She’d felt it too. Not sure if that’s better or worse, but at least we’re on the same page. It sure as hell shouldn’t make me happy, but it does.
Because I do know why.
It’s why she left, and I’m glad she’s gone.
Why I’m grateful I don’t have her information.
Why I was careful not to look at her license plate and accidentally memorize it.
It’s bad enough I want her with a relentlessness that’s settled into my bones.
But what’s really throwing me is the foreign and entirely unwelcome feeling sitting heavy in my chest.
I feel…connected to her.
Like we’d walked into this room and stripped away all our normal walls and barriers and ended up naked in more ways than the obvious.
The truth taunts me.
If I put my mind to it, I could find her.
The part of me trained to search for patterns, to gather information from the periphery, already wants to catalogue everything I know about her.
I won’t, but I could.
I shake my head, ridding myself of the crazy thoughts.
Forget her.
I turn on the shower and get on with what is sure to be one hell of a day.
Many hours later, Ryder and I are sitting in Sam Roberts’s bar, located on the outskirts of town. A charming but shabby dive that is blessedly empty at dinnertime on a Saturday.
I’m exhausted. Bone-weary.
But no matter how tired I am, sleep is hours away.
The adrenaline is still rushing through my veins.
Which is why, instead of going home, Ryder and I came to visit Sam.
The free alcohol he supplies as one of our best friends is great, but we’re here to ease the transition between work and home. Where we talk through what happened and what needs to be done, so we’re fit for the rest of the world that doesn’t deal with tragedy on a semi-regular basis.
And, what neither of us would ever admit, we come for Sam.
The way he somehow smooths the rough edges away with…whatever it is he does with the energy. It’s one of his unusual talents I can’t explain and don’t need to because he doesn’t like to talk about it.
“Are we missing anything?” I ask Ryder, before downing the rest of my beer.
He digs his thumbs into his eye sockets. “I think that’s it.”
“I’m sure we’ll think of a few more things at two a.m.” An unfortunate byproduct of a racing mind.
“I’m banking on Sophie putting me into a coma.” Ryder’s fiancée is a little blond-haired spitfire by way of Chicago who now works as the PR director at Revival’s city hall. She rocked his world the second he laid eyes on her and hasn’t stopped rocking it since.
“Can’t say I blame you.” The woman from last night fills my thoughts. Again. She’d put me in a coma. She already had. I’d slept so deeply, I’d dreamed.
It wasn’t a good dream—they never are—but it was a rarity.