Hell on Heels(37)

“And then what?”

It pained me to think it, but to say it out loud was a special kind of hell. “His daughter showed up.”

“What?!” she screeched, and the shrill sound of it ricocheted inside the car.

“She looks like she’s ten.” I rested my forehead on her dash.

Leighton wasn’t stupid; she did the math in her head. “But that means…”

“Yeah.”

“Did he say anything?” She sounded as shocked as I felt.

“No.” I shook my head against the dash. “I ran inside.”

“Jesus,” Leighton repeated. “You need a drink.”

She said it, even though she knew I had a self-imposed limit of three.

I never got drunk, ever.

But three sometimes felt good, really good.

“You haven’t even heard about my date last night.” I laughed into the dash.

Turning on her blinker, she pulled me upright by the back of my coat. “What happened last night?”

“Maverick ripped the door off the bathroom stall while I was about to go pee.”

Her mouth dropped open.

“We were evacuated from the show due to gunshots.”

She made a startled sound in the back of her throat.

“Turned out to be unrelated gang activity.”

Leighton rolled her eyes. “‘Cause that makes this story way less insane.”

“Beau kissed me.”

She clapped her hands.

“And this morning, he sent the cast of the Dirty Dancing show to perform the finale in my office, because we missed it.” I shook my head. “‘Cause of the gunshots and all.”

Her mouth hung open again. “No shit.”

“Definitely shit.” I put my head back down on her dash. “And then Dean.”

“And then Dean,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” I said.

Leighton drove, and I filled her in with more detail on the events of last night, and today, and tonight, as she did.

By the time we arrived, I was overwhelmed and it showed.

My flight instincts were still on high alert and my response was to emotionally shut down.

I was fading, fast.

We were sat at a small table in the back of Chill Winston.

“I’ll have a glass of Chardonnay.” Leighton told the waitress. “Whatever’s good.”

The redhead nodded and turned to me, but Leighton spoke on my behalf. “She’ll have a whiskey, neat.”

The waitress left and Leighton leaned her petite forearms onto the table. “I think you better tell me what’s going on in that head of yours.” She tilted her head to the side and pulled her perfect eyebrows together. “And I don’t mean the dates and dancing office parties. I mean what’s going on upstairs. You look like you’ve been to hell and back.”

I felt that way too.

I stared at her—or, well, through her. “I’m lost.”

“What do you mean?” She was concerned. It was all over her delicate features.

“I’m a lost woman,” I told her, not entirely sure I knew what I meant by it, but just knowing that was the only way I knew how to describe what I felt.

I’d been content for years with the guarded way I lived my life, but now I, for lack of a better word, I wasn’t.

“It’s not just Dean.” I shook my head. “It’s all of it. It’s Beau. It’s Maverick. It’s Henry. It’s me.”

She reached across the table and squeezed my hands.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” A tear slid down my cheek.

“Do what, Char?”

I pressed my eyes tightly closed. “I don’t want to be in this much pain anymore.”

My best friend slid out from her side of the booth and into my side, wrapping her arms around my shoulders.

“I think it’s killing me,” I whispered for the first time out loud to anyone.

Leighton held me like that, even when the waitress brought back our drinks. She never let me go.

“Something has to give.” I stared into the highball glass now sitting on the tabletop.

She waited. She waited until she was sure I had nothing left to say, and then she spoke. “I love you, Charleston.”

“I love you, too.”

“I know you do. I also know that you’ll understand that what I have to say only comes from a good place.” I nodded. Leighton didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. “You have to stop torturing yourself. First, it was with Dean. Then, it was with Henry. And it’s been either one of them or something else you’ve picked up along the way for the last ten years.” She sighed sadly. “You need to find a way to forgive yourself for losing them. You need to find a way to let go.”

The tears from my eyes fell quietly, and she wiped them away as she continued to speak.

“It’s not your fault they left you, but Char, I mean it, it’s your fault that you left you.” She started to cry too, because she knew it would hurt me to hear her say that. “I know you’re lost. I know it feels that way. It feels that way, because you walked out on yourself before you ever gave yourself a fighting chance.”

It burned.

It hurt the way getting stitches without freezing did.