Slow Burn

by K. Bromberg

  Time is precious. Waste it wisely.

  “Give me strength, Lex,” I whisper into the silence.

  I realize how much I don’t want to be alone right now. I know it’s the loneliness talking, but I miss the sounds of Dante moving about in the kitchen downstairs. I reluctantly admitted to Rylee what had happened with him and why he’s gone merely because I didn’t want to lie to her again but knew she’d be worried that I was alone.

  Shockingly she gave in to my need for solitude after I explained that with her knack for planning, I knew after the surgery I’d probably never be left alone. And I needed as much time to myself right now as I can get. But lying here with only my thoughts screaming through the silence, I wish I would have accepted Ry’s offer to spent the night and snuggle up with me.

  But I didn’t.

  So I replay the voice mail again.

  And again.

  Because I know if I keep the phone replaying the message, it will prevent me from dialing Becks.

  I miss him. Desperately. I’m doing the right thing because if I feel like this after such a short time, it makes me realize just how he’d feel if he went through all of this with me and then was left alone in the end.

  Fucking brutal.

  Exhaustion starts to win the battle over my internal thoughts. My finger hitting the repeat command every two minutes and thirteen seconds as the voice mail ends to start it anew.

  I begin to drift off to sleep.

  I don’t walk away from the people I love without a fight, and damn it to hell, Haddie Montgomery, you’d better prepare for that fight because I’m in love with you.

  The words flicker through my mind, and I’m so tired and worn-out from the day that I vaguely wonder if I’m remembering or if my finger actually dialed his number and I’m hearing him say them to me.

  Regardless, I succumb to the pull of slumber, my last waking thoughts focused on Becks conquering my heart rather than the cancer invading my body.

  Chapter 27

  BECKS

  The engine revs down the backstretch, the computer in front of me reporting all of the gauges in the car that I usually study and scrutinize religiously.

  But not today.

  Today the constantly fluctuating numbers don’t register at all. I see them, I record them, but where they usually reflect specific issues with the car, today they don’t trigger to life anything in my brain.

  “We good?” Colton’s disembodied voice comes through my headset, and I realize I didn’t even check what I was supposed to, so I can’t answer him. I don’t have a clue.

  I’d love to say, Yeah, we’re good, but this is my best friend’s life in a car that will fly close to if not over two hundred miles per hour. I can’t bullshit him, even though the thought crosses my mind.

  “Sorry, Wood,” I tell him, calling him the nickname someone on the race team gave him years ago. “Got distracted with something. Wasn’t able to track the numbers.” I ignore the glances from the crew when they hear my explanation over their headsets. They saw me sitting at the computer. No distraction occurred whatsoever. “Give me a sec, and I can pull them up, make sure they’re within range.”

  “Feels like they are,” Colton says, his voice strained from the force as he enters turn three. “Ass end’s not sliding anymore on the top side. Feels like the guys fixed it with that last adjustment.”

  “Good,” I tell him as I scramble to study the numbers and make sure his assessment is in fact correct.

  Fuck if Haddie’s not gotten to me—goddamn voodooed me—but hell if I can tell Colton that. Explain to him I’m so distracted by a woman who keeps pushing me away that I can’t focus on my fucking job. Yeah. Cuz that’s professionalism at its finest.

  “Good? That’s all you’ve got for me?” The car accelerates out of turn one, his voice vibrating with the pressure against his body. “Why don’t you work on pulling your head out of your ass and doing your fucking job, huh?”

  I bite the knee-jerk reaction on my tongue to tell him to go to hell. I deserve the shit he just gave me after blowing our meeting yesterday with Penzoil because I was too distracted.

  “Numbers are within range.” I tell him as my eyes glance over the last gauge readings. “We’re all set.”

  There’s silence on the radio, and I know he knows I’m off my game right now. He won’t ask why because hell, we’re guys and don’t get all touchy-feely, and shit, but I never fuck up with sponsors. And I fucked up with Penzoil without a doubt.

