Things We Never Got Over

by Lucy Score

  “I miss you, Naomi. I miss our dinners together. I miss coming home and finding out you did all my laundry for me. I miss taking you out and showing you off.”

  I shook my head, hoping to rattle some sense into my brain. I couldn’t believe he was here.

  “Look,” he said, “I apologize for what happened. I was stressed. I had too much to drink. It won’t happen again.”

  “How did you find me?” I asked, finally extricating myself from his grasp.

  “My mom is Facebook friends with yours. She saw some of the pictures your mom has been posting.”

  For once I regretted not telling my mom exactly why I’d run out on my wedding. If she’d known why I left Warner, she sure as hell wouldn’t have pointed the way here.

  Warner took my wrists in his hands.

  “Everything all right here,” Max asked, appearing at the mouth of the hall.

  “Everything’s fine,” I lied.

  “Mind your own damn business,” Warner muttered without taking his eyes off me.

  “Warner!” I remembered all the little insults he’d say under his breath directed at me and countless others.

  “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk,” he said, squeezing my wrists tighter.

  “No. You need to listen to me. I’m not going anywhere with you and I’m certainly not getting back together with you. It’s over. We’re over. There’s nothing more to talk about. Now go home, Warner.”

  He stepped forward into my space. “I’m not going anywhere unless you’re with me,” he insisted.

  I could smell alcohol on his breath and winced. “How much have you had to drink?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Naomi. Stop trying to blame everything on a drink or two. Now, I let you have your space and look what you did with it.” He swept an arm out. “This isn’t you. You don’t belong in a place like this with people like them.”

  “Let go of me, Warner,” I said calmly.

  Instead of letting me go, he pushed me back against the wall and held me there by my biceps.

  I didn’t like it. It wasn’t like when Knox boxed me in and my senses were full of him, when I wanted to do anything to be closer to him. This was different.

  “You need to go, Warner,” I said.

  “You want me to go, you’re going with me.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t leave. I’m working.”

  “Fuck this place, Naomi. Fuck your little temper tantrum. I’m willing to forgive you.”

  “Take your fucking hands off her. Now.”

  My knees went weak at Knox’s voice.

  “Move along, asshole. This is between me and my fiancée,” Warner said.

  “Not the brightest answer,” Lucian said mildly.

  Knox and Lucian were standing at the mouth of the hallway. Lucian had his hand on Knox’s shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he was restraining him or telling him he had his back.

  Then suddenly Knox wasn’t standing at the mouth of the hall, and Warner didn’t have his hands on me anymore.

  “Give him the first shot,” Lucian called.

  Warner swung, and I watched in horror as he landed a punch that snapped Knox’s head back.

  “Good enough,” Lucian said, his hands in the pockets of his slacks, the picture of relaxation.

  Knox let his fists do the talking. The first punch connected with Warner’s nose, and I heard the crunch. Blindly, Warner struck out. The blow glanced off Knox’s shoulder. As blood poured from Warner’s nose, Knox threw another punch and then another before Warner crumpled to the floor. Before Knox could follow him down, Lucian was pulling him back.

  “Enough,” he said calmly as Knox fought to free himself. “Take care of Naomi.”

  When Lucian said my name, Knox’s gaze abandoned my bloodied ex-fiancé and found me.

  “What the fuck?” Warner snarled as Lucian hauled him to his feet. “I’m calling my lawyer! Your ass will be in jail by morning!”

  “Good luck with that. His brother’s the chief of police, and my lawyer is ten times more expensive than yours. Watch the door,” Lucian warned. And then he used Warner’s face to open the kitchen door. A cheer went up in the bar as the two men disappeared.

  And then I wasn’t thinking about who was going to clean up the bloody smear on the glass because Knox was in front of me, looking a thousand shades of pissed off.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE WHOLE STORY AND A HAPPY ENDING

  Knox

  “I have to go to the restroom,” Naomi announced and bolted into the ladies’ room.

  “Goddammit,” I muttered, clenching my hands into fists. Adrenaline and rage raced through my veins, heating my blood to boiling.

  I debated going into the No Man’s Land after her, but Max, Silver, and Fi beat me to it.

  “You can’t all leave the floor at the same fucking time,” I called through the door.

  “Fuck off, Knoxy. We got this,” Fi yelled back.

  “And we got this, Knox,” Wraith said, throwing a bar towel over his shoulder and stepping behind the bar. “You’re all gettin’ beers or shots cause I don’t know how the fuck to pour anything else.”

  A raucous cheer rose up from the customers.

  The kitchen door swung open, and Milford the cook walked out with two baskets of brisket nachos in one hand and an ice pack wrapped in a towel in the other. He tossed me the ice, then let out an ear-splitting whistle.

  Sloane jumped up and grabbed the baskets. “Yo! Who got the brisket nachos?”

  Hands went up all over the bar.

  “If I find out any of you are lying, I’ll personally ruin your life for an entire year.”

  Sloane was no mild-mannered librarian. She had a legendary temper that, when roused, was a Category Five Shitstorm.

  All but two hands wisely went down.

  “That’s better,” she said.

