“Someday, I hope you realize how wrong you are.” He moved to her, tilting her chin up to him.
“Linx.” She reached for his hand where it rested against her cheek, tracing the mountains and valleys of his knuckles. “I’m going to be honest here.” God, he’d been through hell, she didn’t want to add to that. But he had to know. “I don’t know what I want.”
Because, God love her, she didn’t.
Other than to run far away.
But what exactly was she running from? She pressed her hands against her temples.
“Do you want to go?” he asked, seeming to read her thoughts.
She nodded.
“Then let’s get you home.” He tugged his shirt over his head. “But, Becca?”
It took every ounce of intention, but she looked at him. Really looked at him. The devastation of losing his band. The hope of a future with her.
“Yes?”
“When you figure it out, I’ll be waiting.”
He meant that. No doubt he meant that.
And she didn’t know what to do with it. So she took him home.
The sun was still not thinking about touching the sky when Becca pulled into Linx’s drive. She didn’t take the driveway around to the garage. She pulled up to the front door instead.
“Do you want to come in?” he asked. “Sleep here for a while?”
She did. But she couldn’t. She needed time to reflect. Time to figure out what was going on with her. She shook her head. “You need to sleep without distraction.”
He looked at her like he knew her number. He so knew her number.
He leaned across the gearshift in the middle of her cheap sedan and kissed her full on the mouth. “When you’re ready, give me a sign.”
She gripped the steering wheel tighter. “What we have…it’s…”
Temporary. A flash of desire. A blip on the radar. A feeling that will fade.
“It’s perfection,” he said, finishing her unfinished sentence. And with that, he opened the car door and meandered to the front door of his house.
And Becca? Becca watched until he went inside.
He didn’t look back.
Neither did she, as she drove away.
Chapter 22
Linx
Forty-nine hours, twenty-five minutes—the time since Becca dropped him at his front door. He’d been serious. The next move was hers. That didn’t stop his fingertips from itching to text her. His craving for a ginger ale in a Coors bottle at Brek’s was, frankly, becoming ridiculous.
He was holding out, but he didn’t know how much longer it’d last.
If there was a silver lining in having a band implode while his girl wasn’t reaching out to him, it was that he’d made a helluva lot of good music in all the time he wasn’t sleeping. The broody kind of tunes with extra helpings of angst.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have a band he wanted to test them with.
