Page 36 of Slaughter
“Anytime.”
She grabbed her purse from the back office and headed for the rear exit, pausing at the door to look back at me. “You okay?”
The question hung in the air between us, weighted with all the things she wasn’t saying. All the things she had noticed over the past two weeks. The way I had gone through the motions, the hollow smile, the distance I kept even from myself.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
She didn’t believe me. I could see it in the way her mouth tightened, the way her hand lingered on the doorframe. But she nodded anyway. “Lock up behind me, okay?”
“I will.”
The door swung shut with a soft thud, and then I was alone.
The silence pressed in around me, thick and suffocating. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting harsh white light across the empty booths and abandoned tables. The smell of coffee and grease hung in the air, familiar and comforting in a way that made my chest ache.
I moved through the diner on autopilot, spraying down tables and wiping them clean. The motions were soothing, repetitive, mindless, requiring nothing of me but muscle memory. I didn’t have to think. Didn’t have to feel.
I just worked. But my mind wouldn’t stay quiet. It kept circling back to him. To the way he had looked at me behind the garage, his face stricken with shock and something that looked like horror. To the way he walked away without looking back, his broad shoulders rigid with tension as he disappeared into the crowd. To the way he whisperedJulieagainst my skin while he moved inside me.
I scrubbed harder at a stubborn coffee ring, my jaw clenched tight against the burn in my throat. Two weeks. It had been two weeks since the barbecue, and I hadn’t heard a word from him.Hadn’t seen him. Hadn’t even glimpsed his motorcycle on the roads around Lawton.
It was like he had vanished. Like I had imagined the whole thing.
Except I hadn’t. I could still feel the ghost of his hands on my skin, the weight of his body pressing me into the grass, the way he looked at me in the moonlight like I was everything he ever wanted—stop.I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing the memories back down where they belonged. Buried. Hidden. Locked away in the part of my heart that I couldn’t afford to examine too closely. Because if I did, I would fall apart. And I couldn’t afford to fall apart. Not here. Not now. Not when I had tables to clean and a life to live and a future to figure out that didn’t include a man who called me by another woman’s name.
I moved to the next booth, spraying and wiping with mechanical precision. The rag squeaked against the vinyl seats, the sound grating in the quiet. Outside, the parking lot was dark except for a single streetlight near the road. Its yellow glow barely reached the diner’s front windows.
I was so lost in my own mind that I almost didn’t hear it.
A knock. Soft. Hesitant. Three gentle raps against the glass door.
I froze, my hand stilling mid-wipe. My heart kicked hard against my ribs, a sudden jolt of adrenaline that made my fingers tighten around the rag as I slowly turned toward the door and stopped dead.
He was standing there. The man who had broken me and put me back together and broken me all over again in the span of a single night.
He stood on the other side of the glass, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, his long black hair falling around his face. The streetlight cast shadows across hisfeatures, making him look older, harder, and more dangerous than I remembered.
But his eyes—God, his eyes—were the same. Dark and haunted and filled with something I couldn’t name. We stared at each other through the glass, the silence stretching between us like a living thing. My pulse thundered in my ears, so loud I was sure he could hear it even through the door. My hands trembled, and I set the spray bottle down on the nearest table before I dropped it.
He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just stood there watching me with an intensity that made my skin prickle with awareness. I should have turned away. Should have pretended I didn’t see him, finished cleaning, and left through the back door like Stacey had. Should have protected myself from whatever this was, whatever he wanted. But I didn’t.
Instead, I walked toward him. Each step felt like wading through water, my legs heavy and uncooperative. The distance between us was only a few feet, but it felt like miles. Like crossing a chasm I’d never be able to uncross.
When I reached the door, I hesitated, my hand hovering over the deadbolt.
He was so close now. Close enough that I could see the exhaustion etched into the lines of his face, the dark circles under his eyes, the way his jaw was clenched tight, as though he was barely holding himself together.
He looked as I felt. Broken.
My hand moved before my brain could catch up, turning the deadbolt with a soft click. The sound seemed impossibly loud in the quiet, final and irreversible.
I pulled the door open. The night air rushed in, cool and crisp, carrying the scent of asphalt and distant rain. He didn’t step inside immediately—just stood there on the threshold, hiseyes locked on mine, his chest rising and falling with slow, deliberate breaths.
“What are you doing here?” My voice came out softer than I intended, barely more than a whisper.
He swallowed hard, his throat working. “We need to talk.”
Four words. Simple. Direct. But they landed like a punch to the gut, stealing the air from my lungs. I nodded slowly, not trusting myself to speak. Not trusting that my voice wouldn’t crack and give away just how much those four words affected me. Then I stepped back, holding the door open wider in silent invitation.
