Leaving Amarillo(16)
I jerk my chin upward, faking a confidence I don’t have but refusing to let him intimidate me. “Did you sleep with that waitress? I want to know.”
He snorts out a harsh, humorless laugh. “No you don’t.”
“I do. Tell me the truth.” I look up into his eyes, praying the answer is no. Something about that specific waitress is really bothering me. Maybe because I saw their initial flirtation or maybe because of what she said to me in the ladies’ room. I don’t know. I’m well aware of the fact that he’s been with countless women, but somehow this one feels different. More personal. Because this time, he knew how I felt and if he slept with her anyways, then he actively chose her over me. “Please,” I add to my already pathetic plea.
He releases me from my forearm prison and shoves both of his hands into his hair. I inhale a much-needed breath and relax just a little. Until he slams a palm against the wall. I flinch, only because it startled me, but I can see in his wounded expression that he believes he scared me. As if I could ever be afraid of him.
“No, okay? No I didn’t sleep with her. There, you happy now?”
“Well, you’re obviously not. If you were going to be so upset about it, why didn’t you just go ahead and do her?”
“You gotta be f*cking kidding me,” he says, raising his voice a few decibels shy of shouting. “Which is it? You want me to have screwed her or not?”
I’m all wound up, like the toys from my childhood. The ones with the knobs you turn and turn, winding so tight the spinny thing breaks and falls off. I’m confused and hurt and angry and turned the hell on in a way I can’t even process. The combination is more than I can handle rationally. I take a page from his broody book and let my palm smack the wall behind me. It stings so I clench it shut. The pain distracts me and I blurt out the truth.
“No, I don’t want you to have screwed her. I don’t want you to screw anyone!”
His reaction is wide-eyed shock and disbelief. “Anyone? Christ, you want me to be celibate? Do you hate me or something?”
Licking my lips, I take several deep breaths in an attempt to calm down. It almost works. “I want you,” I begin slowly before taking another deep breath. “To not engage in foreplay in front of my face.”
He opens his mouth to respond—most likely to deny that he did that tonight—but I place my trembling fingers against his lips, firmly breaking our ten-year unspoken no-touching rule. I’d like to take a moment to enjoy the soft, full, sensuously masculine mouth of his, but there isn’t time. I need to focus all cylinders of my brain on what I’m trying to say.
“I told you how I feel, what I want. And I get it. You don’t feel the same way. Or you won’t act on your feelings. But that doesn’t mean I can switch mine right off for your convenience. And it doesn’t mean that I’m not jealous, not hurt, and that I don’t hate, hate, being in the presence of any woman who is going to have you in a way that I never will.”
I’m breathing hard, tasting his anxiety and frustration in the air between us. Removing my fingers from his mouth and placing them on mine, I watch him go to war with himself.
His neck loosens, allowing his head to fall forward. Remaining completely still while he inhales the length of my neck, I swallow hard.
“Tell me I’ll never have you that way. Tell me to move on and let this go,” I whisper, needing to hear him say it and terrified that he actually will in equal measure.
“You’re my best friend. Growing up, you were my safe place,” he tells me on a ragged breath that seems to pull the life completely out of both of us. “I don’t want to ruin you, Bluebird.”
Before I can assure him that he won’t ruin me, Gavin does the absolute last thing I expect him to.
In my mind’s eye, I watch him grab me, kiss me, and we spend the entire night making love. But in the real world, where I unfortunately live, where parents die, and dreams don’t usually come true, Gavin Garrison bites out his favorite curse, turns away from our intimate confrontation, and walks out on me.
Chapter 6
Austin MusicFest—Day 1
“ONE, TWO, ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!” GAVIN BEATS OUT THE count with his drumsticks and it feels like he’s playing the drums on my temples.
After he left last night? I lay awake and tried to come up with some excuse for why I’d behaved the way I had. The memory of the humiliatingly honest truths I’d told made me want to turn back time, slap the me from yesterday, and shove a gag in her overactive mouth.
Could I tell him I’d felt sick and taken unnecessary cold medicine in order to avoid getting ill and screwing up MusicFest? Or maybe I could say that I had food poisoning and wasn’t myself. Except he knew I hadn’t really ever eaten.
My intro comes and I play my few lines in “Whiskey Redemption,” a slow ballad Dallas wrote about a man who loses everything to a drinking problem. I usually love this song, love the harmony that Dallas and I play, but today it’s grating on my sleep-deprived nerves.
Gavin Garrison riled me up and left me hanging and it’s only now that I’m realizing how incited my pissed-off side is by him igniting a flame he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stick around long enough to extinguish.
We finish up and play a few classic hits and then some up-tempo stuff. By the end of the set, the anger is ebbing and flowing, effectively draining me.