“Goodbye,” she said.
And then she hung up.
Chapter 12
*Jackson*
“If you’re going to do something wrong, do it big, because the punishment is the same either way.”
Jayne Mansfield
For maybe the tenth time so far this morning, I caught myself daydreaming about my kiss with Rae. I had no regrets about turning down her offer. A one-night stand, even with the woman of my figurative and literal dreams, wasn’t something I wanted for myself anymore. I wanted permanent, not temporary. I wanted real, not fantasy.
That said, I had no regrets about the kiss either. I knew I’d come crashing down from this high at some point, but that point wasn’t now. Hopefully, the high would last a good, long while.
It’ll have to. You’re never going to see her again. At least, not in person.
I frowned at the thought, immediately pushing it aside, and taking another sip from my thermos of coffee. It wasn’t a thermos brand container, but some hoity-toity version that looked sleek and kept my coffee hot for hours. My sister Jessica had sent it for my birthday along with two bags of coffee from Italy. She, her husband Duane, and my nephew Liam were now living there full-time, until Jess got the travel bug again and they went somewhere else.
She was an odd one, my baby sister. But I liked the cup she’d sent. You should get one for Rae.
Now that odd thought had me frowning again, and I decided to refocus my thoughts elsewhere. Like on work.
My eyes lifted to the horizon, expecting to find an empty expanse of road beyond the cruiser’s hood, but that’s not what I saw. Man, I really must’ve been distracted if I’d failed to notice Cletus Winston pull up in his Geo in front of me. Mind, he didn’t park directly in front of my car, but rather some fifty or so feet further down.
Unbuckling my seatbelt, I brought my fancy coffee container with me as I left the car and walked toward him. “Hey. What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you, my friendly, local public servant.” He also carried a coffee container, a pink and purple Hello Kitty thermos. Within, I knew he’d doctored his coffee with blackstrap molasses and apple cider vinegar. Since we’d become friendly, he’d made me taste it every so often, swearing that one of these days I’d come around to his coffee recipe.
He was wrong. It was disgusting.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“This is your area, isn’t it?” He motioned to the empty road.
“Yes. For today.”
“Well then, you just answered your own question.”
“Cletus.” I halted, not wanting to be out of earshot of the radio. “My coverage area stretches for miles. How did you know precisely where I’d be?”
He walked past me toward my cruiser. “You might as well ask me if I know where JT MacIntyre’s stolen gold coins are.”
“Wait. Do you?” I followed him.
“That’s a silly question.”
“I’m suddenly thinking it’s not so silly.”
“No. It’s definitely silly. Silly to ask, I mean. But maybe not silly in general. However, I’m not here to debate the silly quotient of questions with you. I’m here to deliver a warning and an invitation, but not in that order.” He stopped at the hood and leaned back against it—half sitting, half standing.
“An invitation?” I didn’t move to recline next to him, but instead stopped four or so feet away.
“Yep. To the jam session tonight.”
“Oh. Yeah. I was planning to go.” I sipped my coffee.
“I’d like your word, if you please.” He lifted his thermos toward me. “That’s a nice coffee carafe. Where’d you get it?”
“Jess sent it to me for my birthday. You want my word?”
“I’d like you to promise me that you will attend tonight’s music-making merriment, come what may.” He scratched his beard, which was always kept bushy and full. “My birthday isn’t until December. Do you think she’d send me one of those for Tracky Dack Day?”
“I just said I was going to the jam session. And what is Tracky Dack Day?”
“It’s an Australian holiday for pants. And now I’d like you to promise that you’re coming to the jam session.”
Confused—a holiday for pants?—I scrunched my face and shook my head. Cletus was always having two conversations at once. “Fine. I promise. I’ll go.”
“Excellent. Now to the warning.” Cletus drew in a deep breath, pushed away from the hood of my cruiser, paced to me, and placed his hand on my shoulder. Looking me square in the eye, he said, “Jackson James, everyone in town hates your guts.”
I reared back. “Excuse me?”
“Wait—” He let go of my shoulder and pulled out his phone. “I brought visual aids.”
I stared at him, waiting while he unlocked his phone, navigated to something he clearly wanted me to see, and then shoved his phone at me.
“Watch this.”
Moving my frown from him to the phone, I pressed the play button. It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing, and a few seconds more to understand where—and how—the video had been made, and less than a second after that to lose my breath with the weight of what it meant.
“Fuck.”
“No. I think y’all stop before that happens.”
I passed his phone back to him, not needing to see it again. Not now. My chest filled with lead. My stomach hurt. I needed to . . . I needed to think. Think.
“Jackson, I know you’re having a bad day, but now might be a good time to inform you that all ATMs have cameras.”
“Yes, Cletus! I know about ATM cameras. I knew we’d be recorded, but I wasn’t thinking someone would take the recording and share it!”
“Why not? You were kissing a world-famous actress. They probably got enough money from the sale of that video to quit their job for a while. Maybe a whole year’s salary.”
I’d known about the camera, and I’d dismissed it as inconsequential in the moment. All I’d been thinking about was kissing Rae.
“Jesus.” I covered my mouth with my hand, staring at the sky and the end of my career in law enforcement. How could I have been so monumentally stupid?
“I don’t think he can help much with this now. This video is up everywhere—the Twitter, the Facebook, the Tikety Tok—but I’ve found it never hurts to ask.”
I’d be fired. I’d definitely be fired. Wearing my uniform, while on duty, indecency, conduct unbecoming an officer of the law, all caught on the camera of an ATM. What had I been thinking?
You weren’t thinking. Your dick was.
I shook my head. No. That wasn’t true. I had been thinking.
Yes, there’d been a fair share of dick-thinking involved, but I’d been thinking with my brain too. It’s why I hadn’t kissed her in the car. If I’d touched her in the car, we would’ve ended up doing a lot more than just kissing.
She’d asked me to spend the night with her, and I’d wanted to say yes—my God, I wanted to say yes so badly—but I knew, somewhere deep down, spending the night with Rae would absolutely wreck me and I’d feel nothing but regret after. I didn’t want to be that guy anymore. I didn’t want to just take whatever was offered and be passed around for a good time, but never for a real, lasting, permanent time.