Hard Beat

Let her think about that kiss on the nights when she’s lonely.

My feet eat up the sidewalk. Then finally I slide into my car and bang my fist against the dashboard. It would be so much easier to walk away if the sex had been savage and carnal and full of spite. A quick fuck to work each other out of our respective systems so that we could move on. A little piece of physical satisfaction to mask the anger and hurt vibrating beneath the surface. It would have screamed that we weren’t meant to be together. That we were a fucking flare of desire that had already hit the high point and was crashing to the ground, burning itself out.

But it wasn’t. Not in the least. We made love. It was slow and emotional and so real that I can taste more than just her kiss still. So it’s that much harder to walk away because you can’t fake that. You can’t connect with someone on every level like that and have it be a goddamn farce.

It gave me hope. A false hope. And false hope is the worst kind of all.

I made a promise to myself to walk away if she pushed. Well I pushed back when I shouldn’t have, tried to help her, love her, be with her, anything with her, and now I have to walk away and never look back. So I choke back all of the emotion within me that threatens to come bubbling out. I won’t allow it.

As I drive away from the perfect little Stepford house growing smaller in my rearview mirror, all I keep thinking is that looking back is all I want to do.

Fuck the popular theory that if you love something, you should set it free; I came back and look how that turned out.

Whoever said love is like war, easy to begin but hard to end, knew exactly what he was talking about.

For the next couple hours I drive aimlessly, losing my way and not caring if I find my way back because frankly I have nowhere to go. I vacillate between thinking what a huge mistake it was coming here and knowing that Beaux does love me.

How in the hell can I walk away from her without more of a fight?

When my phone rings, my hopes surge that it’s her calling me to come back. Seeing Rafe’s name, I ignore the call, in no mood to speak to him. He calls one more time. Then my phone alerts a text. When I look down, my curiosity is piqued when I see the code 9999, the one that we’ve used over the past five years for him to tell me that a story’s about to break and he wants me on it.

I stare at the screen for a few minutes. The fact that I’m interested but the buzz of adrenaline I thrive on is thready at best tells me that my head is elsewhere. I contemplate ignoring the text and heading back to Beaux’s house, but know I’ll kick myself later if it’s something huge that I passed up for a woman who’ll no doubt reject me again.

Even though my heart’s not in it, and my head is warring over whether I’m giving up too easily on Beaux, I dial the phone to return his call.

I was raised to fight for what I believe in and to not give up until I get it, so what do I do now?

“Tanner.” Rafe greets me, his tone curt and his impatience more than obvious.

“What gives?” I ask before realizing this is the first time we’ve actually spoken in more than ten days, and a part of me cringes at the sound of his voice.

“What the fuck are you trying to pull, Tan?”

Whiplash hits me full force because I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Come again?”

“You’re in Kansas?” He yells into the phone as my hand falls off the steering wheel and into my lap while the shock and confusion over how he knows I’m here rifles through me. “You couldn’t let it go, could you?”

“What in the fuck are you talking about?” I shout back, my mind coming up blank on how he knows I’m here. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going or what I was doing.

“Don’t try and play me for a fool, man. Beaux. You tracked her down? What in the hell were you thinking?”

I open my mouth and close it before something I can’t take back comes out of it. “Rafe… you don’t understand. I’m just —”

“You’re just getting a restraining order filed against you is what you’re doing.”

My head whips up in complete bewilderment because there’s no way he just said what I think he said. “What are you talking about?” I feel like we’re having two completely separate conversations, and neither of them looks promising for me.

“I just got a call from Beaux. She’s filed a restraining order against you.”

“What?” I feel like the word screams through my head in a tornado of bewilderment, but my voice comes out even and quiet.

“Yeah. She wanted you to know that if you show up at her house again you’ll be arrested because she’s already filed one against you.”

I laugh long and hard, the edges of the sound tinged with hysteria that I won’t even deny as I sag against the seat, my head dropping back as I attempt to fathom how we went from the intimate murmurs in the foyer of her house to the tearful good-bye after sex to me being threatened with arrest. I’m at a complete loss and in utter shock.

“She did what?” I finally say into the phone as I try to piece together what in the fuck she’s trying to prove here.

“I’m not joking, Tanner, and I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you’re scaring me. Forget what I said before when I was talking as your boss and ordered you to come home. Listen to me right now as I speak to you as a friend. Dude, you’re losing your shit. You just tracked down a married woman, visited her house when she didn’t want you there, and did who knows what, but whatever it was is bad enough for her to spend the last few hours taking legal action to prevent you from doing it again. It’s called stalking, Tanner.”