It was a temptation. It was a real damn temptation.
But there was something beautiful about letting the kiss just...be a kiss.
He thought he might drown in it. Thought he might die. He had no idea how long it went on. Just kissing her. Holding her. Lust was a drumbeat through his whole body. But the moment...
The moment.
He lifted his head. “You don’t happen to have that cactus on you, do you?”
She laughed. The press of her breasts against his chest as she giggled making him groan.
“Why did you ask about the cactus?”
“Because nothing mattered but the moment.”
She let out a long, slow breath. Her eyes looked a little unfocused, her lips swollen. And they were very close to his motel room. Normally, that would be the assumption. He didn’t kiss a woman just to kiss her.
But he had to let the kiss with Tansey just be a kiss. Because it needed to be. It just did.
“You did good tonight,” he said. “The barrel racing. I’m not grading you here. But that was good too.”
She laughed and lowered her head. “Thank you.”
He leaned in and kissed her. Shorter this time. “I need to tell you good night,” he said.
“Why?”
He gave her a meaningful look. “Because I need to. I’m trying to be good.”
“Oh,” she breathed.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And he didn’t know how any of this had happened. How they had gone from friendship to this.
They might be... Hell. He might be dating her.
He didn’t know what he thought about that.
But he also knew that he wasn’t willing to let her go. And that told him quite a bit.
After
Yeah. That was the problem. He had known. He had known that he was getting in too deep. He had known that he was walking into something he had no right to walk into.
And there was no excuse for him. There was no getting older and wiser. Because it was about him. It was about what he had to give.
And sitting across from her now, he could feel the echo of unfinished business inside of him. Except it wasn’t. They’d drawn a line under it because that was what they’d had to do.
Maybe that had always been one of the issues with the song. Maybe one of the issues with the song had always been that it showed him the line hadn’t actually been drawn where he thought.
Because he’d been convinced that he got out of it before he devastated her. And it was a lie; he knew that. But that was part of the problem. He thought that he had a pretty good handle on who he was. But it turned out he wasn’t as strong as he thought when it came to his resolve. And he’d been convinced that he just knew himself. That his resolve was what had kept him from those relationships, when in fact his resolve had had nothing to do with it. There had never been a woman that compelled him. And the minute she’d been there...he turned away from everything he knew. Everything he knew that he had to do to keep someone safe from him.
Maybe the real issue was that as much as she hated him, it had made him hate himself even more.
“I keep waiting,” she said. “To feel triumphant. I keep waiting. I had pretty great revenge on you, you have to admit that.”
“I thought you said you didn’t think about how I would feel.”
“I did. I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to find a way to hurt you, because I looked at you in the face and... I didn’t hurt you. I couldn’t hurt you. And I hated that. I wanted to.”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “You can’t get to me like that.”
“That’s what I don’t understand. I don’t understand why.”
“Let’s just call it a night,” he said, pushing his plate back to the center of the table.
“Why?”
“Because the point of this wasn’t to rehash what we were. I thought the point of it was to find some common ground now.”
“Yes. I guess so. But I... I gave you everything, you know that. I gave you everything. And...” She swallowed hard. “I guess it just doesn’t matter, does it? But part of me wanted to hurt you. To take even half of what you took from me away from you.”
“If you want the fucking scarf, you can have the scarf.”
“I don’t care about the scarf,” she said. “It was never about the scarf.”
“Are you going to tell me the scarf is a metaphor, because I literally have your scarf, so I think you know it isn’t.”
