Actual Stop (Agent O’Connor #1)(59)

“You dance?” Allison murmured out of the corner of her mouth. She definitely sounded amused.

I studied her. Was she was teasing me? It was tough to tell. “A little.”

“There’s this song,” Paige slurred her words. Clearly none of us needed to be present for this conversation. She was evidently hell-bent on driving it whether we actively participated or not. “It’s kind of old, but it was on the radio the other day, and the second I heard it, I thought, ‘Rico and Ryan would look smokin’ if they danced to that.’” She blinked at us expectantly.

“I’m not really dressed for dancing, Paige.”

Paige’s bleary eyes looked me up and down. She waved one hand dismissively. “You look great.”

I held up one foot and hitched up the leg of my jeans a little to show her my shoes. “I’ll probably break an ankle in these.”

“Ooh, those are cute! Where did you get them?” Paige frowned. “Wait, what did you wear on your sting?”

I tried not to smile. “Lower heels. And it wasn’t a sting.”

“It wasn’t? Are you sure?”

“We don’t use the term ‘sting.’”

“I thought everyone used ‘sting.’”

“You’ve been watching too many old cop dramas,” I told her. Rico put a hand over his mouth to hide his grin.

Paige looked to Allison for confirmation as though she didn’t trust me to tell her the truth.

Allison shrugged. “I’ve never heard any of our guys say it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI did.” She met my eyes for an instant and beamed at me before her attention returned to a very serious Paige, leaving a bittersweet ache in my chest.

“I’ll tell you what.” I was determined to finish this discussion and not above looking for any way to placate her into dropping the subject. “I’ll hang out for another half hour, okay? If the song comes on, let us know. Maybe we’ll dance to it.”

Paige nodded happily and stumbled into Rico. She seductively ran her hands over his chest and then threaded them behind his neck. She tilted her face up to his, wordlessly asking for a kiss. Rico’s eyes danced as he complied.

Smiling wistfully at the display, I turned to give them a moment of relative privacy and ended up face-to-face with Allison, which made my heart thud wildly out of control. It was awkward for me to be standing next to her while near such a display of adoration and love as Rico and Paige were putting on, and I didn’t know what to say. So I shoved my hands into my pockets and looked toward the bar where Keith was animatedly telling a story.

My scalp tingled, and I heard a definite ringing in my ears as the sensation of déjà vu threatened to overwhelm me. I’d never been particularly suave in this type of situation before. I sure as hell didn’t know how to act now.

Once upon a time, Allison and I had been a normal, happy couple. Well, sort of. No, not exactly. We’d gotten along well enough, and we’d never lacked for passion, but for reasons I was never able to get her to confess, she’d wanted to keep our relationship a secret. As a result, I’d spent a lot of nights just like this one, standing next to her while feeling as though we were emotionally miles apart. And that was on good nights. More often than not, we’d spent the evening on opposite sides of a room, each pretending the other didn’t exist, though I was always aware of her presence the way you can always tell where the sun is even without looking directly at it.

At first, her attitude hadn’t bothered me. I don’t want everyone in the entire agency to know my business either. And, let’s face it, we’re worse than adolescents sometimes. We all spend so much time together it’s inevitable that after a while familiarity takes its toll, and conversation degenerates into gossip.

Unfortunately, as time wore on, I’d become less able to hide my feelings for her, to say nothing of actually being inclined to. So what? I was in love. I’d gotten her desire not to express extreme PDA when we were out with the work crowd, but to get pissed because I touched her on the arm? Smiled at her? Tried to have a conversation? That, I hadn’t fully understood. And her aversion to almost any amount of interaction with me in a public place had done more than just anger me. It’d f*cking hurt.

She’d expected me to walk an extremely fine line, too, because if I didn’t pay any attention to her at all—which frankly had eventually just became easier for me than constantly policing my actions—she’d accused me of ignoring her and had become upset. But if I’d looked at her for a fraction of a second too long, well, she’d gotten annoyed then, too. I couldn’t win.

Ultimately, the entire situation became too much for both of us. I’d been on edge all the time, worried I’d somehow do something to make her mad. But underneath all that, so much more was tearing me apart. I’d been sad that we couldn’t just be happy together and devastated that she seemed ashamed of us—ashamed of me. I’d been angry I couldn’t just accept her wishes, because I felt I was pushing her to overreact somehow. And I’d also been pissed off at her for putting me in that situation to begin with. Why the hell couldn’t she just freaking relax?

In the end, we’d fallen apart. I think there’d been too much fighting, too much anger, too much resentment, too much pain between us by that point. I hadn’t been able to see any way to fix it, and Allison clearly hadn’t wanted to. She’d shattered me and never once looked back.