“My plane?” I repeat in confusion before it hits me. “Oh. Right.” I’m leaving today for six months. And while it’s always been my dream, now I have a new one. “What…what if I didn’t go?” I ask Winston. “Do you think I should maybe stay?”
His bare back is to me and his wide shoulders stiffen before he opens the closet door and tosses the armful of clothes into the hamper.
“It’s all you’ve talked about for fucking weeks,” he grumbles, snatching a black t-shirt angrily off one of the hangers and pulling it over his head.
“How would you know? I have barely seen you in weeks before last night,” I remind him.
“Get your ass up and get ready, Zoe. I have to get to work.”
“Wow,” I mutter. “So that’s it, huh? We’re not going to talk about what happened between us last night?”
“We fucked. Big deal. It didn’t mean shit.”
“It didn’t?” I repeat as my eyes start to burn. I would never mistake Winston for the sweet, romantic kind of guy, but jeez. The way he acted, the way it felt when we were together, how he held me so tightly in his arms all night, I thought it meant something.
“Look,” he says, bracing his palms on his hips and refusing to look me in the eye like before. “We both knew you were leaving today. It wasn’t a secret.”
“So, you don’t want me to stay?” I ask, the words burning my throat as I hold back tears.
“No, I don’t. In fact, that’s the only reason I fucked you in the first place.”
“It-it is?”
“Nothing says no strings attached like putting thousands of miles and an ocean between us a day later. It was fun, now it’s over and done. Time to move the fuck on.”
“You’re an asshole.” A tear escapes and runs down my cheek. His brutal words are cutting me wide open.
“You’ll be sucking off some French-speaking asshole in no time, I bet. And it’s summer break. You know how much I love fucking tourists. Here today, gone tomorrow, and nobody expects me to call them.”
“I thought I was different,” I admit with a sniffle.
“Well, you’re not. Let’s just pretend like it never happened and pray our parents don’t ever find out,” he remarks. “Fuck it. Get a shower if you want. I’ll have one of the guys at the shop bring your car over by the time you’re done. See ya in six months.”
“Yeah. See ya,” I mumble, even though he can’t hear me because he’s already on his way out the door, ready to move on and forget the things we did together last night.
But I’m not. How can I be when he just ran over my heart and crushed it into a million fucking pieces?
Chapter Four
Winston
* * *
Ten years later…
* * *
The day started out like all the others. I snuck out of a hot brunette’s hotel room, showered at home, worked on a few bikes at the Savage Kings MC’s Harley dealership, and then joined the rest of my brothers who wear the skull king patch on their cut at our clubhouse for a meeting.
Same old, same old.
Most guys would love to walk in my shoes for a day, but to me, it’s nothing more than going through the motions, keeping myself busy to avoid thinking about the one person I can’t forget, no matter how hard I try. Weeks, months, years go by and still, she’s never far from my mind. I keep waiting for the day I won’t spend all my free time worrying about her, but I’m not sure if it’ll ever come. In fact, Zoe’s been on my mind more than usual recently after the kidnappings. And that’s the one topic our Savage Kings’ meetings always come back around to.
“It’s been three months since Tessa’s kidnapping and we’re no closer to finding the assholes responsible than we were the day we found her,” Roman, the president of the Savage Kings and the closest friend I have, says when we’re all gathered around the table. “I was hoping we would have the fuckers off the streets before Tessa finished up her stay in the facility, but I’ve let her down.”
“Tessa is going home, back to Raleigh? Why the fuck didn’t she tell me?” Verek asks in a rush as the entire mood at the table quickly shifts, thanks to the one topic that hangs over all our heads like a dark cloud. While none of us know the victims other than Tessa, who we met through Roman’s girl, Charlotte, it’s impossible not to feel for the poor girls or stop ourselves from imagining she could’ve easily been one of the females in our lives—our mother or girlfriend or stepsister…
“Tessa’s checking out at the end of the week and then coming to stay with me and Charlotte until she feels safe enough to go home,” Roman informs him, scratching at his reddish-blonde beard. “How can she or the other women ever feel safe when the bastards who hurt her are still breathing? The answer is, they can’t, which is why I’ve asked Danny to work his IT magic and let us know if there are any similar kidnappings in the surrounding states. He’s had a few hits up in North Carolina and Virginia, but we’re still trying to figure out if it’s the same suspects or not. I’ll let you all know what we find out and if we need to head north to talk to some witnesses ourselves.”
Since the kidnappings, I’ve wanted to hop on a plane and fly up north, just to lay eyes on Zoe and make sure she’s safe. I haven’t seen or talked to her since the morning she left my apartment for Paris. I’ve convinced myself that’s the only reason why I constantly stalk her social media accounts several times a day, to make sure she’s still alive and well. The girl couldn’t have picked a more dangerous profession for a woman. It’s like she went into modeling to drive me fucking crazy. I have a reoccurring nightmare about her father getting a call that she’s been hurt hundreds of miles away instead of being here, all because of me. If she were home, I could watch over her and protect her, but she refuses to step foot in the state.
What started out as just a six-month adventure launched her career on the runways for several years, after which, she started doing provocative photoshoots.
It sucks worse because I know I’m not the only one she’s avoiding. My mom and her dad have visited her in New York a handful of times, but she doesn’t ever come home, not for holidays or during the summer. I tell myself her refusal to spend time with our family year after year has nothing to do with me, but I can’t help feeling that it does. That it’s my fault for how I treated her.
Fuck, I know I hurt her. It killed me to pretend like I didn’t give a shit about her and send her on her way that morning. I did what was best for her and now she’s gone but still lingering around this town like a goddamn ghost. A sexy, mysterious ghost that manages to haunt me from miles away by sending me each and every one of the twenty-five magazines she’s featured in. The packages show up out of the blue, in a plain manila envelope with no note and no return address; just the postage stamp with a New York zip code and her looking like a sex goddess inside.
“That’s all I have for today, and if there’s nothing else that needs to be brought to the table, we’ll adjourn and go have a few beers,” Roman says at the end of the meeting before he slams his gavel down.