In order to cover for Buck, Cruise, who seemed alarmingly practiced with this, had launched straight into action to avoid an unpleasant incident.
Buck found me studying hammers like they were my one life’s desire. When he found me, he’d swept me into his body with an arm hooked around my neck, then bent his head and touched his mouth to mine.
I didn’t feel it starting like I normally did, and thus I didn’t open my mouth to invite him to deepen his kiss into a kiss.
The minute his lips left mine (lips, I might add, that not ten minutes before I was pretty certain had been locked to another woman’s), I turned my head and pulled away.
Lorie, Minnie, and Pinky were close, and Lorie instantly moved in for another hug good-bye in what I would realize, while sitting silent in Buck’s huge, black SUV (which, by the by, considering I hadn’t been recently beaten up or pumped full of painkillers, I had since seen was a GMC Yukon), was an effort to cover my withdrawal. Minnie and Pinky did the same.
Buck, sensing nothing amiss (then again, he didn’t really know me as, I reminded myself, I didn’t really know him) took my bags and led me out to his truck.
Then we were away.
“Unh-hunh,” I muttered to the window in answer to his question.
“Clara,” he called.
I didn’t move my gaze from the streaming landscape. “Yes?”
“Baby, did something happen today?” he asked in a gentle voice.
I closed my eyes because his gentle voice hurt.
What once was so gorgeous, in fact, it was so everything that I could convince myself it was the meaning of life…hurt.
Why couldn’t one thing in my life—one thing—be good?
It didn’t have to be perfect, but why couldn’t it be good?
Like the promise of Buck had been, but the reality was not.
I opened my eyes but kept staring out the window.
“No, we had fun. The girls are great. I’m just tired.”
“Too much, too soon,” he surmised on a murmur.
“Unh-hunh,” I agreed on a lie.
“I’ll cook tonight,” he decided. “Gear called. They got some party they’re goin’ to, meetin’ their friends before for food. I was gonna take you to the Valley Inn, but we’ll camp out at home.”
“Great,” I replied, relieved his kids were going to be off at a party.
An hour ago, I would have loved going out and having a meal with Buck like a normal couple.
We’d never done that. We’d never done stuff a normal couple would do—a normal couple dating or a normal couple living together and deciding on the fly to go out and share a meal.
Either way, I would have loved that.
I really would have.
And I might have even donned some of my new biker babe apparel, taken it for a test drive, assessed Buck’s reaction.
Now I was glad we were going to camp out “at home.”
Home.
It hit me then, my thoughts having descended into black, that I had never actually had a home. Not really. Not even with Rogan.
My home with Rogan was owned by the hundreds of pensioners who paid for it when Rogan sucked away their lifeblood (though, he didn’t actually do this, he just sucked away the lifeblood of their retirement, but that was the same thing, or would be eventually).
God, I was a mess.
A pitiful mess.
I pulled in a deep quiet breath asking myself, What would a biker babe do?
I knew one thing from Minnie’s lessons that day.
She wouldn’t think of herself as a pitiful mess.
She’d either stick Buck with a knife or grin and bear it.
I wasn’t the knife-wielding kind, so I was going to have to get myself together, grin and bear it.
“You get a cell?” Buck asked.
“Yes,” I answered the window.
“You have a problem with the contract?” Buck asked.
“Yes, then Minnie shouted ‘fuck’ seven hundred times at the top of her lungs and on the tips of her toes with her face an inch away from the cell phone shop guy’s face and they decided they didn’t have a problem with my contract anymore.”
Buck chuckled.
It was funny, but I didn’t laugh.
“Seems you got on with them,” he observed.
“We bonded,” I replied.
“That’s good, Toots,” he muttered.
I didn’t reply.
Grin and bear it, grin and bear it, grin and bear it.
“Clara?”
“Unh-hunh.”
“Babe, you wanna tell me why you aren’t looking at me?”
I looked at him.
Golly, he was handsome.
I looked out the windshield.
“It’s just pretty up here. Lived in Phoenix my whole life, and probably have been up in the mountains less than a dozen times.”
This was true, but as a reason for not looking at him, it was a big, fat lie.
“You have something on your mind,” he stated.
He was right about that.
“I spent all your money,” I told him to throw him off the scent.
“Babe,” he replied.
“Actually, I spent eleven hundred and sixty-two dollars of your money. I have thirty-eight of your dollars left.”