And he didn’t say anything for at least an hour of the drive.

Chapter 5

After

When she came down the stairs, he had his own dinner ready, and had sat down at one of the tables in the dining room. He was still wearing jeans and a short-sleeve shirt, and she was in sweats, no makeup on her face.

He wondered what her adoring fans would think of her now.

They would probably love her for this. Classic Tansey. So down-to-earth.

If he happened to look at the things that people said about her, well. He was only human. He didn’t have an endless amount of resistance and restraint where she was concerned. But then, he never had. It had always been... It had always been fraught. She had always been someone that he couldn’t look away from. No matter how he couldn’t explain it.

“Why exactly did you want to have dinner together?” he asked.

“Because this is ridiculous. Because...because you were an important part of my life, Flint. And now we don’t even talk.”

“As far as I know, that’s how breakups go. Admittedly, I’m not an expert.”

“Oh. So you admit that it was a breakup?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice rough.

There was no point denying it. Because there was no point denying that they had been entangled in each other in a way he wished they fucking hadn’t been. In a way they shouldn’t have been. In a way he never had been with anyone else, and never would be again.

But here they were, and somehow it was like something entirely different and something altogether the same. Because he hadn’t been charming for a single moment since she’d walked into his hotel, and he had no intention of being charming.

He didn’t put up the performance for her.

But then, he never had.

She’d never believed it. She didn’t buy into the facade that he had put up to interact with the world.

What he knew about himself was that he was a bigger bastard than most people realized.

Boone knew.

Boone knew better than anybody else, and seemed to forgive him for it, but that was kind of what younger brothers were for, he supposed. They had to see you better than you saw yourself. They had to see you better than anybody else did.

Didn’t mean that he should.

Because Boone knew the truth, and he was still the brother that Flint was closest to.

And Tansey knew the truth.

Without even knowing any of the details of his life, she knew the truth.

Because he had shown her. He had shown her what he did when the chips were down.

Even with all that discomfort, there was something...undeniable about it. His connection to her. The same way there always had been.

Because he was himself when he was with her. Unvarnished and raw and not even bothering with the face he tended to show the world. And it was true now too.

Except she took that and she wrote a song about it. And she might do it again.

“I want... Do you want royalties from the song?” she said, as if she read his mind.

Everything in him rejected that. Everything in him was disgusted by the offer. Outraged by it. “No, I don’t want to make any money on that shit,” he said. “I don’t want to make any money off of the things that you told everybody about us.”

There they were, eating really good steak, and not getting along at all, and he had a feeling that wasn’t at all what she had expected out of having dinner with him. Or what she had wanted. But here they were. And he was committed to the lack of facade. Because why couldn’t they just be honest? Because he had been telling his brothers for two years now that the song wasn’t about him. He’d been telling anyone who asked that it wasn’t about him.

Part of him had told himself that it wasn’t.

That she’d made it up. Because she hadn’t fought him. She hadn’t said any of those things to him. So maybe there had been another man.

Except he knew he was the first. Except he knew that he was the one.

And he knew that he had her scarf.

He had it here.

Just like she had the cactus. So whatever other stories they told, whatever they had told each other the moment that it had all ended, there were lies buried in there. And that much he knew. Even if he didn’t know himself well enough to know what the hell all the lies were. Or what he was supposed to do about them. Because he hadn’t known what to do then, and he knew even less of what he was supposed to do now.

Except his feelings were carefully kept behind the wall in his chest that he normally kept them behind. She was here and he was angry. She was here and he thought she was beautiful.

She was here, and they were having dinner in this fancy dining room, with her in sweats and him in his mud-covered boots, and they were fighting.

Whatever it was...it was real, and it was them.

So he was just going with it.

“Is that how you feel? That it was wrong for me to make money off of it?” she asked.

“Yeah. I fucking do. Because it was...”

“You told me it was nothing, Flint.”

“And you told me it was fine. So are we going to be angry with each other now for a lack of honesty?”

“That was never why I was angry with you.”

“Why are you angry with me then?” he asked.

“Because you ended it. I didn’t want it to end. And you know what, I was too afraid to tell you that. Because I knew it wouldn’t make a difference, and I knew that it would just...expose me. But now here I am sitting with you, and you might be mad at me about the song, but I’m kind of mad at myself about it too, because now you know. All the things that I didn’t say, all the things that I couldn’t say, you know what they are now. The song is the truth.”

“The song is part of the truth,” he said.

She winced. “The song is my truth. My feelings. It isn’t yours. Only you could write that song.”