Page 2 of Take What Hurts

The woman smiled, and Elliott’s eyes strayed to the small white scar that stretched under her left eye with her smile, and she had the overwhelming and entirely inappropriate urge to reach out and touch it. She squashed that thought down deep.

Stranger.

She’s a stranger.

“I’m sure I’ve driven through there, then. I ski, badly, at Stevens Pass at least once a month in the winter. I’m not sure why I torture myself, but despite the boot pain and the falling and the bad weather, it’s somehow… fun?” She said it like a question and laughed a tinkling laugh that embraced Elliott like a hug. “Sorry, I’m babbling.”

The thought of whether they’d ever shared a chairlift or a run floated across Elliott’s mind. She let it linger there while her eyes scanned this stranger’s gorgeous face, her features lightly flushed in the heat of the terminal and softened with what Elliott thought was something almost hesitant. She smiled, spurred on by the talk of skiing. “I ski there, too—grew up skiing there.” She shrugged. “I actually taught skiing there on weekends during college for extra cash. It was always entertaining watching the weekenders come out from Seattle—particularly the ones who didn’t do it all that often. All the gear and no idea.”

The woman beside her barked out a short laugh. “Guilty,” she said, raising her hand. “Maybe if I’d had you teaching me, I would have paid more attention.”

Elliott’s eyes widened, and what she had to guess was adrenaline skittered along her spine. Was this woman flirting with Elliott? Is that what that was? Admittedly, it had been a while since Elliott had flirted and, embarrassingly, even longer since she’d been flirted with, but she was fairly certain that’s what it was. Giving credence to the thought was the way the woman’s already-pink cheeks darkened in color and the hue spread down her neck and chest.

But she was almost certainly reading into it. Elliott had a tendency to do that—find things that weren’t there—particularly with women. And with this woman. Yeah, with her sharp, blunt bob and her designer purse and red-bottomed heels: There wasn’t anything there for Elliott to read into in that department.

She swallowed hard around the disappointment as the woman’s eyes dropped to a spot on the carpeted floor, and almost like she thought she’d said too much, the woman sighed. “I really need to work out what to do about this flight situation, because I don’t feel like looking for a new job after I get fired for failing to turn up at my meeting.”

Elliott’s heart sank. The ease of their conversation had been a balm to the anxiety that had gripped her not five minutes before, and she had to swallow the impulse to ask the woman everything about herself: what she was doing here, what her job was, whether she was single, whether she believed in fate or the stars or lust at first sight. She managed it—just—and settled on “Same here. I think I’ll go and find the desk to get on a cancellation list.” She tried to keep the regret out of her tone but feared she’d failed.

The woman bent to collect her bag from the floor. Her shoulder brushed Elliott’s, and it was like an electric shock zinging its way through her arm and into her body, igniting like the last match left forgotten in the box. “I’m going to go do the same. Maybe I’ll see you around, Heston.” She winked as she walked away in the direction of the airline help desks.

Elliott sat immobile and ramrod straight and watched the woman walk away, dumbstruck by the sway of her hips. It wasn’t until she was out of Elliott’s line of sight that Elliott realized she didn’t even get her name.

TWO

MACKENZIE

As Mackenzie Williams walked away from the woman who had stopped her in her tracks, she took several deep breaths in through her nose and released them through her mouth, like her therapist had taught her. In for three, out for six. Repeat.

Aside from the obvious—being that the woman was a smoke show—she wasn’t sure what had driven her to speak to the stranger staring forlornly out the window at the departure gate. It wasn’t like she never saw anyone out in the world she thought was attractive, but she never approached any of them. But before she’d known what she was doing, her feet had carried her to where the woman had collapsed into a chair, the longer hair on top of her head flopping into her eyes as she put her head in her hands.

It was dangerous. The hair at the sides and back of the woman’s head was short, there was a curl to the longer hair on top, and she looked, essentially, like a queer wet dream, all dark jeans and flannel; her high-top sneakers sprawled on the floor beside her bag—a telltale sign she’d sprinted through the terminal after clearing security. Everything down to the woman’s socks, adorned with tiny golden retrievers, was Mackenzie’s type. Then the woman had started talking. Her voice was like honey, warm and comforting, and the sound had gone straight through her and made her feel hopeful for all the wrong things she didn’t, couldn’t need.

Not right now.

Not after everything, despite what her therapist and her best friend, Frankie, had both told her for months. Get back out there. Like it was that easy. Like she could ignore the dull ache that filled her chest when she thought about how her ex-wife, Reilly, had left her without a word. Like she was nothing and meant nothing.

