It was late.
He’d been riding all day partly because the weather would soon turn and he wouldn’t be able to take out his Fat Boy again until March or April.
But mostly, he did it to find a way to clear his mind, keep focused, and not fuck things up by moving too fast with Cher.
As he rode in, he saw that he may have managed to get through another day without fucking things up with Cher, but he had another problem he thought he’d sorted, which, apparently, he had not.
He swung off the bike, but she was already out of her Rover and heading his way.
He didn’t look at her when he started across the parking lot, but he felt her.
“This isn’t happening,” he stated.
“Merry, please,” she begged. “Give me a second.”
He kept walking.
“I screwed up,” she declared.
She fucking did.
He made no reply, he just kept walking.
He felt her hurrying after him, her short legs no match for his long ones.
“I thought it was you. The way you’d ended us, I thought it had to be you,” she told him.
At the foot of the ugly concrete steps, with their unattractive iron railing that would lead him to the concrete landing that would take him to his shitty-ass condo, not a pot of flowers in sight, nothing to make that place look like anyone gave a shit, he stopped and turned to her.
“Go home, Mia.”
She stared up at him, her pretty face twisted and pleading.
“I gave you opportunity after opportunity,” she whispered.
Oh no.
They weren’t doing this before.
They sure as fuck weren’t going to do it now.
“Go home,” he repeated.
She reached out a hand, but when his eyes dropped to it, she halted its progress.
He looked back to her.
“I kept coming to you, but you never did anything,” she declared.
So he’d been wrong the other night, right the rest of the time—that had been her game.
Regardless, it was fucked up and damaging, wasting time and causing harm when the bitch should have just said something.
At that point, however, it didn’t matter. They were over, so going through this wasn’t worth his time.
“Say it one more time,” he warned. “Go home.”
“I see now,” she said quietly, eyes glued to his, imploring. “I made the first move. Kept making the first move, over and over. But maybe I should have made the second one too. Maybe you needed that from me. Maybe with…” Her eyes started drifting, but she put visible effort into forcing them back. “With the way things were with your family…” She rubbed her lips together quickly before going on. “With your mom, I should have had a mind to what was going on in yours.”
Cher’s words slammed into his head.
You got good, you don’t let it go. It lets you go, you hold on. It slips through your fingers, you pull out all the stops to get it back. You got somethin’ worth fighting for, you fight for it.
Mia was right.
It was him who had fucked them up.
But with his history, she gave that first shit about what they had, it was her who needed to make all the moves.
Now it was too late.
Before he could speak, she kept doing it.
“I’m gonna talk to Gerard. We have to…I need to be free, because you and I need to sit down and talk things out.”
Garrett felt his brows go up. “You’re gonna dump your fiancé to take a shot at me?”
Her body moved in ways that shared she was gathering the courage to say her next.
“I’m gonna do what I need to do to work with you to get us back to us.”
“Thought I made it clear, Mia—there is no us.”
Hurt moved through her features, right on its heels, chased by stubborn.
There she was.
He’d always thought that was cute.
But Mia had a pain-in-the-ass mom who was a pain in Mia’s ass because she was just like her daughter. They both had a man in their life, Mia’s dad, who spoiled those bitches rotten. They’d been vying for his attention since Mia could cogitate.
But Justin McClintock loved both the females in his life and he had a lot of love to give. Through that, he’d taught his daughter if she wanted something, it would be hers.
She clearly now had decided she was serious with wanting Garrett back and wasn’t going to fuck around with making that happen, and the way she’d been taught, she thought that would just be so.
He watched her smile, and he couldn’t believe in their situation as it stood, at the same time he could because she was Mia, that her smile was smug.
“We’re the ’burg’s last Rocky and Tanner,” she declared. “The last Colt and Feb. There never was an end to them. There’ll never be an end to us.”
“Gonna go bad for you, you believe that,” he replied. “Now, go home.”
Done with this shit, he turned and had moved up two steps before he felt her coming up after him.
So he turned back.
He looked down his nose at her and stated, “Right. This is not gonna happen. I told you to go home and I did that repeatedly. I told you we were done. I told you that you were no longer welcome here. You follow me up these fuckin’ stairs, I’ll slam the door in your face. You knock, I am not fuckin’ with you, Mia, I’ll open the door, cuff you, and arrest you for harassment.”
He watched her eyes grow huge.
“I’ll take you in myself,” he continued. “You’ll be booked. I’ll press charges, woman. Not fuckin’ with you on that either. And I do that, your man in Bloomington will know you came to visit me. Everyone will know the state of play between you and me, that bein’ me makin’ a very public statement that I’m tryin’ to make now privately. We…are…” He bent slightly to her. “Done. Now, do not make me make a fool of you. I won’t enjoy it. But I sure as fuck will do it.”