  The silence hangs there, the sound of the engine all I hear on the open mic as I wait to see if he’s going to push my buttons here or if he’ll rake me over the coals in private.

  It’s one or the other. Colton’s not the type of guy to let something like this go. Not because I fucked up, but because as much as he’ll never admit it, he cares. The stubborn bastard.

  “Good. I’m taking her for another twenty. Balls out,” he finally says. And I know it’s his way of saying, You paying attention now?

  The car’s dialed, and for him to run full throttle is something he knows I hate. Runs the risk of fucking up its perfect state. He’s goading me into reaction, and fuck him, I’ve got enough shit to deal with, I don’t need him on my back too.

  “Have fun,” I tell him, noticing Smitty down the line whip his head over to look at me when my typical arguing with Colton over unnecessary risks doesn’t come.

  Fuck. It must be pretty obvious, I don’t have my shit together.

  Colton’s only response is a deep rev of the engine, which to me says, Fuck you. I start packing my shit up as my mind absently notes the turns one through four as he hits them from the pitch of the engine alone.

  I debate sticking around for him to get out of the car and dealing with the ration of shit I know he’s gonna give me but figure it’s not worth it. I’m pissed and moody and going to blows with my best friend isn’t something I want to tempt.

  Although, fuck, is it tempting.

  Maybe I just want to get a reaction out of someone since it seems like I can’t get shit out of Haddie.

  Zip. Zero. Zilch.

  Anger, accusations, indifference … anything would be better than the silence.

  It’s been five days since I went to her house and found her in the backyard. I can still see the look in her eyes, feel the desperate hunger in her touch. But riding next to that is the rejection on her tongue and the sting in her words.

  And then she got me so goddamn flustered that I told her I loved her. Fucking loved her. Something I hadn’t even fully admitted to myself because thinking you feel it is one thing, but saying it aloud—putting it out into the universe—you can’t take that shit back. And then what did she do in return?

  Nothing.

  Not a goddamn thing.

  Not a single Becks wait or Don’t go. Not a Wow this is too fast or Are you fucking crazy? She gave me nothing but guarded eyes and complete withdrawal.

  I shove the hurt back down. Push away the unanswered phone calls and unread texts, the numerous times I’ve driven past her house to see if she’s home, and the time I spent pounding on her door last night because her car was in the driveway. My pleas for her to open up, to talk to me, tell me she’s okay, that she hates me, really chooses Dante. Something. Anything. This suspended state of limbo fucking sucks.

  The woman’s reduced me to a needy son of a bitch, and I hate it.

  My thoughts are racing faster than Colton around the track right now, and I just need to quiet my head for a bit. I shove up out of my seat, ignoring the looks I get from the rest of the guys in the view box, and grab my keys. I glance down at my cell and pretend I’m reading a text as I make my way to the door. “Tell Wood something came up, and I have to bail. I’ll call him later.”

  I don’t wait for a response because I need to pull a Haddie.

  Lose myself for a bit so that I feel a whole lot less. Fuck.

  Listening to what my damn heart is saying is new for me. And it’s a
goddamn muscle, so why am I hoping that it can give me some answers?

  Muscles may not be able to make sense of something, but hell if they can’t ache with pain when they’re used and abused.

  And she sure as fuck did just that.

  So why do I still want her?

  Fucking love.

  * * *

  The music is bluesy, the lighting on the dark side, and the beer ice-cold as it slides down my throat. The best part about being in my favorite pub besides being left the fuck alone is that all I have to do is raise my chin to Vivian, and she brings me another round without a single word.

  It may be her first week on the job and we’ve just met, but Viv’s my new best friend for that alone.

  The texts have finally stopped after two hours of constant pestering. But not a single one is from the person I want.

  I’m enjoying feeling sorry for myself, wallowing in a damn ocean of barley and hops with a few odd shots thrown in here and there. My lips are numb, my head is quiet—spinning but still quiet—and I still don’t have a fucking clue how she could choose him over me.

