He chewed his cheek again. He hadn’t bargained for her putting him in the hot seat. How did he say he still loved her?
He’d pined for her through his rock bottom. Time had worn down that pining, like it had the edges of that photo crammed in his wallet lining, but the ache of missing her was flowing full force now, like a current beneath the surface.
He swallowed at the throaty rattle to his voice, his hands started working his mesh-back, clenching it with whitening knuckles. His eyes dipped back to her lips. He’d devoured those lips so many times. He’d drank in her abundant kisses, a well that once had never run dry for him but sure seemed dry now.
“I wouldn’t have been good for you anymore,” was the random remark his brain decided to blurt out through his tight lips. His gaze popped back to hers, those naturally wide, shimmery blue depths so sparkly, so bright. “I didn’t know what to say at the hospital.” Worked that cheek in his molars. “Seeing you confused me. Been a long time.”
Despite his racing pulse and hungry eyes, he couldn’t help but soften his resolve a degree further. Getting to know about Brandon, about her was all he’d been able to think about last night. It would never happen if she slung venom like a rattler. He had to put her at ease.
“You still wear that hat,” she muttered now, glancing at his mesh-back cap, having finally managed to say something that didn’t sound like she wanted to bite his head off. And a moment’s fondness shimmered over her face, softening the wary hardness. “I hardly recognize it now.” She said it like she hardly recognized him. “Remember that truck stop where we found it?”
A huff worked its way up his throat. “Yeah. That old Randy Travis song playing on the overhead…”
Her eyes widened farther. So innocent an expression, no more frost, when a moment ago she’d been determined to win first place for the world’s hardest glare. She remembered. God, did that song have the same effect on her? It had been their song. Already an oldie when they’d been teens, it had become their theme song, their soundtrack. Which was why it had been such a kick to the teeth yesterday.
He swallowed. “The lining fell out a long time ago, though, but it’s still my fav—”
Shit. She’d picked this hat out for him, popping hats off the rack one at a time, slipping them onto his head, clicking photos on her high school camera as he’d held his chin and smoldered for her lens, just happy to have her hands all over him, until the clerk, huffing, had finally asked them if they were going to buy one or else get lost, to which they’d fallen apart laughing. Their pasts were so intertwined, in ways that didn’t cross his mind anymore except for moments like this when it was brought to his attention. His cap was so much a standard part of his uniform, he put it on without a thought. He exhaled hard, slouching his hands on his hips as her eyes dipped to his tattoo, fixated on it like Brandon had been.
She bit her lip, then—miracle of miracles—she walked the couple paces to his table and slipped her backpack from her shoulder, setting it on the metal seat opposite his. He jammed his mesh-back on his head, pulling the bill down over his nape. She smiled more easily now, watching him do it, as if she finally recognized something about him that she liked.
“How’ve you been—”
“Why’d you leave me—”
Her question, blurted out at the same time as his, rattled him.
She froze. That incredulity twisted her brow again in a way he was starting to realize he didn’t like, and her mindless hand worked its way onto her stomach before she swiftly dropped it. His brows drew together. Was she ill?
Her head began to shake. “How have I been?” she replied, wrenching her backpack right back off the seat and turning away from him as if she couldn’t bear to look at him anymore, grabbing the door handle. He wanted to snag her arm, wanted to stop her. The need to touch her itched at him. There was a strand of hair clinging to her lip, and God, he wanted to brush it back.
A couple guys in road construction reflective shirts pushed through, and Sky held the door for them, which bought him another millisecond of her company to try and mend whatever he’d said wrong so maybe he’d get her back to the table. They thanked her…and, hell, side-eyed her hips and ass as they went, sharing knowing smiles between each other. Dammit, assholes, eyes in front of you. Why did he feel a pinch of dread at losing this tiny connection?
“I know you didn’t want me to enlist,” he blurted out. The workers eyed him, then her, over their shoulders and moseyed off the curb to their truck. She stopped mid-step through the door. “I wish I’d handled so much differently…when we were young. I wish…”
He shook his head with frustration. The right words just wouldn’t come. Just wish these past years could have been far more different. If he’d taken over the ranch, sucked it up and gone into the agriculture program at A&M instead of being petulant and rebellious, bucking against everything Harold Dixon had demanded, none of this would have happened. Once his pops had passed on, he could have raised any number of horses he wanted with no consequence. But he’d been too hotheaded to think further into the future than his nose stuck out.
He’d never envisioned when he’d dreamed big with Skylar and made love and mused about baby feet and puppy paws running though their home that they’d be here. Estranged. Like this. Those dreams of a future, conjured in the arms of the first woman he’d ever slept with, had all turned out like a staph infection gone septic. A dead dream as he’d spent the years coping with the loss of both Boss and his foot.
Travis exhaled. Chewed that cheek. “My vision of the future used to be so simple. But after the bomb, I, eh, I wasn’t myself anymore,” was all he could say, or else he’d choke on his words.
“Who were you, then?” she said, far more gently.
Good question.
“Why didn’t you look for me over the years? Don’t you know how much I missed you?” she murmured, a sliver of vulnerability emerging from a crevice. Desperation wavered her voice despite her champion’s effort to quell it by swallowing. “Why didn’t you try to find me? Why didn’t you want me anymore?”