  “We got this, boss. See to your lady,” Milford insisted.

  “Did Lucian—”

  “Mr. Rollins is taking out the trash,” he said with a grin before ducking back into the kitchen.

  I wanted to, but I was afraid her posse wouldn’t let me near her. I could punch an asshole out without a second thought, but I was smart enough to be a little terrified of the Honky Tonk women.

  “Naomi,” I said, pounding a fist on the bathroom door. “If you don’t get your ass out here, I’m either comin’ in there or I’m gonna go knock more sense into that son of a bitch.”

  The door opened, and Naomi, with smudged eye makeup, glared at me. “You will do no such thing.”

  Relief coursed through me, and I leaned into her.

  “I’m gonna touch you now because I need to. And I’m warning you in advance, because if I touch you and you flinch, I’m gonna go out in the parking lot and start kicking ass until he’s too broken to ever touch another woman again.”

  Her eyes widened, but she nodded.

  I tried to be gentle as I took her by the hand.

  “We good?” I asked.

  She nodded again.

  It was good enough for me. I pulled her past the restrooms and Fi’s office into the next hallway that led to my office.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” she groaned. “I’m so embarrassed.”

  She hadn’t been embarrassed. She’d been fucking terrified. The look in her eyes when I stepped into the hall was one I’d never forget as long as I lived.

  “The nerve of him showing up here, saying he wants me back because he misses how I cleaned up after him.”

  I squeezed her hand. “Pay attention, Daisy.”

  “To what? The way you turned his face into ground beef? Do you think you broke his nose?”

  I knew I had. That was the point.

  “Pay attention to this,” I said, pointing at the keypad next to the door. “0522.”

  She stared at the keypad then back at me. “Why are you giving me the code?”

  “If that guy or anyone else you don’t want to see shows up, you co
me back here, and you plug in 0522.”

  “I’m trying to have a nervous breakdown, and you want me to memorize numbers.”

  “Enter the code, Naomi.”

  She did as she was told while muttering about what pains in the ass all men were. She wasn’t wrong.

  “Good girl. See the green light?”

  She nodded.

  “Open the door.”

  “Knox, I should get back out there. People are going to be talking. I’ve got six tables,” she said, her hand hovering over the handle.

  “You should open the damn door and take a breath.”

  Those gorgeous fucking hazel eyes of hers widened, and I felt the world slow to a stop. When she did that, when she looked at me with hope, trust, and just a little bit of lust, it did things to me. Things I didn’t want to dissect because it felt good, and I didn’t want to waste time wondering how it was going to go bad.

  “Okay,” she said finally, pushing the door open.

  I hustled her across the threshold and closed the door behind us.

  “Wow. The Fortress of Solitude,” she said with reverence.

  “It’s my office,” I said dryly.

  “It’s your safe space. Your lair. No one but Waylon is allowed in here. And you just gave me the code.”

  “Don’t make me regret it,” I said, moving in to back her against the door, fighting against the need to grab her and hold her tight.

  “I’ll try not to,” she promised on a breathy sigh.

  “What happened out there was a shit show,” I began, putting my hands on either side of her head.

  She winced. “I know. I’m so sorry. I had no idea he was coming. I haven’t talked to him since the rehearsal dinner. I tried to get him away from the crowd and handle it privately, but—”

  “Baby, a man ever gets you in that position again, I want you to knee him in the balls as hard as you can, and when he doubles over, you knee him in the fucking face. Then you run like hell. I don’t give a shit about causing scenes. I give a shit that I walked into my bar and found a man with his hands on my girl.”

  Her lower lip trembled, and I wanted to hunt down Warner Whatever the Fuck His Name Was and put his head through a plate glass window.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Baby, I don’t want you to be sorry. I don’t want you to be scared. I want you to be as pissed off as I am that some asshole thought he could put his hands on you. I want you to know your worth so no one in their right mind ever thinks they can treat you like that. You get me?”

  She nodded tentatively.

  “Good. Think it’s time you tell me the whole story, Daze.”

  “We don’t really need to talk—”

  “You’re not getting out of this room until you tell me everything. And I mean every fucking thing.”

  “But we’re not really togeth—”

  I pinched her lips closed. “Uh-uh, Naomi. It doesn’t matter what the fucking label says, I care about you, and if you don’t start talkin’, I can’t do what I need to do to make sure it never happens again.”

  She was still for a long beat.

  “If I tell you, will you let me go back to work?” she asked through my fingers.

  “Yes. I’ll let you go back to work.”

  “If I tell you, will you promise not to hunt Warner down?”

  I was not going to like this one bit and I knew it.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Fine.”

  I took my hand away, and she ducked under my arm to stand in the middle of the room between my desk and the couch.

  “It’s my fault,” she began.

  “Bullshit.”

  She whirled around and fixed me with a look. “I’m not telling you anything if you’re going to interject like one of those old man Muppets in the balcony. We’ll both just die of starvation in here, and eventually someone will smell our decaying bodies and break down the door.”

  I leaned against the front of my desk and stretched my legs out. “Fine. Continue with your asinine assessment.”