  “More her type, my ass,” I mutter to myself, thinking of the last thing she said to me. Sweet fuck. I can blame my drunk mind on why I don’t understand, but the haze isn’t strong enough to forget that I’m drinking because I can’t make sense of it sober, either.

  I raise my chin to Vivian again. Might as well add to the clutter of glasses lined up on my table.

  I lean back in the booth I’ve commandeered at the back of Sully’s Pub and cross my legs, which are stretched out on the bench. I run through the possible scenarios in my head, trying to figure how we went from sleepless nights and that look in her eyes when I left her after the trip to Ojai to here.

  I mean, fuck, it was hard not to go to the last Scandalous event a few nights back. Took everything I had to not go sit in a dark corner of the club and watch her, make sure she’s okay. Just see her—because damn, I miss her—but then that would be stalkerish.

  I refrained by drinking a six-pack and watching the game.

  I thank Vivian when the bottle slides onto the table in front of me and consider calling Rylee. It’s a stupid fucking move on my part, but what other choices do I have at this point? It’s gotta be the alcohol pussifying my thoughts.

  But damn, the alcohol just might have a point.

  Then I realize that as much as I want to know what the hell Haddie is thinking, I also want to ask Rylee if she’s gotten the test results back yet. I know it’s nothing, but there’s that tiny bit of worry that’s still unsettling. And since Haddie won’t communicate with me in any way, shape, or form, I decide to ask Rylee.

  My God, that’s pathetic.

  Wait. I can’t ask Rylee about test results because she doesn’t even know about Haddie’s damn biopsy in the first place. There goes that plan.

  I close my eyes, welcoming the off-kilter spin of my world right now because if life’s not going to make sense, you might as well do it drunk, right?

  “Gonna drink yourself into a good mood or what?”

  I snap my head forward at the sound of Colton’s voice and immediately look over to where Vivian stands. She scrunches up her face and mouths the words I’m sorry as she points the blame at Miller, the bartender who knows Colton and me as frequent customers.

  Fuck. When did he get on shift? I thought I had lucked out with a new waitress and old Earl, who couldn’t care less what I was doing over here by myself.

  I ignore Colton and close my eyes again, putting my head back to the same position against the back of the booth.

  I hear Colton chuckle and then plop down across from me in the booth. It takes only seconds before I hear the clink of another bottle on the table and a polite thank-you as he’s served.

  And I wait for it—the ration of shit—but he doesn’t say a word. So I sit with my eyes closed until the suspense of what in the hell he’s doing is so consuming that I have to look. I crack my eyes open and angle my head over to find him sitting there the same as me but he’s staring at his beer bottle, peeling the label.

  “Hey,” he says with a lift of his chin, and then goes back to his label without even meeting my eyes.

  “Hey,” I respond, trying to accept his nonchalance when he’s usually a get-straight-to-the-point kind of guy.

  “Watcha drinking?” he asks after a bit, pointing to the empty glasses gathered in the middle of the table. “Scotch.”

  “Scotch?”

  “Macallan,” I add.

  “Good shit,” he says with an appreciative hum.

  “That it is,” I sigh out, paying attention to the label on my own beer now. “Tastes like Heaven—smooth, addictive—but hell if it doesn’t pack a punch.”

  “Why do I get the feeling we’re not talking about alcohol here?”

  My eyes lift to meet the intensity in his. I see concern and compassion there and want to talk about it at the same time as I want to avoid discussing it.

  About Haddie.

  And even stronger than my need to spew my guts is my wanting to ask him about her. Chicks talk about shit like this—guys don’t—so maybe Haddie talked to Rylee. Told her about why she’s pushing me away, that I confessed my love like a jackass.

  God, this is so fucking frustrating.

  “Sorry about Penzoil.”

  Colton’s head startles with the whiplash of switching gears. “It happens,” he says, and I know I’ve had a lot to drink, but I’m not processing this laid-back guy responding to me very well. I feel like he’s holding back, walking on eggshells, and avoiding pushing me when that’s usually the norm.

