Hawk seems to want to say something. Melissa watches the internal struggle play out over his face, and she sees the moment that he realizes he won’t speak out against Josh, not when he’s the man who has done more for Hawk than anyone else. Hawk looks between Josh and Felicia, clearly not believing that he’s being ganged up on by the two most important people in his life. Once he gets the message that neither of them will back down, he throws his hands up in despair.
“Fine, do what you want. But don’t expect me to stand around playing nice. I’m done here.” He doesn’t even look at Melissa before he turns around, leaving them all staring after him.
“That boy is more stubborn than a damn mule.” Josh shakes his head in despair, as Hawk strides back to the pool table, purposefully ignoring Melissa’s corner of the bar. “Don’t take it to heart, beautiful. He burns fast and hot, but he’ll cool down soon enough, and when he does, he’s going to realize what a grade A ass he’s been.” Josh gives her a comforting pat on the shoulder before rejoining some grizzled bikers in a corner booth.
Ali lets out a low whistle after the drama has passed. “Gotta say, hun, I’m not sold that this guy is anywhere near deserving of you. If it were up to me, I’d shove that holier than thou attitude where the sun don’t shine.”
“I can’t say I blame you.” Felicia heaves a deep sigh, signaling Matt for another beer. “If that was all I’d seen of Hawk, then I’d probably feel the same way. But what you’ve just seen is about as far away as it gets to the whole story.”
“So he had a bad childhood, join the freakin’ club! That doesn’t give him any right to treat people like they don’t matter.” Ali plants her hands on her hips, looking at Hawk’s back as if she wants to pick a fight with him. “Melissa is the best person that I know. He doesn’t deserve to breathe the same damn air as she does!”
Felicia raises an eyebrow at Ali, clearly impressed at how protective she is of her best friend.
“Calm down, Ali. I’m fine.” Melissa settles a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “I appreciate the whole lioness thing, but you’re going to blow a blood vessel if you keep staring at him like that.” Melissa nudges her friend playfully until Ali drops her gaze. Melissa has no desire for her to go off half-cocked in front of the whole club. If that happens, there is no way that her little secret that Hawk has so far managed to keep would stay on the down low.
“And Felicia’s right. That guy, he’s not the Hawk that I know. You’d like the one that I know.” Melissa shrugs sadly, wondering what she needs to do to get him back.
Felicia gives her an appraising look, as if she’s seeing another side to Melissa, and Melissa realizes that Felicia is just as protective of Hawk as Ali is of her. “Thank you for what you said to Hawk, you know, about me. Thank you for standing up for me.” Melissa hugs Felicia in the impulsive way that she has, pulling away before the other woman gets uncomfortable.
Felicia looks a little less shocked at Melissa’s outburst of touchy feeliness than she did the first time it happened, but it’s still not something that she’s used to—although Melissa doesn’t doubt that the woman needs a hug about as much as Melissa needs a kind word from Hawk. “You don’t have to thank me. I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.” Felicia shrugs as if it were no big deal, but a flicker of understanding passes between them. “Josh’s right about him, Melissa. He’ll come round. But he’s hurting and when he’s like this, there’s no reasoning with him. I should’ve known.” Felicia seems to shake her head at her own stupidity.
Melissa reaches out and places a comforting hand on her arm. “You tried, Felicia. You can’t beat yourself up over that.”
“Well, this was definitely more exciting than my date would ever have been.” Ali breaks the heavy atmosphere with a joke, and the three girls share a laugh.
But Melissa’s is forced, still rocked by her confrontation with Hawk. “I need the Ladies. I’ll be right back.” Ali seems to read the truth in Melissa’s expression, that she needs to be alone for a few minutes, but she just nods mutely, engaging Felicia in conversation as Melissa slips out of their little circle.
She stares at herself in the mirror in the Ladies room, grateful that the restrooms are in the opposite direction to Hawk and his little crew. Her eyes are a little puffy from the cry that she’s allowed herself locked safely out of view in the bathroom stall. Aside from that, her makeup is surprisingly intact. She fusses with her dark auburn hair—although it doesn’t need to be fussed with. It’s as if an outward display of order will go some way towards hiding the inner turmoil she’s feeling.
