The woman laughed, and so did the guys. Until one stopped laughing, started hacking, and promptly heaved into the nearby garbage can.
“And that’s all, folks, in today’s five p.m. Parade of What We Might Have Been,” said Kevin, Colin’s friend and mentor from his recovery group. The two of them stood on the elevated walkway at the corner of Bally’s, surveying the madness and mayhem of happy hour on the Strip. This was one of the many faces of Vegas—the city embodied glitz and glamour in its classy hotels, sex and sin in its nightclubs, beauty and class in the fountains of the Bellagio, but also the seedy in the late afternoon crowds weaving up and down the sidewalks, drunk as skunks.
Colin held up his iced coffee and toasted. “Here’s to my best friend. Coffee,” he said, since caffeine was the one “vice” he allowed himself to have.
“Hear, hear. May it never ever be banned,” Kevin said, swallowing the last of his drink then returning to the conversation they’d started before She-Elvis had arrived on the scene. “So, the meeting with the detective and talking about the past, did that stir anything up?”
“Not really,” Colin said quickly, glancing at his watch, calculating how much time until he saw Elle.
Kevin shot him a steely stare. “Really?”
Busted.
Colin forced his mind away from the anticipation of tonight, and back in time to his conversation with Michael at the base of the mountain after they’d met with John. He sighed, dragged his free hand through his hair, and shrugged. “Guilt. It brought back a lot of guilt.”
The other man nodded sagely. “That makes sense. But you need to keep working on letting go of that. Guilt—and I mean the misplaced kind—can eat you up. When you start to feel that way, the things that we think will take the pain away seem a helluva lot more appealing. Tequila looks a lot prettier the worse you feel.”
“Yeah. That’s true,” Colin admitted. The moments he’d been most tempted to crack open a bottle were when he felt the shittiest about himself.
“Just be aware that revisiting the past can mess with your head. So keep doing the things that make you feel centered. Your exercise. Your work. Your meetings. All of it. Okay, man?”
Colin’s gaze drifted to his arms, to the inked reminders of the man he wanted to be. The strong one, the kind one. The man who didn’t live a wrecked kind of life. Strength, love, passion, family, truth. They were his touchstones, his hallmarks, and his guides. “I will.”
“Because something this big could knock you off your game. Falling in love. Breaking up. Losing a shit-ton of money. Even good things, like landing a new deal. Hell, just learning something out of the blue. Anything can be a trigger. That almost happened to me a few years ago when I fell in love with my wife. You’d think falling in love would be this wonderful thing to keep me straight. But I very nearly popped the pills again because I didn’t know if she was feeling the same thing, and I felt so out of control.”
Kevin’s admission knocked the air out of Colin’s lungs. He’d never imagined falling for someone could have those kinds of consequences. “Seriously?”
Kevin nodded. “Love nearly kicked the shit out of me.”
“How did you deal?”
“I told her how I felt. I was honest with her. I spoke the truth, and she loved that I was open, and the rest is history.”
The words struck a chord. He’d delivered worlds of pleasure to Elle between the sheets, he’d proven he could show her one hell of a good time out of bed, and now there was one last thing to do.
Open his heart.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At last.
She blasted the AC in her car and cranked up the music, rocking out to an upbeat Katy Perry song as she drove to Colin’s home. Her mom had picked up Alex already, and the two of them had planned a festive night of bowling, arcade games, and the Chinese buffet. He’d also reviewed his history facts for a full thirty minutes, thanks to the app that Colin had found and sent to the two of them. The best part? Alex said the app was fun. From a fourteen-year-old boy, that one-word description was the best she could hope for.
As for Elle, she sighed happily as she imagined the night ahead of her now that she was on her way.
She shivered as the images flashed before her. This was a sex date all right, but it was also more, given the words they’d both said that morning at his office.
I like you.
They were three simple words, said in many ways every day. They were young words, breathed by middle-schoolers and teenagers, and yet they felt adult, too. They were an acknowledgment of caring, a way of stating that what was between them was more than sex, but not quite hurtling toward that scarier four-letter word.
There was no way they were going in that direction. No way at all. Not even possible. She wouldn’t let that happen.
Sinful Longing
Lauren Blakely's books
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