I couldn’t stop grinning as I approached the bar. My vintage T-shirt was a little big and came to the ends of my shorts, but it still smelled like Jericho, even though it had been in my apartment for over a week. It’s like every breath of him was in that fabric—every breath of us. A story of our past, present, and future—woven into the fibers of a threadbare T-shirt.
My heart pounded against my chest and I cursed, unable to find a parking space anywhere near the bar.
“Dammit!” I shrieked.
Word must have spread about their performance because people were parking across the street and jogging toward the door. I couldn’t take it. After circling twice, I double-parked and hopped out of the car.
“Hey, you can’t do that!” someone shouted from behind. I turned to look while running toward the bar and stumbled, twisting my ankle.
Pain lanced through my foot and I hissed, pulling up my leg and debating on whether or not to shift in the street to heal myself or suck it up like a big girl.
I sucked it up.
Hobbling on one leg toward your true love isn’t the most graceful way to find your happily-ever-after, but that’s exactly what I did. I provided a few laughs for some onlookers, hopping like a lame kangaroo as I made my way to the front door.
Thankfully, I still heard Jericho’s voice, calling to me like a siren.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Denver shouted over the music.
“Honey, is your foot bothering you?” Rosie said, coming up on my left.
“Get out of my way!” I shouted, hopping through the crowd. I got pushed left and right as people wanted to get as close to the stage as possible.
I screamed his name like a silly fangirl, so naturally he didn’t look in my direction. I squeezed my head between two large men, hoping maybe Jericho would see my bright hair and look my way.
“Over here!” I shouted.
My heart stopped when he looked right at me. But then I saw it. That look. The one that told me he was pissed off. The one that said maybe he didn’t care about me like I had hoped. The one that said there were a million other girls out there, and I was nothing special.
His eyes dragged back to the front row of girls as he sang to them.
Them. Those big-breasted blondes with tattoos. The ones he always fell for.
My lips tightened in anger, and I spun around, running into Wheeler.
I snatched his shirt and balled it up in my fist. “You owe me one.”
He lowered his head to the left. “Yeah. And?”
“Put me on your shoulders.”
His eyes widened with disbelief. “You want what?”
“I want you to put your head between my legs and lift me up.”
Someone patted him on the shoulder and laughed. “If you don’t take her up on that offer, I will. I’d love to put my head between her—”
Wheeler knocked the guy in the jaw and then spun around. I nervously gripped his hair as he lifted me off the ground. Damn, Wheeler was strong, and his shoulders and arms felt like granite. He handled me as if I weighed nothing.
There I was—the one and only thing that Jericho couldn’t possibly ignore. My red hair was illuminated beneath a low spotlight directly overhead.
Jericho abruptly stopped singing, but the music kept going. His eyes slid from my red hair down to the Pink Floyd shirt.
The one that said “I love you” by simply being on my body. The one he’d asked me to wear when I was ready to tell him what he meant to me.
I held my breath and vaguely heard Wheeler complaining about how tightly I was fisting his hair.
Hell’s bells, Jericho looked lickable. Smoldering eyes pulled me in like magnets. Strands of his long hair had lighter shades of brown, just enough to make you notice him a little bit more. He had on his smoky eyeliner, not that I went for guys who wore makeup, but it had always been part of his act. He said onstage it worked to a man’s advantage to draw attention to his eyes when they were light in color. My brows knitted when he turned away and dragged the microphone stand to Trevor, patting him on the shoulder. The tempo changed to a different song, and Trevor took over, singing a slower ballad in a hungry voice that made a few women gasp.
Jericho leapt off the stage and sliced through the crowd as he moved in my direction. I got the shivers just watching his swagger and the animalistic way in which his eyes devoured me. I remembered his heated kiss, the way he made me laugh, and the way he loved me. I remembered a guy who sat next to me on a rainy day at a bus stop and held a magazine over my head in a failed attempt to keep me dry, who invited me for donuts and coffee until the rain stopped. It had gone on for three days, and it seemed like that’s how long we stayed in that shop together, talking and realizing the friendship between us was effortless. Jericho made me a stronger woman, and I wanted to make him a stronger man. I wanted to see him succeed in life and have everything he’d ever wanted.
But right now, it looked like he only wanted one thing.
“Isabelle, is there something you want to tell me?”