Reminders of Him

“You’re really setting yourself up for failure.”

He smiles. “Looks that way.” He relaxes into the booth a little more. “What do you do, Nicole?”

This is the moment I should walk away. Before I say too much, before he asks more questions. But I like his voice and his presence, and I feel like staying here would be distracting, and I really need a distraction right now.

I just don’t want to talk. Talking will only get me in trouble in this town.

“Do you really want to know what I do for a living?” I’m sure he’d rather have his hand up my shirt than hear whatever it is a girl would say in this moment. And since I don’t want to admit that I do nothing for a living because I’ve been locked up for five years, I slide onto his lap.

It surprises him, almost as if he really did expect us to sit here and chat for the next hour.

His expression changes from mild shock to acceptance. His hands fall to my hips, and he grips them. I shiver from the contact.

He adjusts me so that I’m sitting a little farther up, and I can feel him through his jeans, and I’m suddenly not as confident that I can walk away as I was five seconds ago. I thought I could kiss him and then tell him good night and saunter home with pride. I just wanted to feel a little bit powerful before tomorrow, but now he’s dragging his fingers across the skin on my waist, and it’s making me weaker and weaker, and so fucking thoughtless. Not thoughtless as in uncaring, but thoughtless as in empty inside my head, and feeling everything in my chest, like a ball of fire is building inside of me.

His right hand slides up my back, and I gasp because I feel his touch surge through me like a current. This guy is touching my face now, running his fingers down my cheekbone, and then his fingertips across my lips. He’s staring at me like he’s trying to figure out where he knows me from.

Maybe that’s just my paranoia at work.

“Who are you?” he whispers.

I already told him, but I repeat my middle name anyway. “Nicole.”

He smiles but then loses the smile and says, “I know your name. But where’d you come from? Why have we never met before tonight?”

I don’t want his questions. I have no honest answers. I move a little closer to his mouth. “Who are you?”

“Ledger,” he says, right before he rips open my past, pulls out what’s left of my heart, drops it on the floor, and then kisses me.

People say you fall in love, but fall is such a sad word when you think about it. Falls are never good. You fall on the ground, you fall behind, you fall to your death.

Whoever was the first person to say they fell in love must have already fallen out of it. Otherwise, they’d have called it something much better.

Scotty told me he loved me halfway into our relationship. It was the night I was supposed to meet his best friend for the first time. I had already met his parents, and he was excited for that, but not nearly as excited as he was to introduce me to the guy he considered a brother.

That meeting never happened. I can’t remember why; it’s been a long time. But his friend had to cancel, and Scotty was sad, so I baked him cookies and we smoked a joint and then I gave him head. Best girlfriend ever.

Until I killed him.

But this was three months before he would die, and on that particular night, even though he was sad, he was very much alive. He had a beating heart and a rapid pulse and a heaving chest and tears in his eyes when he said, “I fucking love you, Kenna. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. I miss you all the time, even when we’re together.”

That stuck with me. “I miss you all the time, even when we’re together.”

And I thought that was the only thing that stuck with me that night, but I was wrong. Something else stuck with me. A name. Ledger.

The best friend who never showed. The best friend I never got to meet.

The best friend who just put his tongue in my mouth and his hand up my shirt and his name in my chest.

CHAPTER SIX

LEDGER

I don’t understand attraction.

What is it that draws people to each other? How can dozens of women walk through the doors to this bar every week and I don’t feel the urge to give any of them a second glance? But then this girl waltzes in, and I can’t take my fucking eyes off her.

Now I can’t take my mouth off her.