  Might as well just add a bit more discord to the eddy of confusion already whirling on the broken merry-go-round in my head.

  “Nah. I fucked up. It’s on me. Got a lot on my plate.”

  “You okay? Your parents and Walk okay?”

  “Yeah, they’re cool…. Sorry. All’s good in the hood.” His genuine concern for my family has me immediately apologizing for the second time in mere seconds. I tilt the bottle to my lips, the flavor not even registering anymore because the potent taste of rejection is stronger. We sit there in comfortable silence before I finally confess, “It’s the goddamn Macallan.”

  It’s all I give him, yet he nods his head before taking a swallow of his beer. “You don’t brown-bag Macallan, Daniels.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I tell him, glad he caught the correlation between Haddie and the Scotch. “Can’t enjoy it—brown bag or not—if someone else is swigging from your bottle.”

  He blows out a breath and slouches back in his seat with a shake of his head. “Dude, that’s rough.” His eyes glance up to read mine. “She blew you off?”

  “In so many words.”

  “I’d ask if you understand why, but by the empty bottles on the table and the mere fact that she’s a chick, I’d say the answer is a big, fat, fucking no.” I don’t fight the smile that pulls at my lips. “I told you dude, estrogen vortex. No use in even trying to figure it out.”

  “Truth.” I tip my beer toward him and fall silent for a minute, the bottle in my hand easier to look at than Colton as the confession forms on my tongue. “It’s all your fault, you know.”

  He chokes out a laugh, his face scrunched up as he tries to figure out just what in the hell I’m talking about. “This is gonna be good,” he says, clapping his hands together and rubbing them back and forth. “Lay it on me, brother. Can’t wait to hear your fucked-up logic.”

  I glare at him. “You started all this shit. We—you and I—were perfectly fine—single and ready to mingle—and then you had to go and get struck by the almighty voodoo.”

  His laugh is loud and draws attention from other patrons beginning to fill up the bar. “Struck? More like knocked me on my ass. Dude … I’m sorry…. Wait. No, I’m not.” He slaps his hand on the table. “I’m not going to apologize because when it happens to you, you’ll get it. All of it. The barebacking, being okay with someon
e holding your balls in their hands, the …” Colton’s head snaps up to mine as the puzzle pieces fall into place. His eyes widen as the smirk starts to play at the corners of his mouth. “No fucking way …”

  “Viv?” I look away from him immediately and search for my new best friend and her constant supply of mind-numbing gifts.

  “For the love of all things holy … you didn’t … you’re not … you fucking are, aren’t you?” he finally sputters out. And just what I need: Now Donavan knows I’ve been voodooed.

  Let the shit storm begin.

  I refuse to look up at him, don’t want him to see the misery in my eyes now that it’s unofficially out on the table. Fuck. Here comes the ribbing I deserve but sure as hell don’t need. Viv might as well double up the next round because I think I’m gonna need it.

  “Nah …” Denial is my only option.

  “Sweet Jesus, dude. I go on my honeymoon, you bang the maid of honor, and then you tie your dick in knots over her—”

  “At least you acknowledge it’s long enough to tie in a knot.” I shrug, the beer sliding down so nice, and it feels like I can breathe a bit now that I’m no longer lying to my best friend.

  He snorts out a laugh. “In your dreams, dude. Have another.”

  “Fuck off. And thank you. I believe I will have another.” I lean my head back against the booth again and sigh, wanting to say more but not sure how much ammo I want to give him because I sure as hell don’t need to take any more shit right now from anyone.

  “Good. I’m buying. That way I can get you good and drunk.”

  “I believe I’m already on my way there,” I admit. He murmurs his consent, and I force my eyes open so the room stops spinning behind my eyelids. And so I don’t see that image of her standing there, mouth telling me to go but eyes begging me to stay. “I just … It doesn’t make sense…. I … Fuck!”

  “That about sums it up.”

  I appreciate his silence after the comment as I try to grasp the shifting thoughts in my head. “With Ry … did you … were you …”