Hell on Heels (16 page)

I guess I hadn’t done a good enough job.

Her green eyes inspected me.

I shook my head in her hands and my bottom lip trembled. “Dean was outside when I got home.”

“Jesus.” She winced. “What did he say?”

“Nothing really.” She dropped her hand and I ran my fingers through my hair. “He said we needed to talk, and then…”

“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.

You needed the pain to close the wound.

A necessary suffering.

“I know you did that because it helped, but it’s not helping anymore. You need to let it go.”

I wrapped my arms around her.

“I’m trying,” I whispered. “I promise I’m trying.”

She leaned back and put her forehead to mine. “It’ll hurt like hell, but I’ll be here.”

“I know.” I closed my eyes.

Then she kissed my nose and moved back to her side of the both.

That was Leighton; she bulldozed through the hard stuff like a soldier, with a glass of the house wine waiting for her at the finish line.

She didn’t drag it out.

She didn’t sucker punch you.

She just…did it.

“Now, I want you tell me more about all of these babes you’ve got.” She whistled and brought her Chardonnay to her lips.

“All?” I winced.

Plural sounded bad.

One woman having men in the plural always seemed to rub people the wrong way.

Including me.

“Oh hush.” She waved her hand and the mood lightened. “It’s 2016. If you can’t date multiple men as a single woman in 2016, when the hell can you? It’s not like you’re in a relationship. Dating is just dating. Try a few people on and see what you like.”

True.

“So now Kevin says he’s Team Beau, but I’m not sure I’ve picked a team yet.” She fanned herself with the menu she’d been looking at and smirked.

“Oh, God,” I groaned. “I’m not sure I even like Maverick as a human being, and Dean made me cry,
twice
.”

I held up two fingers.

“Whatever.” Leighton ignored my protests.

Everyone was in on the joke but me.

This seemed to be a running theme in my life these days.

“If you had to choose, which one would you pick?”

I paused, rolling the rim of my glass along my bottom lip. “All of them,” I confessed, tipping the bourbon back and enjoying the burn.

You know the boy who cried wolf?

Well, I’m the girl who cried love… and this time, no one was coming to rescue me.

“M
essage me tomorrow,” Leighton called from the open window of her Lexus as she began to pull away from the curb.

I turned around to walk backwards. “I will. Goodnight.”

“Night,” she hollered.

I loved her.

She was something I’d done really right.

I spun around, enjoying my three-whiskey buzz, and climbed up the stairs.

My passcode was easier to enter this time, but still, I took the stairs. The pulled pork mac and cheese comfort food I’d had for dinner would no doubt soon be residing on my behind.

Not that I really cared, but I cared enough to take the stairs.

Yanking open the door marked
3
rd
Floor
, I fell a little into the hallway.

I wasn’t drunk, but due to the fact I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had three drinks in a year, I wasn’t sober either.

Humming along to
I’ve Had The Time Of My Life
and searching for my keys, I missed it.

I missed him.

“Charlie.”

My head swung up to see Dean sitting on the floor outside the door of my apartment.

I stopped abruptly and started to back up.

“Charlie, wait.” He started to stand, and the booze in my veins started to move through me like molasses.

“Stop calling me that.” I shook my head. “How dare you call me that?”

My voice was getting louder.

Somehow, through the loss of some of my inhibitions, I’d surpassed flooding and grief. I’d arrived solely at unjust anger.

“What you saw today—” he started and I laughed without humour.

“What I saw today was your daughter. What is she, ten?” I laughed harder, like a lunatic. “Matter of fact, where’s her mother, Dean? Where’s your wife?”

I was on a roll and gaining speed quickly.

“Can we please talk about this inside?” he pleaded, taking another step towards me.

I scoffed. “No.”

“My daughter’s name is Alycia.” He sounded angry.

What right did he have to be angry?

“She’s nine.”

My heart plummeted.

We were still together when she was conceived.

“You’re a real piece of shit, Dean.” I was hurt, and there was no mistaking that in my voice. “Go home to your kid.”

“Alycia,” he corrected me. “Her name is Alycia, and right now, instead of being at home with her father on a school night, she’s with her grandparents so that I can be here talking to you.”

The bastard had some nerve, so I told him so. “You have some nerve coming here and trying to make me feel guilty.”

He shook his head. “Let me inside.”

“No.”

Stepping back, he waved at the hallways. “If you don’t let me inside, I’m going to do this right here, and at the rate you’re going, piss off all your neighbours in the process.” I flinched. “We are hashing this out one way or another.” He was aggravated and breathing hard. “So either open the damn door, or shut your mouth and let me explain.”

I pursed my lips. I liked my neighbours, but more so, I think I knew he meant what he said when he said this conversation was happening.

If he wanted to duke it out, fine.

I’d learned to use brass knuckles with my words over the last ten years.

“Fine.”

Careful, so as not to touch him, I moved to open my front door.

The polite thing to do would have been let him enter first, but to hell with that. The polite thing to do was tell someone you were leaving him or her.

Stomping into my apartment, I threw my bag on the floor and turned around to face him.

He’d changed from earlier. His hair was still wet from a shower, and he had on a leather jacket with yet another pair of worn out jeans.

“Do you ever buy new jeans?” I scolded him.

His eyes widened in surprise and then dropped to my legs. He smirked.

I followed his gaze and was reminded that I had on ripped jeans.

“Whatever,” I hissed. “Talk. You have five minutes.”

My legs were spread hip-width apart and my hands were balled into fists at my sides.

I was prepared to fight.

“This is how this is going to go.” He moved towards me. “I’m going to explain, and you aren’t going to like it.”

I rolled my eyes.

“What you will do is let me finish before you start yelling.”

“Fine.”

Dean pointed towards the living room. “You might want to sit down.”

“Four minutes and fifty seconds,” I reminded him bitchily.

He didn’t like it, but he spoke anyway.

“I loved you back then.” That line, I took like a right hook to the cheek. “But I was young. We were so damn young and I was stupid. The summer you went to New York, I got lonely. I missed you, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I picked up an extra job in Langley building houses for cash, and I met someone.”

That, I took like a kick to the stomach. My face paled, but I kept my mouth shut. I’d waited a decade for closure, and I was going to get it.

“We fooled around for a few weeks, but I knew I’d made a mistake, so I called it off.” He took off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his hair. “You came home, and I didn’t know how to tell you.”

Coward.

“Less than a year later, I got a call from her. Her name was Brooke,” he added, and this time, I did scoff.

Like I cared what her name was.

“She told me she was pregnant and that she was going to keep it. I panicked.” His tone was so desperate for understanding. It was some kind of plea. “I never had a family; you of all people know that. I had a chance to do the right thing and I wanted to. I wanted to be there for my kid like my parents hadn’t been for me. I was doing the right thing.”

I shook my head.

Bullshit.

“I couldn’t tell you, Charlie.” I growled and he flinched. “I tried. I tried, but I just couldn’t do it.”