Her body was in overdrive, urging her to act, to touch him, to yell at him, do…something. Anything. The desire to angry fuck him out of her system for doing her wrong all those years ago was overwhelming.
She downed her drink, and her new bestie behind the bar had collected the glass before she’d even put it down.
“I’ll get you another.” New Bestie side eyed Elliott like he knew there was something there. It would be hard not to. The history between them had gone from simmering to bubbling to boiling over, in fact.
It was tangible, like a living breathing thing that grew, consumed the space, suffocated her, squeezed all rational thought from her thrumming body.
She couldn’t keep running into him and straying down memory lane. Never mind her broken heart—her throbbing girl parts couldn’t take it.
“How’re things?” He took a sip from his beer, and try as she might to keep her eyes off the way his lips wrapped around the bottle, she couldn’t.
As soon as she got home she was ordering a new vibrator. She needed to get her stupid, double-crossing libido under control. God damn the bartender for being gay and married. Double ugh.
How were things? What a seemingly innocent question, but it was charged with intrigue. Should she tell him how things truly were? How she was a single mom on the wrong side of thirty, raising two teenagers, one of whom was about to flee the nest and go out on her own.
Should she tell him how she hated her life, her job, her exes, but mostly herself? How she couldn’t meet her own eyes in the goddamn mirror every morning because she didn’t recognize who she saw staring back at her anymore?
No. She couldn’t go there. The book thing with the stranger was embarrassing enough. Clare didn’t want Elliott’s pity, his sympathy, or worse—his advice on how to fix it.
He cleared his throat and took another drink of his beer.
Nope. She did not want his pity. But she sure as fuck wanted his mouth. Around her nipple. Strike that. On any part of her body. She wasn’t fussy.
“Things are…” How to answer without lying? She might not have seen him in a long while, but she’d bet her bottom dollar that he still knew her every bit as well as he did all those years ago. “They’re okay. My daughter, Cat, is staying at a friend’s tonight, and my son, Mason, is at his dad’s.”
An almost imperceptible twitch of his eyebrow was the only reaction he gave as he took another mouthful. The bartender placed another drink in front of her and patted her hand twice.
He’d poured her a double. She was going to buy him a romance novel to thank him for being so freakin’ perceptive. New Bestie was the real MVP.
She took a huge gulp of her drink, willing the alcohol to weave its way into her muscles and help her relax. Maybe she’d tell Elliott about her work. That was safe territory. There was nothing sexy or inviting about clerical duties.
“I’m a medical transcriptionist.” She leveled him with a stare, almost daring him to say something derogatory about how she used to always want to be a doctor and now she was essentially a doctor’s glorified secretary.
She winced. She wasn’t. But some days that’s sure as shit how it felt.
“When I got pregnant with Cat…” Clare swallowed, staring across the bar. She didn’t owe him an explanation, and he wasn’t pressing for them, but she needed to drown out the urge to grab him by his stupid collar and kiss his stupid face and she couldn’t stop the word vomit. “College wasn’t in the cards for me. I went to community college when Cat got a little older. Studied evenings and nap times.” She gave an awkward laugh.
“Do you enjoy it?”
Did she? Not really. But she’d done it for so long she’d just accepted that it was a means to an end. Kids were expensive, clothes were expensive, food and utilities were expensive, car maintenance was expensive, college was going to be expensive, and as much as Mason’s dad helped out, her job—while it didn’t light her fire—was stable.
And she needed stable. Reliable. Secure. Not to mention, it provided decent health insurance—which didn’t hurt when she had an accident prone kid who played a sport involving high speed projectiles and metal blades strapped to his feet.
“It pays the bills.” She sighed, picking at the corner of her coaster. Her boss was up for promotion and she was salty as hell about it. He’d been the best supervisor she’d ever had. All the others had been asshole idiots, promoted beyond their abilities, or left for greener pastures.
She could have done their job in her sleep, and in a tiny part of her mind, she always wondered what it would have been like if she’d thrown her hat in the ring.
She could advance to a supervisory position, become a medical records and health information technician, medical coder, or medical records and health information administrator with additional education and training. Or leave the medical field altogether and do something else, something different, something fun.
There were options, she just hadn’t taken them, or even considered them all that much. Her kids were her priority and her job was just that, a job, not a career. But the idea of breaking in another new boss weighed on her.
He pursed his lips but said nothing.
“What?”
“I just…” He shrugged and put the bottle down in front of him. “The Clare I knew was vibrant, ballsy, afraid of nothing…”
The fucking nerve of this guy.