Melissa looks at her reflection, unable to stop replaying the words Hawk had thrown at her. She had been a fool to think that she could just waltz into the bar and make things right; she sees that now. But in a way, she had been unprepared for the depth of the hurt that Hawk felt. They had known each other for less than a week when the truth had come out about why she had come to Durangos that night. But that had been more than enough time for both of them to fall for the other. Hawk didn’t trust easily. In fact, he hardly trusted anyone at all. In a short space of time, Melissa had become one of those few people, and she had been lying to him the entire time. A lie mostly of omission, it’s true, but a lie just the same. It was no wonder he didn’t want anything to do with her.
She squares her shoulders and lifts her chin up, tired of looking at the dejected girl in front of her. Melissa has taken down men twice her size in karate competitions; she had been valedictorian of her high school and top of her class in college. She could figure out how to make what she had done to Hawk right. Even if that doesn’t translate into things going back to the way they were between them, she has to make it right.
With renewed purpose, Melissa steps out of the Ladies room. She’s so caught up thinking about what she can do to make it up to Hawk that she almost misses a familiar face settled into a booth away from all of the action. She does a double take, but there’s no mistaking him. The memory of that last day in the body shop comes rushing back to her; he had been there, too. Hawk had referred to him as ‘the new guy’—which hadn’t made any sense at all. But Melissa had been so caught up in her own drama that she hadn’t been able to react to the presence of her ex. That isn’t true of today.
“Wes.” Her voice is low, but she’s left in no doubt that he hears her.
He starts, looking up from whatever he had been scribbling, and as recognition dawns on his face, it lights up. “Melissa.” He says her name the way he always does, the reverential way he’d said it when they were together.
But Melissa isn’t thinking about his voice, she’s thinking about what he’s trying to cover up as she stands in front of him. He shuffles the papers on the table, hurriedly trying to hide whatever he had been working on. The way that he does it sets alarm bells ringing in her head and tells her that she needs to find out why he’s being so secretive. The Wes that she had been with during her final year at college was über-competitive and would take any opportunity he could get to show everyone just how smart and how much better than everyone he was.
When she’d aced their journalism class, he hadn’t been able to hide his jealousy. It was one of the reasons she’d decided to call it quits. She couldn’t understand why Wes wouldn’t be happy for her and why if anything the opposite had been true. All he was interested in was one-up-manship, and at first she’d found his ambition and drive attractive, but it soon became exhausting.
“What are you doing here?” She tries to read the notes in front of him, but he’s still surreptitiously covering them up.
“Thursday night’s the new Friday.” Wes shrugs laconically, but Melissa knows him too well, and he can’t help his attention slipping back to the notes in front of him.
“I’d heard that.” She smiles at him, changing tack. “But what are you doing here? In this particular bar? I didn’t think that biker hangouts would really be your thing.” Melissa raises a questioning eyebrow at him. Wes was the preppiest person that she knew, he defined the term WASP. With parents near the top of the Oregon rich list, Wes had never had to work for anything. Whatever he had wanted, it had landed on his plate. It wasn’t something that Melissa begrudged him, why should she? But it influenced every part of his life. He had a sense of entitlement that tended to rub people up the wrong way.
“They didn’t used to be. But I’ve changed a lot recently, Melissa. I’m not the same person that I was.” He looks at her with doe-like brown eyes and the hopeful expression on his face tells her that he still hasn’t accepted that they’re over. “It’s good to see you. Take a seat.”
She smiles back at him, not able to return the sentiment. But not wanting to be rude, she accepts his offer, sliding into the booth opposite him. He seems to visibly relax and pushes his notes into a neat pile to his side. That was something else about Wes, he was ordered, meticulous even. Everything had a place; he was almost compulsive about tidiness. It was yet another reason that he and Melissa just weren’t suited to one another. She’d left him alone in her bedroom for a morning, and he’d re-ordered the books in her shelves into genre and alphabetical order by author. At the time she’d thought that it was sweet and thoughtful, looking back at it, with the full benefit of hindsight, she realized that it was just weird.
“So you’re working at The Shop now? I saw you there a few days ago.” Melissa tilts her head, taking in Wes’s new threads. He’s wearing ripped jeans and a black t-shirt, fitting in nicely with the other men in the bar.
“I saw you, too.” Wes smiles at her in a way that makes her insides squirm and not in a good way. “You were with Ownes.” He almost spits the words out, his gaze flicking towards the pool table where Melissa had last seen Hawk.