After four years. After so much. So many early happy moments swallowed and eclipsed by arguments about Mackenzie’s workload: about how she needed to work less so they could focus on starting a family but how she still needed to chase her dream and make partner at the firm she’d worked at since she graduated from law school, but also how she needed to slow down to alleviate the stress to increase their chances of conceiving, but also how she needed to “go out and ask for that raise,” like asking for a raise didn’t come with strings in the form of more billable hours, more responsibility, and more stress.

And it wasn’t like she didn’t want all that. She wanted to make partner. She wanted the raise and the responsibility and the feeling she knew it would give her. Like she’d reached the pinnacle. Like she’d achieved something tangible and worthwhile and good. But she also wanted the family. And she had been convinced she could have everything with some adjustments. Her body had disagreed. Violently. So had Reilly. And especially so had her mother, whose view was that anything other than work and files and networking events was an unacceptable distraction.

So when it had all fallen in a heap and left Mackenzie racked with grief, the easiest way to live with it all had been to wrap herself in the parts of the tattered dream that were hanging on by their threads. The partnership. It was so close she could taste it. So close her mother bared her teeth with imminent victory in the form of Mackenzie’s new paycheck whenever they spoke about it. Mackenzie’s stomach roiled at the mere thought of her mother, and she shook her head as the airline counters came into view. She smiled to herself as she thought about the new case she’d been assigned in the last few days. It was the case that would make the partnership a done fucking deal if she could get around the tiny, insignificant fact that her client was a complete and utter maniac. But she’d worked with worse before. Well… maybe not worse. But she was confident she could get this done.

She had to.

If she did, it would demonstrate to herself she was fine. Great, even! That her life was on track. That she really was the bulldog everyone in the industry knew her to be. And her bank account would welcome the pay raise that would come with a partnership. There was something else she thought making partner might achieve, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. What she hoped was that when it happened, it would identify the hole that needed to be filled and would plug it for her. The uncertainty was something she didn’t like to dwell on.

Despite her best efforts, her pursuits at work didn’t always block out the reason for the single-minded dedication in the first place, and she sighed as she dodged a small child—maybe three years old—slowly towing a PAW Patrol miniature suitcase behind a frazzled parent. The cavernous space that lived permanently in her chest—the place where the guilt and hurt and aching still lived—expanded, and she sucked in a breath around it. She was still trying to come to terms with the fact that other people’s children were a constant reminder of what she’d lost and what she worried she’d never have now. The hollow in her chest grew with the thought she would proceed through life resolutely ignoring any child she came across in an attempt to stave off the burning ache that settled inside her with each encounter.

She didn’t love Reilly—not anymore. But the feeling of abandonment, of not being enough because of her body and what it couldn’t seem to provide… That was difficult to shake, and at thirty-three, it felt like the lake had frozen over on those feelings, because she was still struggling with them a year on while Reilly had managed to shack up and marry a girl. For months after finding out about those developments, Mackenzie’s sole focus every day had been to stubbornly avoid thinking about the timeline and to take on any new file that came across her desk. Dating and trying to put herself out there had ended abruptly when she’d tried to have her first post-breakup one-night stand with a woman and had shoved the woman out of her apartment in a mild panic following the woman’s very normal attempt to literally get into her pants.

And yet, despite all that soul-crushing emptiness and the reluctance to expose herself so completely to another person again, she had approached a gorgeous stranger and let herself feel the effects of a nice, easy conversation and some accidental flirting. And it had felt… good. Like taking a deep breath after being deprived of oxygen for too long.

She sighed again, pulling her carry-on behind her as she approached the Alaska Airlines desk. She’d been fast, it seemed, and had beaten the rest of the airport to the punch. The airline staffer looked up, a distinct look of dread in his eyes, though he wore a trained grimace. Mackenzie watched him swallow hard, Adam’s apple bobbing, painfully it appeared, judging by the way he winced before he asked, “How can I help you this evening?”

She smiled her best smile—the one that showed just the right number of teeth. It was one she usually reserved for judges when she was intent on things going her way in the courtroom, and it worked 95 percent of the time. “I’m just hoping to get a seat on a flight to San Francisco. Ideally the first flight out, if possible.” Another flash of teeth, and she watched the staffer exhale in relief, his plastic face collapsing.

“Let me have a look and see what I can do.” He dropped his eyes to the screen in front of him, brow furrowed as his eyes darted every which way. Mackenzie let the sound of the hundreds of unintelligible conversations wash over and wrap around her, as she closed her eyes and sucked in a calming breath in an attempt to not appear too desperate. She busied herself with retrieving her ID and boarding pass from the canceled flight and, to occupy herself, tapped her blunt nails, painted lavender this week, on the airline desk. Minutes passed, and Mackenzie’s heart creeped into her throat. Her brain whirred into problem-solving mode as the furrow in the staffer’s brow deepened.