Page 7 of Playing With Temptation

Now he was asking the right question.

Something was fucking with my head, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. My kids were thriving. It had taken a few years after the divorce for everything to smooth out and settle, but we’d had a good five years of calm. I worked a job I loved, had good friends, provided a nice home for Juni and Cole, my relationship with them was strong, but something was missing.

Ethan being one of those good friends meant I didn’t lie to him. “Don’t know. Something just feels off. I can’t place it, I have no reason not to be grateful, but something’s just missing.”

I turned onto the street that would lead to Tate’s house. My first thought was I wished I could’ve talked Stacey into moving out of this neighborhood. I didn’t need the sun shining to see the unkempt yards and dilapidated houses. My second thought was that Ethan’s silence worried me.

And when he broke it, I knew I’d been wrong. I shouldn’t’ve been worried, I should’ve braced. “Have you thought about dating?”

“Dude.”

I thought my answer said it all. Apparently not. “Seriously. It’s been seven years. You think maybe what you’re missing is a woman?”

“I have not spent the last seven years celibate, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Picking up a woman from a bar and getting your dick wet, then rolling out with a ‘thank you’ isn’t what I’m talking about.”

Fuck.

“Wait. You’re supposed to say thank you?”

“You can joke all you want. But brother, when we're done here, I’m going home to my wife. Depending on how long this shit takes, I’ll either go home to her waiting up for me, which gives me the opportunity to take her to bed, or she’ll already be in that bed. Which goes without saying is a bed I want to be in. I know shit with Shay was great in the beginning but ended not being that. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for someone who makes you want to get home so you can crawl into bed beside her.”

Ethan was right, but he was also wrong—in the beginning, everything with Shay was good—not great.

I’d had great and lost her. I had everything, but I was too young to take care of it. Too stupid and immature to know love wasn’t just something you felt—it was actionable, and if you didn’t work to keep it, you lost it.

“Do you ever think about the one who got away?”

I regretted my question as soon as I asked it. Ethan was a bulldog with a chew toy; if you didn’t want him gnawing your ass to death, you didn’t give him the ammunition to do it.

“I don’t have one of those,” he told me. “I thought I did. After Carson was born and the way Chrissy left, I felt that. Not only for my daughter, but I thought she was the one. Time and reflection taught me otherwise. I’m grateful she gave me Carson, but if she wasn’t her mom, I wouldn’t think about her. She wouldn’t have been anything more than a girl I knew when I was sixteen.” Without missing a beat, he went on to ask, “Who’d you let get away?”

“Rainy Cross.”

Just saying her name made my chest hurt.

Sixteen years later, and the hole she left hadn’t healed.

“You wanna know something fucked-up?” I asked, but didn’t give Ethan a chance to answer. “Shay cheated on me, but part of me was relieved. I had a concrete reason to end our marriage. I do not regret marrying her when she got pregnant with Cole. By doing that, I got Juni out of the deal. I can’t even say we didn’t have some good times, we did. When it was good, it was good, and I could forget I was still in love with someone else. But Shay would go out, max out credit cards, and I’d work overtime to pay them off only to have her do it again and again until I was working a second job to pay for all the shit she bought, and I would think about Rainy and how different my life would’ve been if I didn’t fuck that up.”

I pulled up next to the curb a few houses down from Tate’s and killed the engine just as two gunshots disturbed the quiet night.

So much for getting home at a decent hour.

Not that I had anything or anyone to get home to.

CHAPTER THREE

“Mom!” Lucas shouted. “Dude. I’m gonna be late.”

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Two weeks into the school year and it was me who was going to make my son late for school.

“Coming!” I yelled from inside my closet.

Where was my damn shoe?