Melissa has experienced Wes’s jealousy before; she doesn’t have any intention of explaining herself to him. They aren’t together anymore; it isn’t as if she owes him any kind of explanation about her relationship with Hawk. “I was a little surprised to see you there. I didn’t know you knew anything about being a mechanic. I thought all that manual labor stuff wasn’t really your bag.”
Wes smiles at her in that indulgent way of his that makes her feel like a stupid little schoolgirl. “Like I said, I’m not the same person I was before. There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me anymore.” He shrugs enigmatically, and Melissa has to resist the urge to roll her eyes at him. Wes has always had a flair for the dramatic, acting as if there is a camera filming him at all times.
“Well, I can see there’s one thing that hasn’t changed.” Melissa flicks her eyes towards the notes that sit by his right hand. “You think you’re ever going to trade in your notebook for a laptop? Or, in your opinion, is technology still the big bad that’s destroying the publishing world?”
Wes shakes his head at her, looking at her patronizingly as if she couldn’t possibly understand what he’s no doubt about to explain to her. If there was one thing that Wes enjoyed more than coming first, it was imparting wisdom to the less gifted. “It’s not an opinion, Melissa. It’s a fact.” He says this as if it were a universal truth. “I know you mean well, but blogs like yours, online news feeds, all that stuff, they’re like a disease, eating at print.”
“Gee and I just thought that it was called progress.” Melissa doesn’t make any effort to stop herself from rolling her eyes this time. There was a time when she would have put up with Wes’s extreme views, thinking that he was an idealist. Now, she knows that he is just stuck in the past. He doesn’t like change. Keeping everything the same, ordered, and in check, it is all part of his compulsive behavior. When Melissa had suggested that perhaps he talk to a therapist about the root of his problems, Wes had gone postal. She hadn’t brought it up again.
“It’s not progress because technology is never going to win. You can’t undo hundreds of years of paper, the Ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus, the Romans on tablets of stone. What will our legacy be?” Wes looks off into the distance, posturing just like he always does. It was as if he were giving a speech to an imaginary rapt audience.
Melissa was barely even listening. It was a line of thought she’d heard before, any number of times from him. Wes would constantly make fun of her blog or her posts on forums and websites. He would tell her that it wasn’t real writing, because it only existed digitally and there was nothing tangible that you could hold in your hand. At first his words had upset her, that perhaps he was right, later she had realized that he was just being cruel.
“Melissa?” Wes’s tone jerks her out of her thoughts, and she realizes he must have been speaking to her while she had zoned out. “I asked if you liked the flowers.”
She takes a deep breath, prepared to re-hash the same conversation she’s had with him any number of times. “They were very pretty, Wes.”
“White roses, your favorite.” He seems so sure of himself that Melissa doesn’t bother to correct him. They were Wes’s favorite flowers, not hers. He’d just decided that they should be what she liked. His controlling nature had even stretched to believing that her preferences always fell into line with his.
“They were pretty, Wes. But we’ve talked about this before. You can’t keep sending me gifts. We’re not together anymore.” Her tone is soft but firm, she had learned the hard way that she had to be straight with him. He would cling on to anyone branch of hope that she gave him, so she’d stopped giving him any at all.
“Things change, Melissa. We’re so right for each other; you can’t deny that.” He leans forward, covering her hand with his and tightening his grip so she would have to yank hers away hard to get away from him. “I would never treat you like Ownes, with such little respect. I know you like no one else, Melissa.”
She feels her stomach roll at his contact. No matter how much she tries to forget the way he had touched her that night when he had tried to… Anyway, it was useless, it always brought her back to that moment in her house, when panic had set in as she had realized what was about to happen. From the outside, Wes would seem like a catch to most women, tall, attractive, rich, smart, but Melissa knew him too well. She’d seen the dark side of his nature, and now he just made her feel sick.
“Whatever happened between Hawk and me is between us. It doesn’t concern you, Wes.” She pulls her hand out from under his, clasping her hands underneath the table and striving to keep her voice from shaking.
“He’s not right for you, Melissa. Surely you can see that? He’s dangerous. Do you know about the things he does? The things they all do?” Wes lowers his voice, looking around to check that no one is within eavesdropping distance.
The hairs on the back of Melissa’s neck shoot up. “What do you know about that, Wes?” The wheels in her head start turning as Wes’s eyes flick down to the notes by his hand.