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Nodding, albeit unconvincingly, I release my hold on the bar and stumble several steps. Though, to my credit, I manage to stay on my feet. “Sure will, sugar.”
Turning to leave, a last-minute thought slams into me and falls out of my mouth without permission. “My brother likes your ass,” I half-yell at Luella, much to her utter shock.
“What?” She blinks. “Crew?”
“Nah.” I shake my head. “Well, he might—who the fuck knows. But I was talking about Conan.”
My words are barely discernible, one slurring into another, but Luella somehow manages to decipher what I'm saying.
“Conan?”
Nodding longer than I need to, I clarify, “Yeah, the old grumpy one. Ya know him?”
She laughs, “Yeah, Cole, I know who he is.”
“Don't tell him I told you, though.” I go to touch my nose in the universal gesture of secrecy but poke myself in the eye instead. “He'd have my ass.” Then, I pause again and add, “Don't tell him I said that either 'cause I like to pretend I'd beat him in a fight, but I actually think it'd be pretty hard to win against a Navy Seal, ya know?”
With a twitch of her lips, she promises, “Your secret's safe with me.”
Blowing an unnecessarily large breath of relief, I make my way on rickety legs to the front door of the bar.
“Wait,” Luella calls after me. “I'm gonna call someone for you.”
“No need,” I yell, then stumble aimlessly into the night, my broken heart as my only companion.
* * *
The next day, I sleep through morning and most of the afternoon. By the time I finally wake at three, the sun is already beginning its descent through the sky. There's a note on the pillow beside me scribbled in Conan's handwriting that lets me know he found my “pathetic drunk ass“ roaming the streets of Tupelo and demands that I text him when I wake up to let him know I'm alive. Beside it are two Advils and a small glass of water.
Both I'm thankful for as my mouth is dry as a bone and there's a dull pain radiating from one of my eyes like it took a hit last night. Maybe it did. I don't remember.
Knocking back the pain killers, I clutch my throbbing temples and search blindly for my phone. I finally find it tucked under the sheets at the bottom corner of the bed.
Squinting at the screen through my one good eye, every breath in my body leaves me at the sight of the most recent notification.
A missed call from Thea.
It's been six days of radio silence, of listening to the phone ring out each time I called her and keeping my phone clutched in my hand in case, by some miracle, she returned one of my calls.
And now she actually has. And I fucking missed it.
Without thinking twice, I hit the call back button.
My heart is in my throat, my hands sweaty and shaking. But I can't stop thinking that if she's called me back, maybe that means she's realized I didn't leak the photograph. Now that the shock of what happened has worn away, maybe she's finally able to see that I would never do anything to hurt her like this, that I would never ruin what we have with such a colossal and vile betrayal.
She picks up.
She actually fucking picks up.
I'm so overjoyed by the damn fact that I can barely feel the relentless soreness of my hangover anymore.
But then I hear a sound on the other end of the line that obliterates my joy completely.
A sob.
“Thea?” I ask quietly, hesitantly. “Thea, baby?”
What follows is a long pause fraught with unbearable tension and the heart-wrenching sound of her crying. It's agony, hearing her pain. It makes me want to burn down the world so that I can watch her dance in the ashes of all those who have led her to feeling this way.
