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I shouldn’t push the issue. He’s going to think I’m desperate. But I can feel the gray fog seeping back in for the first time since we left our quarter-mile driveway in New Haven. The last two days I’ve been too anxious or too distracted, and the fog stayed away. It feels like coming up out of the water after holding your breath a little too long—the air feels so good, and all the tension in your body bleeds away.
Now I can feel that old tension winding up, pressing me down again, coiling around my heart, threatening to make everything dull again. And I panic.
“Callahan.”
My name is little more than a growl this time. I gasp a little at the intensity I hear in his voice, and I see West tense further at my reaction.
“We already agreed nothing is going to happen,” I say, pressing my luck. It’s so unlike me, and I get a little dizzy just from saying the words out loud. Or maybe that’s just West’s effect on me. God knows, I’ve been dizzy around him for years. “There’s no harm in talking about it.”
“You think so,” West says. The air around him seems to swell. He leans a little closer and lowers his voice.
“Sure,” I say, playing it cool and trying to ignore my pounding heart. This is foolish. I’m just torturing myself.
“The harm,” says West, “is that I’m about ten seconds away from hauling your ass out to the back room to fuck you up against the first flat surface I can find.”
Yes, please. That. I want that. Please. Twice.
“Oh.”
West snorts.
“Yeah, oh,” he says. He shakes his head, settling back into his own seat. “Forget I said that. Chalk it up to wedding craziness or whatever.”
“Right,” I say, frowning. “So you didn’t mean it.”
West snorts again.
“Fine,” I say. I’m a little shocked to discover how annoyed I feel. I haven’t felt annoyed by anything in months, or longer. But if this is how he wants to play it, I can play along. “Fine. You’re right. Weddings make people go a little crazy. Maybe I just need to cut loose for a little while. Have a little fun for once. You never know who you’ll meet in a place like this.”
West sits up again.
“Is that a threat?” he asks, his voice dropping. I scan his face. He’s stone-cold serious.
“It’s no threat,” I say, my heart pounding all over again. “Not to you. I’m just saying, if I can’t cut loose at a bachelorette party, when can I? Drink a little too much, get a little wild. If I get into trouble, that’s my problem. I just need to find somebody to party with.”
West doesn’t like that at all.
“Over my dead body.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“The hell it doesn’t,” he says, leaning in and tapping the edge of the table about an inch away from my breasts. My whole body tightens at the proximity, at the suggestion, and that annoys me even further.
The hell with him. He might be rejecting me, but I bet I can find somebody who’ll say yes, even if only for a night.
A small voice in the back of my mind reminds me that I agreed with West, that I understand why he’d backed off, that we’d backed off for the same reasons. Important reasons.
But right now Finnegan’s up at the bar flirting with some redhead and I’m just over it, all of it. I should be cutting loose, just like my brother obviously intends to do, like everybody else here is planning to do. I’m sick of West’s rejection, sick of watching myself every second of the day, sick of being so damned scared all the time.
“Whatever you’re thinking,” West says when the silence between us drags on, “knock it off.”
“You said I’m not weak,” I say, flinging his earlier words back in his face. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I just need somebody to show me just how strong I can be.”
West’s reply is lost to the noise as the announcer starts the next segment of singers. I see Raleigh walking up to the stage and I ready his camera app the way he showed me. He takes the mic and catches my eye. I give him a big thumbs-up and smile as encouragingly as I know how. If Raleigh can get up on that stage for karaoke in front of a heckling bar crowd despite his obvious nerves, then by God, maybe I can take a chance, too.
Thirty seconds into his song, I triple check to make sure I hit the record button because I don’t want to miss this. Raleigh is amazing. Amazing.
His nerves seem to have dissipated by the time he hits the first chorus and by then half the bar has their own phones out to record him. He belts the high notes without a hitch, and by the end he’s working up the crowd, dancing a little and moving around the stage. They’re eating it up, every last one of them.
