Chapter 21
Taylor
* * *
Weird how I’ll cry over an Allstate commercial or two senior citizens holding hands, but right now, when my heart hurts worse with every pound, I can’t eke out a tear.
I’m sitting on the beach in a sweatshirt and bare feet, arms wrapped around my raised knees. We came down here after letting the men in to replace the broken window in the back bedroom and simply never left. Now there is a magnificent sunset painting the sky with pinks and grays and I want to enjoy the beauty, but I’m too numb. It helps to have Jude sitting beside me, not talking, just occasionally rubbing a circle on my back or showing me a pretty shell. I want to ask him what happened with Dante, who was gone by the time I returned home, but if I open my mouth, I think I’ll just start shouting about pigheaded men and never stop.
“It hurts now. Feels like it’ll never stop,” Jude says quietly. “But it’ll get easier to ignore. One day you’ll be able to convince yourself it never happened.”
It sounds like he’s speaking from experience, but I don’t have the heart to point that out. So I just nod.
Stupid bounty hunter with his secret soft center and tortured past. I fell for it. Leave it to the teacher to fall for the textbook temptation to fix a man. To incorrectly believe, somewhere deep down in my heart, that he wouldn’t be able to walk away. That was nothing but a bad assumption. I’m just a Bond Girl in a long line of Bond Girls. He’ll look back on me in fifteen years, squint his eyes and say, oh yeah, the one who liked grandma ice cream.
And I’ll probably have a family and be settled down.
“Settled down,” I murmur. “But I’m not going to settle.”
Jude raises an eyebrow at me. “Huh?”
“Well.” I wet my lips, grateful to be talking and thinking about something other than Myles. “You know I’ve been dating men who have a serious eye toward marriage. But I don’t think I’m going to do that anymore. I think maybe…I just want to live and see what happens.” Saying that out loud loosens a little bit of the pressure in my chest. “I don’t have to be practical and play it safe, just because I’ve always been told that’s who I am. I’m who I decide to be, you know? I can play it safe in some aspects of my life, but in others, maybe I just want to help catch a murderer or have a fling with a bounty hunter. I’m more than one thing. I decide my own course. Nobody else.”
Jude is nodding along with me. “You’re damn right.”
I pick up a handful of sand and throw it. “Shoot. I didn’t mean to bring him up. I don’t want to talk about him.”
“We don’t have to.”
“But since we’re on the subject, I hope his long hair gets stuck in a toaster.”
“Savage.”
“I mean, not in a way that he gets electrocuted,” I rush to clarify. “Just in a way that is inconvenient and embarrassing.”
“I’ll see what can be arranged.”
“Maybe I should look at this whole torrid affair as a positive thing. He shook me up. Make me realize what I need to be…to feel. To feel. And now I’m determined to expect more out of my future real, functioning relationships.”
“Gratitude is a healthy way to approach anything.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Gratitude is a little bit of an overstatement. Maybe once the hostility fades.” We share a laugh and I reach over to squeeze his hand. “Are you all right?”
He blows a long breath out at the ocean. “No. But I will be.”
We sit in silence for several minutes, watching the sky turn from pink to orange to cerulean and finally, midnight blue. Stars wink to life on the canvas of the sky, the brush blowing behind us on the hill. Laughter reaches us from backyards up and down the beach, fire pits glowing and barbeques smoking.
I’m unsettled—and I know it’s because of Myles. The way things ended. The way everything feels so woefully unfinished. I miss his big, grouchy ass. But there’s more. There’s a little niggling sensation buried in the nape of my neck that won’t quit. I tell myself the itch comes with the territory of being hit over the head with an encyclopedia, having the best sex of my life and catching a murderer all in one day…but the worry just keeps churning. Eventually it moves to my stomach. I’m getting ready to voice my—probably—unfounded concerns to my brother when a wind rolls off the turbulent Atlantic and lifts the hair off my neck, making me shiver.