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My phone pings. My driver’s arrived. He’ll wait five minutes but then he’s leaving. My hands are shaking too hard to message him back. My feet turn to concrete and I can’t move. My low-heeled sandals morph into galoshes. They grow roots, tethering me to this spot, to this man.
The last time I saw him, he was boy bleeding out into the hard, cold snow. My hand lay on the soft skin on the divet right above the bone in the middle of his chest. The last time I saw him I willed my life back into him so hard I went cold.
And after all the years, after all my anxiety. After love earned and love lost, the storm blows through, and yet here I am again — still tethered to Wyatt Wolfe.
Now, he takes the arm of the pretty girl he’s about to marry, leans in, and kisses her. “Love you, darling,” he says. “We’re in this forever.”
When I was thirteen I dreamed I would marry Wyatt Wolfe. But I am changed. Different. Shorn. I will never be the girl that marries Wyatt Wolfe.
A firm hand grips my arm, a grip much harder than I’m used to. I turn, expecting Dylan, already trying to figure out the best way to tell him that as much as I want to stay, as much as I love him, I have to go now before anything else bad happens. But the man gripping my arm is not Dylan.
It’s Wyatt’s older brother. Easton Wolfe.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” he hisses.
“Easton?”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Shock tingles on the backs of my arms.
“Dylan McAlister can stay here. Play tournaments anytime. But he’s not allowed to bring you.”
“I’m not with Dylan anymore. I’m leaving.”
“Good,” Easton says. “You’re not welcome in my hotel, Evie Berlinger. Any of them. You’re not welcome in any club I own.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think or feel. I’m not even sure I can feel.
“You’re not welcome anywhere near anyone with the last name Wolfe,” Easton says. “Not now. Not ever.”
“Fine. Let me go.”
He drops his hand from my arm but he’s still seething.
“Leave.”
“I’m leaving, Easton. My ride’s here.”
“And don’t you dare mess with my brother today. It’s his day. Not the day to remember the girl from the crazy family who left us broken and bloody and forever fucked up on the side of the road.”
He moves away from me and I sway. I try to remember how to walk. I put one foot in front of the other and keep going until I stumble out the hotel door.
***
23
Leaving Las Vegas
LEAVING LAS VEGAS
I was late and my driver left without me. I get into the back of a Yellow and Black cab. “Where to?” the chick behind the wheel asks, pulling off into Vegas traffic.
“Anywhere but here. And preferably a place that doesn’t have weddings. I don’t have a lot of luck in the wedding department.”
A half hour later I sit at the retro-styled bar at The Jester’s Court – a drag bar close to the airport –and nurse my drink. My hand shakes a little less with each cocktail. A Gaga impersonator lip-synchs on stage and maybe I’ve completely lost my mind because I think she’s pretty good.
“Sweet Jesus, your night has been caterwampus,” the husky Jayne Mansfield impersonator says from behind the bar, sliding a cocktail in my direction. “Tell me that part again, honey. The part with all the men.”
