walked past me or accidently brushed by me. Back then I thought it was wrong. I thought it was terrifying and dangerous to react to a girl that I knew wasn’t for me, but now I knew Salem was irresistible and it was physically impossible not to react to her.
“So what’s with the freeze-out?”
Normally I was charming, affable, and engaging with the opposite sex. I just had a way of talking to them that let me get my way and left everybody happy at the end of the day. With Salem I couldn’t do that. With her I couldn’t find words that weren’t accusation, blame, and downright hatefulness. I was mad at her for leaving and madder at her for suddenly showing back up.
“She left Loveless when I was fifteen. She packed a bag and took off in the middle of the night with the town’s biggest weed dealer. Her parents were big in the church and her little sister worshiped her, so it was hard on everyone when she disappeared.” I sucked down a heavy swallow of beer and sighed heavily. “It was really hard on me.”
I had loved Salem’s sister, Poppy, with every piece of my young soul. She was my one and only, she was the center of my entire world. At least she had been until I followed her to college and ultimately had her tell me we were never going to be a thing. Salem, however, had been my confidante, my confessor, and maybe most importantly she had offered a lonely and unwanted boy friendship and acceptance. She was my very best friend and I was lost without her. When she left without so much as a good-bye it had been the second time in my life that I felt like I was being abandoned. I was once again left behind by someone that was supposed to care about me forever. Salem left me gutted and hollowed out.
“So you were tight and then she bounced and this is the first time you have seen her in ten years and now you’re all twisted up about it?”
If only it was that simple. The Cruz sisters had done a number on me coming and going. I would be perfectly happy to have never had to see or think about either one of them again.
If I didn’t have my hair slicked up and styled like a character out of Cry-Baby, I would have shoved my hands through it in frustration.
“I’m not twisted up. I just don’t have anything to say to her. A decade is a long time. She’s a stranger.” And anything I said wasn’t going to come out right anyway. The words would be twisted with rage and memory.
Jet gave me a look and pointed the open end of his beer bottle at me. “Right. She’s a stranger, a superhot stranger, and instead of talking to her or flirting her up like you normally do, you’re acting like a mute weirdo. Nope, not twisted at all.”
I contemplated cracking him over the head with my pool stick, but I had a soft spot for his wife, Ayden, and I wouldn’t want her to get upset with me.
“Shut up. You’re not around enough to make commentary on how I’m acting anyway.”
I meant it as a joke, a way to change the topic of conversation, but I saw him flinch and his hands tightened involuntarily on his beer bottle.
Jet worked hard. He was hell-bent on making a name for bands he had faith in. He was killing it as the head of his own record label, but the trade-off was that he had to go where the music was. That meant he was forever off to L.A., Nashville, New York, Austin, or even Europe. It was hard for him considering he and Ayden had only been married for a couple of years and they were in love—really, really in love. I could see it wearing on both of them but neither one had said anything, and like I said, there was no stopping fate no matter what that nasty bitch had in store for you.
“Everything all right with you on the home front?” I didn’t want to pry but it was way better than dredging up my past for him to dig through.
“Ayden and I are great. It’s everything else that sucks.” He shook his dark head and looked at me from under a frowning brow. “She’s going to apply to transfer to the grad program in Austin.”
I paused for a second so I didn’t say something stupid.
“You want to move to Austin?”
He chugged back the rest of the beer in his hand and laid the pool stick across the table.
“Want to—no, but it makes the most sense. She can transfer to UT Austin and finish school and I can actually see my wife more than two or three times a month. It just sucks. Our friends are here. Her brother is here and Cora just had the baby.” He shook his head again and his chest rose and fell in a heavy sigh. “It was her idea, but it still makes me feel like shit. I renovated the studio thinking it would be enough, but it just isn’t.”
It did suck but it was understandable.
“When will she find out if she gets in?”
“Not for a while. It takes some time to get into grad school, and even if they do want her she has to go and do an interview and jump through a million hoops before it’s official. Try not to say anything to Rule or Nash. She hasn’t told Shaw or Cora yet. She wants to wait until we know for sure what we’re doing.”
Rule and Nash ran the tattoo shop and Shaw was not only Ayden’s best friend but also Rule’s brand-new wife. All three of the girls in our little world were supertight, and if one of the dudes let this major development slip it, there would be carnage to follow for sure. Those girls were a solid unit and the idea of one of them leaving was definitely going to be the cause of some serious emotional upheaval.
“That’s some pretty big news. Keeping it quiet might not be the way to go. Has she told Asa she’s thinking about leaving?”
Asa ran the Bar and was Ayden’s older brother. He was a little bit of a wild card and the only reason he had settled in Denver was to be closer to his sister. The two had a strained relationship due to the fact that Asa had a history of being a major shithead and petty criminal, but they were just starting to mend some long-broken fences.
Jet nodded and propped a hip up on the table. I really did expect those jeans of his to split in half every single time he moved. It was endlessly fun to rip on him about it.
“They talked about it. He told her to do whatever makes her happy. I think it bummed her out he didn’t ask her to stay.”
I grunted and cocked my head to the side a little as I noticed a group of guys several years older than us giving us squinty-eyed looks from the far corner of the bar. I mean I knew we didn’t fit in with the run-down ambience, the rough-and-tumble vibe of the place, but we were minding our own business and we always respected the locals’ territory.
I told Jet absently while keeping an eye on the group, “He spent her entire life asking her to do things for him. After he almost died it makes sense that maybe for once in his life Asa would want her to do something for herself. He knows you’re what makes her happy. He isn’t going to try and keep her from being happy anymore.”
Asa was an enigma. He sort of just showed up out of the blue and had dragged Ayden into a mess full of her past and a group of angry bikers. The end result had landed Asa in a coma and Jet and Ayden in matching wedding rings. We all had welcomed the blond southerner into the fold, but everyone watched him with careful eyes. He was lucky Rule’s brother, Rome, had come home from the war and ended up owning the Bar. For some reason the older Archer took a shine to Asa and had put him to work. I think we were all just kind of waiting to see how it played out.
The group that was watching us bent their heads together and the guy I figured was the leader met my gaze and flipped me off with a
