“How long are we stopping—” I start, but I’m unable to finish as I step around him. Instead of a convenience store, I’m facing the front door of a crappy motel room. I clench my fists, digging my nails into my palms so deep that pain shoots up my wrists, as I take a hesitant step forward. When I speak, my voice is strained. “Where are Heidi and Cal?”
Wyatt comes up beside me, and I feel the lines of his body press against my side. I stiffen and turn my face away from him a little. “Where are they?” I repeat.
“At the convenience store across the street. We need to talk.” Despite my cold shoulder, he grabs my hand and leads me to the front of the Suburban. He leans against the grill, but I stand with my back straight, glaring at the door to the motel room as if it’ll fly open at any second and slap me across my face.
In a way, it already has.
“Why would we stop here?” I demand. “Why would you want to talk here?”
“You remember this place?”
How the hell could I forget? This is the same motel where we first made love. It’s the place where he found me after my four-month marriage to Brad came to an end. While I was asleep, our trip had taken a detour, and now, we’re in Livingston.
“Do you remember?” he asks again.
I nod slowly, and each tiny movement of my head makes me feel like I’m going under. “I stayed in that room down there the first time.” I point my finger to the left toward the room at the end of the row of identical doors. “And in this one the last time.” I incline my head to the door in front of us, room number 32. It’s sad that I still remember both rooms. “You play so fucking dirty.”
“I told you I was going to remind you why you fell, Kylie.”
My breath hitches. “By bringing me back here? Do you think it was worth adding extra time to your trip?”
“I have so much to say to you. It seemed like this would be the best place to do it.”
“We’ve already said enough here.”
He’s quiet, and I know he’s thinking about the room at the end of the row. He’s thinking about how I told him everything about myself, how I showed him each tiny scar, five of them in all, and how I tried my best to explain why I did it. That same night, he told me how he aspired to be a better man than his father, a womanizing drunk who hadn’t made it as a guitarist, who flaunted women in front of Wyatt’s mother until she took off.
“I didn’t even mind him beating the shit out of me,” Wyatt says, pulling me closer to him in the hotel bed. He inhales my scent, Ralph Lauren’s Romance.
He’s quiet after that, and the only sound in the room is Chevelle’s “The Red.” He waits until the song is finished, and then he says, “But the way she left without even giving me a second thought...it still fucks me up, Kylie. She didn’t give a shit about me.”
“I’m so sorry.” Tears are forming in my eyes because I feel selfish. I feel like the most selfish bitch in the world for complaining to him earlier about not meeting anyone’s expectations and retaliating by punishing myself. I cried about disappointing my parents when his had let him down too many times.
He pulls away from me, cupping my chin. “Don’t be sorry, beautiful. I’ve got you, don’t I?”
“Yeah, you do.”
His chest rises heavily, and he makes a noise that sounds nothing like Wyatt McCrae. This is the first time in all the years I’ve known him that I’ve seen him nervous, and it sends a wave of anxiety through me. I pull the sheets up to my chin. “Is everything okay?” I ask hesitantly.
He snorts. “Yeah and fuck no. Lucas will fucking kill me for going here with you.” I start to respond, but he shakes his head. “It’ll be alright.”
“Alright,” I whisper despite the pain in my throat. Wyatt’s right about Lucas, and it’s impossible for me not to dart my gaze at the door as if my brother will barge in at any moment.
“Relax,” Wyatt orders. He brings my hand up to his lips and turns it slightly to kiss my wrist. “I meant what I said in the car, Kylie. Don’t ever hurt yourself again. You want to get rid of the pressure? You take it out on me. Hit me, scratch me, do whatever the fuck you want, but don’t do that shit to yourself again.”
“Alright, then don’t lie to me,” I counter, staring at him hard.
If he were honest about his home life before tonight, I wouldn’t ask. Instead, he lied to me and to Lucas for years. He led us to believe that his relationship with his father was perfect, instead of a heartbreaking tangle of deteriorating knots. The man lying next to me has felt abandoned and beaten and unwanted. I refuse to let him feel any of those emotions again, especially after tonight.
“Then you’ve got to tell me the truth, too, beautiful.”
I nod. “No matter what we are after this tour ends, don’t ever treat me like I’m fragile.”
He nods. “I won’t,” he says. Before he closes the space between our mouths, he adds, “But I’ve never thought for one moment that you’re fragile, Ky.”
Eight years later and judging by the strained, distant look on his face, he’s thinking about all that. When his nostrils flare and his gaze darts to the door directly in front of us, my mind goes to our second time at this motel—when we talked about Brenna in room number 37.
“Fuck, I’ve taken you for granted, Ky,” he whispers harshly.
I stare down at a crack in the asphalt. “Yeah, you have.”
He reaches out to me, and maybe it’s the effect of being back at this hotel, but I step toward him, closing my eyes when his rough fingertips knead into the nape of my neck. “This is the last time I’ll try to remind you, Ky...if that’s what you want.” His forehead touches mine. “But, God, I had to show you.”
“Show me what?”
“That when I think about the happiest times of my life, I think of this shithole right here.”
Me, too. I dip my head, too afraid to try to manage words right now.
“I want you with me the rest of this trip. Sleeping in my bed. Waking up next to me. My girl, just this last time.”
Like the memories of our past, I can almost clearly see our future—a future where we’re not together, where other people will give us exactly what we’ve been looking for with each other.
And I loathe it.
I loathe it so goddamn much that I speak without thinking.
“I’ll stay with you until we get back to L.A.,” I whisper.
He lowers his lips to my temple, blowing strands of blue-and-black away from my face. “And if I’m what you want by the time we get back, if we can finally fix ourselves, what the fuck then?”
I can hear Cal and Heidi coming across the parking lot, arguing loudly about the original lead guitarist of some band, and I swallow hard. “I...I don’t know.” Once again, the words tumble out before I have an opportunity to consider them, and his face cracks into a smile.
Damn it.
He backs away, slow to take his hands away from me. “It’s not what I wanted to hear, Ky,” he says just before Heidi and Cal come within earshot. “But that’s so much fucking better than hearing never.”
Chapter Eleven
Because of the detour and then the long dinner break we take six hours into the trip, we don’t arrive in Albuquerque until close to two the next morning. Though I’ve tried several times, I haven’t slept a wink since we left the crappy hotel in Livingston. That place brought out so many memories—both good and bad—and I’m still restless as we check into the hotel.