***
Hours later, home and miserable, I was trying not to get too drunk.
I had to work tomorrow.
But my head didn’t care.
It was doing what my heart wanted.
Which was to forget.
My eyes caught on the young girl directly in front of me.
She was sitting at a bar height table with both of her parents, and who I guessed to be her boyfriend.
I didn’t know. The guy was weird. He hadn’t taken his eyes off of me all night, either.
“What do you think she’s staring at me for?” I asked my best friend, Mia.
Mia turned to stare at the seventeen-year-old cheerleader across the room from us, then shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you go ask her?”
I ignored her, and tried my best to ignore the glares I was receiving from the peanut gallery.
I also tried to ignore the man that was across the bar from me staring at me. Not that I’d actually caught him looking. Every time I looked at him his eyes were on his wife.
It was safe to say that I was in a bad mood.
Today I’d seen Booth for the first time since I was twenty years old.
Which meant it’d been eight and a half long years.
And he hadn’t changed one freaking bit.
Well, the beard was new.
Before he hadn’t been allowed to have a beard. Now, though, he had a good one.
One that made me want to sit on his face.
“What are you looking at?” I snapped at a woman that was glaring at me.
Okay, I was taking a long time in front of the mirror and sink, but there was no time limit. And there was another freakin’ sink beside me.
“Bitch, I will fuck your dad and make you my stepdaughter. Back the fuck off!” I hissed at the girl.
The girl’s eyes widened in shock that I would use such crass language in front of her and her parents.
Her mom didn’t look too happy, either. Her dad, on the other hand, looked calculating as he thought about the possibilities.
I wasn’t saying that I wouldn’t do him, because holy shit the man was hot for an old man. However, I didn’t do married men. Ever. Period. End of fucking sentence.
Which was why knowing Booth was married really gutted me.
I’d always harbored a secret hope that one day he would come back and let me explain. Let me try to grovel my way back into his life.
But now, with him married, that was never going to happen.
Never.
Ever.
I closed my eyes and walked to the bathroom, slamming into a stall and shutting it forcefully.
The door banged shit with a rattle and I locked it before taking a seat on the toilet fully clothed.
The alcohol wasn’t cutting it.
Neither was the ignoring him.
I had to get out of here.
I looked at my watch.
It was thirty minutes past eight, and our dinner hadn’t come yet.
I’d promised Mia a girl’s day out, but there was no way I could make it through the rest of dinner with that man in the same room.
What were the chances that he’d pick the same exact restaurant that we were in?
My stomach felt queasy as I got up and slid the lock to unlock the door.
I whizzed through the process of washing and drying my hands before I slowly opened the door and surveyed the room.
I could just barely make out the top of Booth’s red hat he’d been wearing declaring him the newest member of KFD.
Mia sat at the bar with a plate of food in front of her, and I started to feel a wave of guilt.
I roughly pushed it back, though, instead pulling out my phone and texting Mia.
She’d understand.
If there was anyone in this world that would, it was her.
Then, without another word, I slipped out the delivery door and hurried across the parking lot to my Jeep.
It wasn’t much to look at.
In fact, it was pretty boring.
I’d gotten her when I turned sixteen, and hadn’t looked back since.
I didn’t spend much time in my car, and, when I did, all I needed it for was to drive me less than two miles to work and or the grocery store.
I was a homebody.
I read.
I wrote the occasional review for a blog, and I worked.
That was the extent of my life.
I was as boring as boring could be.
And my Jeep proved it.
Opening the Jeep door without bothering to unlock it since it didn’t lock anyway, I started it up and backed out of the parking spot, unaware of the eyes that watched me the entire way.
My eyes stayed looking ahead as I ignored the motorcycle that I knew was his.
He’d had it for a long time, now.
It’d been in my parent’s drive enough, and I’d ridden on it so many times, that I knew that bike inside and out.
I’d done things on that bike that were inappropriate, and there would never come a time that I didn’t look at that bike with the infinite possibilities that Booth had shown me were possible on it.
My drive home was short, thankfully, because by the time I arrived in my driveway I was crying so hard that I couldn’t see.
Sobs wracked my frame as I opened the door of my Jeep, then promptly busted my ass on the concrete due to the slickness of it.
And so I sat there, in my driveway, with rain pouring down on me, and cried.