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"You said it when we had tacos. And the card. What’s going on with these texts?"
"It’s not a big deal, Landon."
"Then why are you trying to hide it?"
"I’m not."
"You are."
Only the strumming guitars came back in response.
Landon sighed and whipped his hat off to run a hand through his hair. "What the fuck, Katie? You’re all over my ass about my game, how I act on and off the field, constantly telling it to me straight, right? No bullshit? I guess that only applies when we’re talking about me. Why are you keeping secrets?"
And that was the straw that broke her composure. "Because it’s embarrassing! I’m ashamed that I ever dated him, that I ever liked someone like him so much, that I ever even trusted someone like him. I’m embarrassed about who I was with him and the way I groveled. The way I demeaned myself. The way I’m still letting him control how I sleep and eat and how much I focus on my work just by way of constantly worrying if some tiny bit of bullshit from my past is going to wreck my whole world. It’s not the person I want to be and I don’t want you of all people, to see me that way."
The song ended, but was replaced by another, a melancholy tone that filled the void as they both digested everything she’d just said. Or spurted out was more like it. She hadn’t even known she felt half of that.
Landon picked up her hand and kissed the back of it, then held it on his lap, hugging her fingers while she closed her eyelids to hold off the watershed threatening to burst through.
"Katie, I know you don’t want to talk about this, but you have to tell me what’s going on. I’m worried."
"Don’t be. I’m definitely not getting back with him."
Landon sighed. "You know what I mean. I’m worried he’s dangerous. What do the messages say?"
"I don’t even read them anymore. They’re meaningless, just like that stupid card."
"They’re not meaningless. Not when he sends that many in a row, one right after the other. That’s obsessive. How many did he just send?"
"It doesn’t matter, Landon. I just now turned my phone on so they just all came in at once, he didn’t necessarily send them all at once."
"You used your phone to call Lori so it hasn’t been off that long. What? A few hours tops?"
Katie stared at the dashboard.
With the lightening quick reflexes of a pro athlete, Landon dropped her hand and snatched the phone off her lap. She scrambled to grab it back, but he managed to scroll down the screen with his thumb before she could get her fingers around it. He had to glance back and forth to the road, and with her jostling, he couldn’t have read much, but he saw enough.
"Stop it, Landon! You’re driving!"
He gave up the phone, but not the argument. "Holy shit, Katie, I’ve hooked up with some clingy girls and even they aren’t that bad. You need to get a restraining order."
This conversation was heading in a very dangerous direction and she didn’t like it at all.
"You’re making this into something it’s not. He’s probably just drunk and he’s all the way in Georgia anyway. Enough said, so let’s just talk about something else. What does Chef Dante make for dinner?"
"What happened with him? Why did you break up?"Landon asked. "No bullshit."
"I already told you," she said, not quite remembering what she had told him.
Landon remembered. "No, you’ve only ever said that he was an asshole and that you moved here to get away from him. That doesn’t tell me much. So what happened?"
"There wasn’t one big incident." The lie rolled off her tongue so easily her subconscious must have been protecting her. "It just wasn’t the relationship I wanted. As you yourself have noticed, I have a tendency not to hold my tongue, and he, uh, took offense to that pretty often. Plus, he was kind of, you know, controlling. I just wanted to live my own life, on my own terms."
"What does controlling mean?"
Katie shimmied in her seat. This is the part where she would have fled had they not been in a moving vehicle doing eighty.
"Kind of like my mom, or whatever. Always having to be involved in every decision, always knowing where I was and who I was with. Part of that’s just the mentality of old Southern families though."
