Butterface

Not waiting for a response, because this empty feeling wouldn’t last forever and that meant her emotions were a ticking time bomb, she turned and started toward the door.

Ford stood in front of the door, all the color washed from his face. “Gina, please hear me out.”

Isn’t that what she did last time after overhearing the badge bunnies in the bathroom? She’d known they were right, that he couldn’t really be that into her, but she hadn’t wanted them to be. So she’d listened to him. And there’d been other times when that itchy feeling at the back of her neck had warned her that this wasn’t going to work out like she wanted. She’d ignored it. Listened to him instead.

After everything she’d been through, all the humiliations and embarrassments, she would have thought she had a super sense about it by now.

“Did Kyle lie about me being a job?” she asked, half-wanting to hear him deny it.

Ford opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“Not fast enough on the cover story this time, huh? You probably should have held onto that gem of ‘I see you’ for another girl.” Pain. It was everywhere. Her chest. Her throat. Her eyes. Her stomach. They all ached like she’d been hit by a truck. The need to get out of the Hartigans’ house went from a need to a life-or-death necessity. She pressed through the bone-deep ache and walked to the door, stopping right in front of Ford, and looked him in the eye. “But believe me, now I see you, too. Please move.”

He opened his mouth as if to argue, but he must have seen in her face that she wasn’t going to listen. He stepped aside.

She walked out of the house without looking back, using all of her concentration to put one foot in front of the other until she got to the end of the block, where she called an Uber and wondered just how far away the driver would take her if she begged.

…

All of Ford’s policing skills left him the moment Gina walked out of the house, because he couldn’t detect his way out of a paper bag. First, he hesitated in the doorway, the click of her shutting it echoing in his skull, staring at it as if she was going to come back if he just stared at it long enough. When realization finally dawned, he yanked the door open with enough force that it bounced off the wall and shook the family photos lining the entryway and took off down the street. He had a fifty-fifty chance of picking the right direction and, of course, went the wrong way, correcting his mistake just in time to see Gina get in the back of a car with an Uber sticker and drive off.

You know where she’s going. You can just go home and—

But the Victorian wasn’t his home. It never had been. It was just the place that had felt like it because she was there. He forced his feet to work, to move one in front of the other, and get him back to his parents’ house so he could figure out his next move—because he had no idea what to do next.

If he could just talk to her…but that wasn’t his way. It never had been.

He didn’t charm. He didn’t emote. He followed rules and standard operating procedures. If there was a guidebook for what to do after fucking up this bad, he hadn’t read it.

Fallon was waiting for him, her hands planted on her hips, when he walked through the front door. Kyle stood just behind her. It took everything Ford had not to punch the douchebag just for the satisfaction of watching him go down. That wasn’t going to happen, though, because his mom was standing right beside the loud-mouthed dick. Faith and Finian stood right behind her, glowering at him.

“What in the hell did you do?” she asked.

Everything wrong, but he wasn’t about to admit it. “What were you thinking by bringing that asshole here?”

Kyle let out an offended squawk. “I’m not an asshole.”

Ford and Fallon turned on him as a unit. “Yes, you are.”

Kyle’s gaze went from Ford to Fallon and back again before he grumbled something that sounded a lot like crazy fucking Hartigans and stormed out of the house. The only thing better than watching Kyle walk out would have been seeing Gina stroll back in—a fact that landed like a punch to the kidneys.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” Fallon hollered after him, turning with a smile toward Ford. That moment of agreement at taking out the trash, though, disappeared faster than donuts in the break room.