  “Excellent alliteration,” she said.

  “Talk, Daze.”

  She blew out a breath. “Fine. Okay. We were together for a while.”

  “History. You’ve got it. You moved on, and he hasn’t.”

  She nodded.

  “We’d been together long enough that I had my eye on the next step.” She glanced at me. “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I really like checking things off my list.”

  “No shit.”

  “Anyway, on paper we were compatible. It made sense. We made sense. And it wasn’t like he was making plans for next year’s vacations. But he wasn’t moving as quickly as I thought he should.”

  “You told him to shit or get off the pot,” I guessed.

  “Much more eloquently, of course. I told him I saw a future for us. I was working for his family’s company, we’d been dating for three years. It just made sense. I told him if he didn’t want to be with me, he needed to cut me loose. When he slid a jeweler’s box over the table at his favorite Italian place a few weeks later, part of me was so relieved.”

  “The other part?”

  “I think I knew it was a mistake right there.”

  I shook my head and crossed my arms. “Baby, you knew it was a mistake long before then.”

  “Well, you know what they say about hindsight.”

  “It makes you feel like an idiot?”

  Her lips quirked. “Something like that. You don’t really want to hear all this.”

  “Finish it,” I growled. “I spilled my guts to you the night Nash was shot. This’ll even us out.”

  She sighed, and I knew I’d won.

  “So we started planning the wedding. And by we, I mean his mother and me because he was busy with work and didn’t want to deal with the details. Things were happening with the company. He was under a lot of stress. He started drinking more. Snapping at me for little things. I tried to be better, do more, expect less.”

  My hands itched to close around that fuckface’s throat.

  “About a month before the wedding, we were out to dinner with another couple, and he had too much to drink. I was driving us home, and he accused me of flirting with the other guy. I laughed. It was so absurd. He didn’t think it was funny. He…”

  She paused and winced.

  “Say it,” I said gruffly.

  “H-he grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back. I was so surprised I swerved and almost hit a parked car.”

  It took everything I had not to jump up from the desk and run into the parking lot to kick this fucking guy’s ass.

  “He said he didn’t mean it,” she continued as if her words hadn’t just set off a ticking time bomb inside me. “He apologized profusely. He sent me flowers every day for a week. ‘It was the stress,’ he’d said. He was trying for a promotion to set us up for our future.”

  I was choking on suppressed rage and wasn’t sure how long I could pretend to be calm.

  “We were so close to the wedding day, and he really did seem like he was sorry. I was stupid enough, eager enough to move on to the next step that I’d believed him. Things were fine. Better than fine. Until the night of the rehearsal.”

  My fingers dug into my biceps.

  She was pacing now in front of me. “He showed up to the rehearsal smelling like a distillery and he had several more drinks during dinner. I overheard his mother making snide comments about how she wished she could have invited more people but that she couldn’t because my parents couldn’t afford it.”

  Fuckface’s mom sounded like she needed her own kind of ass-kicking.

  “I was so mad I confronted him when we left the restaurant.” She shuddered, and I was afraid I was going to grind my fillings into dust. “Thank God we were alone in the parking lot. My parents had already gone home. Stef and the rest of the wedding party were still inside.

  “He was so angry. Just like a switch had flipp
ed. I never saw it coming.”

  She closed her eyes, and I knew she was reliving the moment all over again.

  “He slapped me right across the face. Hard. Not hard enough to knock me down, but just enough to humiliate me. I just stood there in shock, holding my cheek. I couldn’t believe he’d do something like that.”

  I doubted that Naomi was aware she’d lifted a hand to her cheek as if she could still feel the hit.

  I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I turned for the door and was ready to rip the knob off when I felt her hands on my back.

  “Knox, where are you going?”

  I flipped the lock and wrenched the door open. “To dig a shallow grave so I have a place to put him after I get tired of throwing punches.”

  Her fingernails dug into my skin under my shirt, giving me something else to feel besides fury.

  “Don’t leave me alone,” she said, then pressed herself against my back.

  Fuck.

  “He started pacing and yelling. It was my fault, he told me. He wasn’t ready to get married. He had goals he wanted to accomplish before focusing on his personal life. It was my fault for pushing him. All he was trying to do was give me everything I wanted, and there I was complaining to him the night before the wedding he didn’t want to have.”

  “That’s fucking bullshit, Naomi, and you know it.”

  “Yeah,” she squeaked, resting her forehead between my shoulder blades. I felt something damp leak through the shirt.

  Damn it.

  I turned and took her in my arms, holding her face against my chest. Her breath hitched. “Baby, you’re killin’ me.”

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she whispered. “It was a slap. He didn’t put me in the hospital. Didn’t threaten my life.”

  “Doesn’t make it anywhere near right. A man doesn’t put hands on a woman like that. Ever.”

  “But I wasn’t exactly innocent. I tried to force a man to marry me. I almost said ‘I do’ even after he hit me. How pathetic is that? I was in that church basement in my dress, worrying about what other people would think if I didn’t go through with it. Worried about letting them down.”

  I thumbed away the tears that tracked down her cheeks. Each one felt like a knife to my heart.