Again.
Disbelief marries with hurt before it rifles through me. After that moment we shared between us last night, how could she have gone out and spent the night with someone else? I force a swallow to compose myself as I watch her eyes widen and her head shake back and forth rapidly as she realizes she’s been caught. It’s too much; I can’t deal with this, with her, with the disappointment spreading through my system right now. It just doesn’t make sense, and I’d rather feel the anger than the confusion.
And it’s just the briefest of hesitations on my part as I allow myself a moment to feel stupid before I begin to rein my feelings in and turn to walk away. That slight falter gives her the opening she needs to reach out and grab my arm as I start to turn away. “No, Tanner! It’s not what you think!” she shouts in the empty stairwell, the echo of her denials bouncing off the concrete walls and hitting my ears to reinforce her words.
The incredulity I feel at being caught in this same moment again on top of my mistrust toward her right now has me primed for an argument. “What the fuck do you mean, it’s not what I think?” I growl as I turn around to face her, shrugging my arm from her grasp. “Because it looks pretty damn obvious to me. Guess the joke’s on me… or whoever else you were with last night. You sure as hell have a way of making someone feel like you have eyes only for them… when in fact you give everything else instead.”
I know it’s a dickish innuendo to make, but it’s true. What I don’t expect, though, is the flash of hurt that flickers and then remains in the green of her eyes. When normally I’d be turning on my heel and stomping my ass down to the gym, that fucking look has me frozen in place.
“Just…,” she says, and then stops as she rolls her shoulders, a war waging across her features over the confession I can see trembling on her lips. But the simple word and the tone in which she says it does its job, because I don’t move. “All I’m doing is taking pictures.” She holds her camera up in front of her as if its mere presence is proof. And of course the notion lingers that we’ve been here with the camera between us before and when I called her bluff, I was in the wrong. “When I feel restless, I go out and take pictures… I get lost in seeing the world through a filter, can distance myself… and sometimes it’s not until the sun comes up that I realize I’ve been up all night long. I don’t know how else to explain it, other than it calms me.”
“What? Here? Are you fucking crazy?” And yes, I should really be reading between the lines, but fuck, I’m a guy. I react without thinking, jump to judge without hearing anything beyond helpless female all alone in the wild fucking West. “It’s like willingly walking into the goddamn lion’s den out there! I told you not to go out there by yourself! You promised that you wouldn’t!”
“Yeah… well, I unpromise.” And there’s something about the contrast of the tone of her voice in comparison to mine – detached versus animated, defiance instead of compassion – that shocks me into realizing it doesn’t matter what else I say because she’s going to do it anyway. I search her eyes for a reason, a connection, anything at all, but all I find is disassociation and a complete lack of caring, and that only pisses me off further.
How can she pull away when all we’ve been doing is connecting, bit by bit, word by word, minute by minute, every day over the past week and a half? It’s like she’s slapping me in the face.
“Are you purposefully trying to push buttons to get a reaction? Because it doesn’t take much to ignite my temper, and, frankly, knowing you’re out there on your own is doing it already.” I step closer to her, willing the warmth in her eyes to return. “What’s really going on, Beaux?”