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Her heart plummets to that hollow pit in her stomach.
Her boots are suddenly rooted to the gravel, and she can’t budge, can’t so much as lift a pale leg to take a step.
All she can do is blink once, twice, a deer in headlights. After a long moment, she hardens her face to stone. She steels herself against the eyes looking back at her.
Parked opposite her truck, a familiar sleek black Cadillac.
Preston doesn’t loiter around his car, though.
He makes it a silent statement exactly why he’s here. For her.
He leans against the hood of her truck. Ankles crossed, hands tucked into his trouser pockets, and his head bowed. Dark tendrils of his tousled hair fall over his forehead, grazing his brow. But his eyes—his eyes aren’t relaxed or lazy… they are focused, locked in on Billie across the lot light the barrel of a gun on an old can sitting on a fence.
She’s the target of those dark eyes, watching her from beneath equally dark lashes.
Words are itching at the back of her throat, the kind that would have a bar of soap shoved in her mouth by her mom. Agony writhes its way through her veins, making its way to the ache in her heart, spreading the pain. But it’s all she can do to simply push from her stance and march towards him.
Hands fist at her sides under the piercing stare that doesn’t leave her.
She reaches the truck, his eyes turned now to run over the side of her face, searching her expression for any hints of weakness he can jump on. She knows him too well. And once he finds a weakness, he’ll pounce on it, shred it apart, and take her back into his fold.
Billie fights against the heart racing in her chest now, the lump swelling in her throat at just being next to him. After wresting the door open, she reaches onto the passenger seat for her bottle—the entire time suffering the familiar scent of his cologne.
She snatches the bottle and slams the door shut.
Preston’s voice is smoothly coated, yet forever dark, “I called by this morning.”
“And called the landline.” Billie uncorks the lid and, staring at her murky reflection in the car door’s window, gulps down the burn. She welcomes it.
His voice is deep, dark velvet. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Obviously.” She smacks the lid back on, tight, then lifts her chin as she finally turns to face him—
Her insides shatter like glass.
But she stands her ground, not letting a mere flicker of weakness flutter across her hard face. “That’s usually what happens after a breakup.”
They just stare at each other for a beat. Then she marches forward, for the bar, her muscles jumping beneath her skin.
He pushes from the front of the truck and moves around the edge. Over her head, he rests his hand on the curve of metal above the driver’s door. His eyes flicker over her, watching her every move and breath and blink. Always searching for a tell, a way in.
Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, she toys with the bottle in her clammy hands. It’s only now she realizes she’s sweating, and she’s not too sure it’s the heat starting to swell outside that’s doing it to her.
Dark eyes look down at her. “Our breakups aren’t the usual kind,” he replies, finally, and it takes her boozed mind a moment to chug back to what she said to him. “We,” he goes on, and takes a step closer, his body towering over hers, hand still resting on the top of the truck, somehow maneuvering her back against the door, trapping her, “fight, breakup, fight again. I apologize. You give in…”
“Then we fuck.” Her smile is twisted and rotten. “And do it all over again. We’re a joke, Preston.”
Unfazed, he lifts his hand and chucks his finger under her pointed chin. “Is that what’s different this time?”
So he knows.
Preston feels a shift this time around. Her pain, her fear, and most of all, her resolve.
“Others use our relationship as some sort of punchline,” he says, his finger dragging slowly from the underside of her chin down the center of her throat. It stops at the dip between her collarbone, and there it stays, a slight touch of pressure. But his eyes like pools of tar never leave her gaze. “People don’t understand our relationship. They never have. And you haven’t allowed that to get between us before, Bambi.”
This time, the pet name isn’t said with full malice dripping from his tongue like poison. It’s a chip at her, sure, it always is. But it’s whispered from him so softly, that it’s almost sweet—
Nostalgic.
