Sweet Sinful Nights

“Tell me what brings you here.”

Shannon didn’t mince words. She was straightforward, revealing the key details of her epic argument with Brent, laying it out for the woman who had been her parent for the last eighteen years. “I guess I never thought it would unfold like that. I imagined a million other scenarios but not that one. And I know I should have told him sooner, or tried harder to find him. And I understand why he’d be upset,” she said, running her finger absently along the mug. “I just wish there was something I could do. I left him a message, but I haven’t heard a word from him all day.” She took a beat then asked the hardest question of all. “Is it over?”

“Is he dead?”

Shannon flinched, taken aback by the question. “Grandma!”

“Well? Is he? Answer the question,” she said sternly.

“No. Of course not.”

She shrugged happily. “Then find him. Talk to him. Say you’re sorry for not telling him sooner, say you love him, say you want to be with him. As long as he’s not gone, you can keep making up with each other. We live and we love and we hurt each other. We don’t always say the right thing, or do the right thing at the right moment. Sometimes we need space, and distance, and sometimes words fall from our lips that shouldn’t have been said. Sometimes they seem untenable, and sometimes they are,” she said, then reached across the counter to take Shannon’s hand. “And we always hurt the ones we love most. If we didn’t love so much, it wouldn’t hurt so much. But you keep going. You keep loving. You keep working on that love every day. The only time you won’t have a chance at making up is when one of you is gone. Since he’s still here, it’s not over. Not in the least. So love him. Show him that you love him.”

“I do. I do love him.”

Victoria parked her palms on the counter, and gave Shannon a steely-eyed glare. “Then go get your man back.”

“I will,” she said, and a small grin formed on her face as the words show him echoed in her head. She didn’t have enough time to show him what she’d started working on for him yesterday in San Francisco, but she could line up the pieces. As her phone lit up again, she opened the list she’d made.

Then she saw a notification for a voicemail.





CHAPTER THIRTY


He waited.

For an hour.

Then another.

Outside her building, with a bouquet of sunflowers in one hand, his phone in the other. He’d stopped by his house to grab it from the utensil holder inside his dishwasher, then he made a pit stop at a flower shop on the way. He’d been taught never to show up empty-handed for a woman.

In some ways, flowers were just flowers. They were an ordinary, average gift. But since Shannon had photos upon photos of sunflowers in a personal and private album, they obviously meant something important to her. They were more than flowers to her. He hoped this bouquet was more than just an average I’m sorry gift.

That it said he was trying to understand the woman he loved.

Since he’d arrived and parked his bike at the curb, he’d sat on the steps and answered emails from earlier in the day. He’d called her again, and encountered her voice mail once more. He’d paced back and forth in front of the building. At this point, he probably looked like a stalker, and he hoped her neighbors wouldn’t call the cops or neighborhood watch on him. Nobody seemed to care though that he was hovering around the entrance. A hipster with huge headphones had nodded hello on his way upstairs. A brunette with a yoga mat had walked by on her way into the lobby. Some dude in a Buick parked by the curb had even glanced over at Brent a few times, giving a cursory hey there nod.

Brent paced up and down the block to kill more time, his phone clutched in his hand. He reached the corner, turned around, and headed back. The guy was still in his car, his arm hanging out the passenger window, watching Shannon’s building.

A bit too closely for Brent’s taste.

The guy had been there for twenty, thirty minutes now, looking like he was reading a book, but he kept glancing up, scanning the street as if he didn’t want to miss anything.

It reminded him of a cop on a stakeout, only the guy didn’t reek of cop. Something about the guy rubbed Brent the wrong way. It was hard to say what it was, but as he neared the Buick again, he held up his phone as if he were answering a message. Instead, he snapped a few pictures of the license plate and the car, and then zoomed in on the guy’s arm, covered in ink.

He tucked his phone away as he reached the open window. “How’s it going?” he said casually.