Country Nights

by Winter Renshaw

  An empty, crinkled potato chip bag skirted and skipped down the curb followed shortly by a sheet of newspaper. Up ahead, a man with a clipboard was flagging down anyone who dare walk past him, asking if they had just five minutes for a quick survey.

  “Excuse me. I’m really sorry to both y’all,” a woman said from behind the bench. We whipped around to see a middle-aged mother with three children all dressed in head-to-toe University of Texas apparel. “You’re Beau Mason, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, offering a smile and pulling my arm away from Dakota.

  The woman pulled out her phone and handed it to Dakota. “Would you mind taking a picture of us?”

  Dakota obliged her as I posed between the woman and her smiling kids.

  “We’re huge fans of yours,” the woman gushed, her hands shaking slightly as she took the phone back. “We just love your music.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that.” I waited for them to leave before sitting back down with Dakota, though in the distance, I saw a group of college-aged girls huddling and staring as they walked our way. “Take me to your apartment, Dakota.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “I just moved in today,” I said as we walked south. “Everything’s still in boxes.”

  “Doesn’t bother me.” Beau took my hand again as we walked, pulling me close almost possessively. “Just wanted a little privacy.”

  He drew out the word “privacy” long and slow, with a twang that sent a rumble to my core. The days we’d spent together the previous week, and the nights we’d shared, were all still fresh in my mind. We walked with an urgent, untamable stride, inhaling lungfuls of city wind and basking in things unspoken.

  I liked being with Beau again, but it was always when we spoke that things got all kinds of complicated. We rode the elevator to my new apartment in one of Wilder’s buildings, and not but two seconds after we’d flung the door open, Beau pinned me against the wall.

  “What are you doing to me, Beau?” I breathed, my thoughts scrambling to make sense of this powerless woman I was becoming.

  “I reckon it’s the same damn thing you’re doing to me,” he growled. “You and I have been unfinished business long enough now. ‘Bout time we finish this.”

  My heart raced, my body yielding to his like snow melting under the sun. The Ice Queen was officially thawing. In fact, she was becoming quite feverish with each passing second.

  His hands cupped my face, his fingers tangled in my hair. Lowering his mouth onto mine and depositing a honey-sweet kiss, I breathed him in. With nerves firing in rapid succession each time he pressed his body firm against mine, my tongue danced against his.

  And then his kisses grew hungry, leaving my mouth in search of bare flesh. Still dressed from my interview with him, there wasn’t much that remained uncovered. His fingers left my hair and worked each pearl button of my blouse until it gaped open wide, revealing a preview of my lace bra.

  His hands worked the button of my pants, tugging them off along with my panties before I kicked them aside and let my blouse fall off my shoulders.

  Beau hoisted me up, wrapping my legs around him, and carried me over to the sofa, one of the only things in the entire place that wasn’t in a cardboard moving box. I straddled his lap as he lowered us down into the downy cushions, and a hint of his bulge pressed against my core.

  I wanted him.

  So badly.

  But at the same time, I couldn’t shake what Harrison had whispered into my ear earlier. He wanted me to ask Beau what really happened with Daisy Foxworthy, which meant Harrison knew something I didn’t.

  Beau’s hand gripped the underside of my jaw as his other found its way behind my back, unhooking my bra and letting it fall.

  “You’re so fucking beautiful, Kota,” he said with a teasing half-smile as his teeth raked his full bottom lip. He leaned into me, closing the space between us again as his lips crushed mine. A swelling sensation between my thighs sent my mind into a blank state, like an animal with primal urges that overrode everything else.

  My eyes trailed over his shoulder to the city view outside my uncovered window. It would’ve bothered Coco tremendously to be two seconds from making love in front of the world, but Dakota didn’t care.

  Dakota wanted Beau. She was a slave to his love and always had been.

  Nothing else mattered.

  I gripped the bottom of his t-shirt, pulling it up over his head and disheveling his thick dark hair before crashing into him once again, our bare skin fusing together. My hips bucked and rolled, grinding against his lap in anticipation of what was to come.

  Beau unbuckled his jeans, pushing them down just enough to expose his throbbing cock. Pulling a rubber from his wallet, he sheathed himself and then sent his hands to the small of my back, hoisting me down onto him and sending a torrent of electric rain rushing down my spine. His right hand slid around the front of my hip, his thumb massaging my clit as we rocked in tandem, meeting each other movement for movement.

  His opposite hand grabbed a fistful of my hair, pulling my head back. Beau’s lips seared into the sensitive flesh of my neck, branding me kiss by kiss with his soul. Our rhythm became desperate, his kisses greedier. I lifted my ass higher, coming down onto him harder and deeper, faster and more desperate. With each impalement, I banished every thought that briefly fluttered across my brain that told me this wouldn’t work.

  Rocking.

  Rolling.

  Grinding.

  Each second brought me closer to the edge. With labored breathing and my body tightening around him, an intense explosion inside me heightened every emotion – good or bad – coursing my body.

  I lowered my face, wanting to look into his eyes as he came inside me. Beau caught my bottom lip between his teeth before kissing me again and releasing a deep groan before shuddering and releasing himself.

