She puts a hand on the dark-haired woman’s arm. “It’s okay, Iris. Seriously not a big deal.” She shrugs, her pasted-on smile a feat of forced indifference. “Jensen is just somebody I used to know.”
The fuck I am. Although it’s a fair point. I never shared my last name, and she gave me a fake first name. But those two nights were more than what I expected. So much more. Our connectionslipped under my skin and made everything after pale in comparison.
I can’t explain how being with Sloane changed me, or why I was at The Alcove every night for weeks after she disappeared, hoping and praying she’d return. She owed me nothing, but those two nights with her left me standing in the same life, yet somehow not the same person.
Two nights that felt like she’d seen more of the actual me than people I’d known for years ever bothered to.
I hold her gaze as she stands. The chair scrapes against the wood floor, and she smooths her hands down the front of her jeans. None of the other women speak, but I can feel the energy rippling off them, shouting at me to leave their friend alone.
Can’t do it. Or won’t. Same difference.
“This will only take a minute,” she tells the room without looking at anyone but me. “We can talk in my office.”
Another blonde, this one with an air of subtle authority, straightens in her seat. “Do you want one of us to go with you?”
“I’m fine, Sads. Thank you.”
The walk down the bright hallway to her office is less than ten feet. She doesn’t look back, but I can feel her awareness like an invisible string. She knows to the inch how far behind her I am.
She opens a door and gestures me forward. The desk is topped with stacks of invoices and a mug full of pens, and there’s a corkboard on the wall above it, filled with postcards and photos I don’t let myself look at. Not yet.
I haven’t been this close to her in over a year, and my body remembers everything my brain and heart have been trying to forget.
She crosses her arms as I turn to face her. She’s left the door open, and is staying between it and me, like she might need a quick escape.
“You can’t just show up?—”
“You ghosted me,” I say. “We had plans to meet again.”
“Hardly,” she mutters.
“And when you saw me last weekend, you took off like your ass was on fire. Did you think I wouldn’t see you? Wouldn’t track you down?”
“What don’t you get about the concept of a one-night stand?”
“Two nights.”
“Semantics.”
“We weren’t finished.”
She lifts her chin, just like she did in a Nashville dive bar the night we met, when she told me she didn’t dance. Thirty minutes later, I had her two-stepping around the dance floor. What she lacked in coordination, she made up for in enthusiasm and it was the best toe crushing I’d ever experienced.
“Wewerefinished,” she says. “Which is why I didn’t come back.”
This tiny office isn’t big enough to hold what I’m feeling. She continues to stare at me, arms still crossed, projecting a calm I don’t believe she feels. The color flooding her cheeks gives her away.
“I know you felt the same thing I did, Sloane.” My lips twist into a scowl. “The name fits you, you know?”
“It’s my name, so yeah, I know.” She glares harder if that’s possible. “Why can’t you take a hint?”
I exhale slowly, praying to a God I’m not sure I believe in for a lifeline I know I don’t deserve. “Why are you lying?”
Her eyes flash. “A couple nights of great sex doesn’t make us star-crossed lovers.”
“It was more than great sex,” I say.
“Amazing sex,” she concedes, and the corner of her mouth twitches before she fixes it back into a grimace.
