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“That’s not you, Tenleigh,” he said softly.
I laughed in his face, an ugly, bitter sound. “You don’t know me anymore. You know nothing about me. And I don’t know anything about you anymore either.”
He opened his mouth to speak but then closed it as if he’d changed his mind. “Christ, I can’t do this with you.” He turned and started walking away.
Fury flashed through my body.
“Hey, Kyland,” I yelled. He turned back around. “Did you ever finish Wuthering Heights?”
He blinked, and then furrowed his brows, regarding me with confusion. “I don’t have much time for reading these days, Tenleigh.”
I leaned my hip against the bar and tapped my finger against my chin. “I was just wondering if you found Heathcliff the despicable, cheating bastard that I did.”
He started walking back toward me. “We never did agree on much in the literary world, did we?”
“Hmm, true. Still, I would think anyone with half a brain in his head would see what a worthless piece of lying trash Heathcliff was.”
“I was more struck by what a dim-witted moron Cathy was…finally getting away from those…moors and then fucking coming back to experience more misery? Squandering the chance she was given? Doesn’t get much more idiotic than that.”
My blood boiled under my skin. “So what if Cathy came back for the moors, dark and foggy though they might be? At least she didn’t come back for Heathcliff. Clearly Heathcliff was the very last thing on her mind. In fact, I found it extremely annoying how…Heathcliff kept showing up everywhere Cathy was.”
I barely heard someone behind me at the bar say, “Are they fighting or having a book club?”
And a different person answered, “I’m unclear. Looks like foreplay to me.”
We both ignored them.
Kyland looked me up and down. “You so sure about that? Maybe”—and he looked momentarily unsure rather than just angry—“maybe Heathcliff had been on her mind all the time she was away. Maybe Cathy wouldn’t have gotten so angry every time Heathcliff showed up if he wasn’t still very much on her mind, if her new boyfriend made her feel the same things Heathcliff could.” His voice softened. “And maybe she’d been on Heathcliff’s mind too. Maybe she was all Heathcliff ever thought of, all he ever dreamed about.”
Boyfriend? What boyfriend? “Well, it wouldn’t matter. After the way Heathcliff betrayed her, she’d never give him a chance again. He ruined everything. He ruined her. He was the most selfish, disgusting character I’ve ever read about. I’m just sorry any paper was ever used to bring him to life. What a waste of a good tree.”
He opened his mouth to say something when he suddenly looked behind him. As he turned, I saw Shelly tapping him on the back. All the fight went out of me and pain squeezed my chest. I had forgotten she was even here for a minute. And whatever battle we had just been engaged in, with that one tap on his shoulder, he’d won. I’d lost. Again.
I looked away. In that one moment I realized what I’d always known. I couldn’t hate Kyland. He wasn’t a bad person. He’d just been bad to me. He wasn’t incapable of love. He had just been incapable of loving me, unwilling to stay for me. But he’d stayed for Shelly. And that was the most painful part of it all. The grief that battered my heart in that moment almost caused me to fall to my knees.
Not now. Not now—don’t fall apart here.
I walked quickly to the ladies’ room, where I locked myself in a stall. Marlo followed me in a few minutes later and helped me gather myself together the best I could. When I returned to the bar, Kyland and Shelly were gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Tenleigh
I worked a couple shifts at Al’s that weekend, but Kyland didn’t come back in. Thankfully. I was still embarrassed about the public argument, but I knew that, at Al’s, it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. In fact, Gable Clancy’s mail-order bride trying to run him over in the parking lot two hours later upstaged it. No, mostly I was just hurt. The anger I’d held on to felt so much better. It made me feel in control. The hurt just hurt. But it was either feel it or turn tail and run out of town. I would see the completion of the school—it was my dream and my legacy to the town I’d been born and raised in, the town that had given me the means to get an education. But after that, I’d consider hiring someone else to ensure the upkeep of the yearly funding and starting fresh somewhere else.
Perhaps this was the closure I needed so I could truly move on from Kyland. Had I been lying to myself? Had part of me desperately wanted to know what would happen if I saw him again? Yes, probably. I hadn’t really let go. And that was a problem. But it was better to be honest about it. It had been confirmed—he was really and truly with the woman he’d cheated on me with. He had a son with her. That was reality. And it was for the best that I face it.