  I fell onto him, our chests heaving together and the coolness of the apartment air wrapping itself around us. With deliciously sore lips, I smiled, breathing in a sated contentment that was quickly replaced with plaguing doubts.

  How funny that the boy I’d sworn off could give me one knowing look and bark out one command and I’d dropped my panties to the floor without a single objection.

  “Come home with me, Dakota,” Beau said, breaking the silence that made the thoughts in my head blaring and loud. Our eyes met, locking like magnets and making me forget how to breathe for a second as the future flashed before me.

  “You know I can’t do that.” I climbed off him, sitting beside him.

  He pulled my legs across his lap. “You know I can’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

  For ten years, I had an ache in my heart where he should’ve been. And now my heart was flooded with more Beau than I knew what to do with. My body and soul had damned the torpedoes and blasted full speed ahead without so much as consulting my head, and now I was stuck in some sort of murky area where one wrong decision could demolish the life I’d worked so hard to build.

  “It’s not that simple,” I said with polished regret. “I have a contract at work. I might get promoted…”

  And you might break my heart again.

  Oh, and I gave our baby up for adoption ten years ago, and I’m scared you might hate me for it.

  “I realize I’m offering you the world when you’ve got your own one right here,” he said, “but I don’t care. I’ll wait. I’ll wait for you, Dakota. Because I don’t want anyone else.”

  All the reasons it wouldn’t work flooded my mind, though they were all rooted in one thing: fear.

  It was funny though, because fear had never stopped me from doing anything before. I prided myself on being fearless and brave, climbing mountains and ruthlessly pursuing dreams like my life depended on them.

  But there I was, afraid to love Beau, really love him. Afraid to tell him my secret. No, I was terrified.

  “This is my home now. This is my life. This is who I am. Maybe we fit together like two
puzzle pieces when we were kids, but we’re not going to fit together right now without the help of a good pair of scissors and some strong glue.”

  He smirked, flashing a deep dimple on his left cheek before his face fell. The afternoon sun spilled in from behind us, highlighting the grimace of his expression and hiding the scar just above his lip. “I’ll bring the scissors. You bring the glue.”

  “Even if I gave you another chance, I know myself. I’ll hold you at arm’s length, one foot on the ground,” I said, adding, “because there’s always going to be a part of me waiting for you to break my heart all over again.”

  “I was careless with your heart,” he said. “I was selfish and egotistical. I turned into someone I hardly recognized – someone that had the power to destroy you – and that’s why I stayed away.”

  I picked at the gray Belgian linen fabric of the sofa.

  “Why you don’t believe me?”

  “I don’t know what I believe.”

  “Damn it, girl, you’re about as decisive as a kid at an ice cream shop.” Beau ran his hand against the smoothness of my naked shin, reminding me that we’d just shared a magical moment of delicious unrestraint, which had vaporized the second it was over.

  “Why now? Why after all this time?” I asked, resting my cheek against the back of the sofa and staring into his tempered gaze as he studied me.

  “In ten years, no one ever made me feel half the things you did.”

  I silently agreed. Every man since him, including Harrison, only ever paled in comparison. I’d told myself that love wasn’t always fireworks, and I believed my own lies enough to settle for a soft, second-rate, boring version of love instead.

  “Maybe I don’t deserve you,” Beau said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I still want you to be with you, and it doesn’t change the fact that for the last ten years, I looked for you in every place you couldn’t be.”

  I had looked for him too. While I’d never allowed myself to actively seek him out, I could never quite shake the feeling that our paths would cross again when I least expected it.

  “I never doubted for a second that my soul would find yours again, and now that it has, I’m not letting you go.” He took the crook of my arm, pulling me into his lap. His fingers lifted to my lips, grazing them as if he were trying to memorize what they felt like. “Some people are real, Dakota, and some people are just an illusion of something real. And you? You’re the realest fucking thing I’ve ever known.”

  His lips crushed mine as he breathed me in.

  “I’d give it all up for this,” he said, placing his index finger against my beating heart. “That’s what I want. I don’t need a fat bank account or a fancy house on the water or a hundred thousand people screaming my name. I need this.”

  Beau’s words seared my heart like a branding iron, the same way his promises had once upon a time.

  “Maybe my word is shit to you,” he said. “But love isn’t what you say, it’s what you do. I’m sorry that some twenty-year-old kid left you with a bunch of empty promises and a trampled-on heart, but let this thirty-year-old grown man make it up to you.”

  I teetered back and forth between the only two things I’d ever wanted in my entire life, and I couldn’t have them both.

  “I need to digest all this,” I said, breaking my silence and climbing off him to gather my clothes. His face twisted into a smirk that indicated he was accepting my challenge. “Please don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Look at me like that.”

  “How did I look at you?”

  I gathered my bra from the floor and slipped on my panties. “The way you always look at me.”

  With an enchanting flicker in your eye and a flash of your dimples that heat my core and tighten my chest until I can’t breathe.

  “I’m not making any promises, Beau,” I said, stepping into my pants.

