and praise the heavens. Then he asked me if I wanted to meet up with him at Ruby’s today to talk. If I knew he was planning an ambush, I wouldn’t have agreed.
This was not how I wanted my first time seeing Aurora to go. I wanted to sit down and talk with Dustin more about things. Make a plan. Seek Prez out and try to make things right with him. Decide on a strategy to get my girl back. I knew I hurt all of them greatly. I knew I would have to walk through hell and back and beg for their forgiveness. What I wasn’t expecting was for Aurora to punch me—again. Or for Prez to get violent. I definitely did not anticipate the woman I love more than life itself to look at me with hate-filled eyes before she ran away from me.