  He rose up, re-dressing before stepping toward me. His lips pursed as he forced a hard breath through his nose. “I was going to try to sell you on how beautiful our life could be together back in Darlington, but I think you already know that. I’m going to give you space, Dakota, because that’s what you asked for. But I’m never going to stop wanting you. Never. And never is a promise.”

  He pulled his shirt over his head and deposited a single kiss on my cheek before leaving.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I touched down in Detroit Tuesday afternoon and rented a car with only one destination in mind.

  I had to see Daisy.

  Heading south to Lincoln Park, I drove past the stretch of road that housed the bar where I’d once bumped into a sweet, small town girl with Midwest charm and an eternally hopeless soft spot in her heart for me. With a short detour at a local flower shop to pick up a bouquet of her favorite flowers, daffodils, I headed her way with a heavy heart.

  In the distance was an arch with ornate spindles and metal lettering that read “Rest Haven Cemetery.”

  I hadn’t been to see her in at least two years, mostly on account of how it tended to rattle my nerves and stir up the muck and mire that rested in the bottom of my soul.

  Pulling up to a spot in the grass next to a granite headstone with her name on it, I grabbed the small bouquet and trekked through the soft ground, setting the flowers at the base of the stone below the engraving that declared her a “loving daughter” and nothing more.

  “Hi Daisy,” I said softly, resting my hands on my hips and squinting as the sun blasted my eyes from just over the horizon. I pictured her blue eyes and the way her small hand used to feel in mine, and I fondly recalled those cold and lonely nights when she kept me warm, always picking me up when I was low and giving everything to me straight up with no chaser. She always seemed to know what I needed to hear, at least in the beginning. My only regret was that I couldn’t love her the way she deserved. “This time of year always gets me thinking about you. I just wanted to pay my respects. I apologize for not coming to see you more often, but I think you’d understand. You were always very patient and understanding with me. Probably more than I deserved. Anyway.”

  It felt silly talking to a stone, but it’d seem even sillier talking to her inside my head. A warm breeze rustled the leaves of the mighty oak that shaded her final resting place.

  “I’m sorry for all the ways I hurt you, Daisy,” I said, pulling in a strong breath as I recalled the way she’d left my house in a rush to get home. The next morning, I’d called her and offered to support her for as long as it took so she could get back on her feet. She’d lived in the lap of luxury for three years, and I wasn’t about to dump her with nothing. Not long after that, she got involved with the wrong kind of people, and it turned out she was using my monetary assistance to support her brand new heroine addiction. “And I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell you that when you were still here.”

  I bent down, repositioning the flowers so they sat upright. They were bright and yellow and cheery, like she was on her best days. Daisy wasn’t perfect by any means, but on her best days, she was more than I deserved at the time.

  “Miss you, Dais,” I said, placing my heart over my chest. “I hope you finally found your happiness.”

  I pulled out toward the road and headed back to the airport to catch my flight home, replaying our end days together. They tended to play like an old movie reel any time I thought about her, as if I needed to remind myself that we were never meant to be together.

  It wasn’t long after Daisy decided to join me on tour that she decided to stay. I quit my man-whoring ways for her, and she filled a void that’d been empty far too long. But after a while, she became accustomed to life in the spotlight, wearing designer dresses and becoming a human accessory for me at any and all red carpet events and award shows I attended. And it wasn’t long after that that she’d become a glitzed-up and glamourized version of her former self. The sweet girl who once distracted me from my self-inflicted heartache had disappeared, leaving in
her place a self-centered beauty queen with a taste for VVS diamonds, Aston Martins, and Hermes bags.

  I sent her packing as soon as I found the strength to tell her I didn’t love her like that anymore, though I neglected to tell her I wasn’t sure I’d ever really loved her. At least not in the all-consuming, unconditional sort of way. I told her there was someone else out there for her who could love her the way she needed, but it wasn’t me.

  Watching her drive away on that rainy April day was the last time I’d ever see her. Little did I know that I was sending her directly into the arms of a shitty ex and a friend named heroin.

  “Goodbye, Daisy,” I said as I left Lincoln Park. My heart was filled with an ache that reminded me that I once had loved Daisy – in my own way. Regardless of everything, she would forever own a small piece of my heart that no one else would ever touch. I said a silent prayer, hoping that she’d found peace and love and happiness wherever she was. And then I asked for her forgiveness.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Five minutes, Ms. Andrews,” the wedding planner called out as she knocked on the door. I lifted Addison’s veil over her head as my mother stood back and dabbed her eyes with a tissue, rambling on about her first marriage to our father.

  “You’re absolutely stunning,” I said, offering her a smile. She pulled in a cleansing breath and nodded. All morning she’d been quiet. Happy but quiet. If I knew my sister at all, I knew that it meant she was stuck inside her head. It happened sometimes. “Don’t overthink this. He’s great. He loves you. You love him. Nothing else matters.”

  Addison nodded. “I’m not worried about him. Just digesting this life change and what it means.”

  “Are we ready?” the wedding planner called from the doorway.

  My sister nodded as my mother reached for her arm. She was going to give her away that afternoon. We headed toward the back of the Presbyterian church and lined up in order, with me linking my arm with Wilder’s best man and first cousin, Theo Van Cleef.