I couldn’t sit indoors all night. I tried watching television, I tried catching up with friends, and I tried sulking. None of it made me feel any better.

Why had Barton stormed off like that? Him not apologizing had been bad enough, but to just outright fucking abandon me was a real crappy thing to do. My mind tried to convince me that he wasn’t worth it and that I shouldn’t wallow in pity over a guy who was so quick to run off.

In the end, I settled for ruining Tasha’s evening with Clyde. I’d been an awful sister lately, and she’d handled it all without complaint. Make no mistake though, she wouldn’t hesitate to remind me of it when this mess was in the past.

I showed up at the bar just as Clyde was coming back with a couple of drinks.

“Mind if I join you?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Tasha said. “Is Barton with you?”

“No,” I replied curtly. “No, he’s not.”

“Ah.”

“Tell you what ladies,” Clyde said, “why don’t I let you two talk it out. Kristi, you can have my drink.”

“You don’t have to leave,” I replied, secretly hoping he would.

“It’s okay, I know you sisters like to talk. And talk. And talk.”

“Wait up for me,” Tasha said before he left.

“Oh, I will. You’d better make it worth my while though.”

Tasha’s smile made it clear she most definitely would.

I took a sip of what had been Clyde’s beer. At least, I thought it was beer. The dark black concoction tasted thick and heavy, with none of the refreshing taste I usually got from beer. That’s why I stuck to a good pale ale.

“So what happened tonight?” Tasha asked. “I take it things didn’t go well.”

“No, they didn’t.”

I explained the stand-off between Barton and I, and how he had just up and left without saying why.

“Neither of you apologized?” Tasha asked.

“No. I’m not apologizing after what he did, and he’s too stubborn.”

“You’re both like a couple of kids sometimes. You messed up, and you should apologize. He messed up, so he should too. If you’d both done that, you could be screwing each other’s brains out right now.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not going first.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Tasha said with a sigh and exaggerated roll of the eyes. “One of you has to go first, and unless you subscribe to all that sexist bullshit, then it can just as easily be you as him.”

“Well, it’s too late now anyway. He disappeared. I have no idea where he went or why.”

“Maybe he remembered he left the oven on?”

“It’s not funny, Tasha,” I snapped.

“Oh come on, it kind of is. Look, you feel bad about what you did and you don’t really care about him telling his teammates. You’re just using that as an excuse to be mad at him. And he’s not really mad with you, otherwise he wouldn’t have come over to see you.”

“When did you become the expert in relationships?”

“I’ve got a lot of relationship experience, thank you very much. Okay, fair enough, most of that experience centers around avoiding them, but still… it all counts.”

“They shouldn’t be this difficult. Not in the early stages.”

“You can’t apply your logic to this one, sis. You both feel strongly for each other, and that means your brains are all over the place. Maybe this is a good thing.”

“How?” I asked. No way could this feeling ever be contrived as a good thing. There was a constant tension in the pit of my stomach that had me on the verge of throwing up at any second and my heart was literally aching. Cheesy, I know, but that’s how it felt.

“It’s best to get your first big fight out of the way early on. Then you can have makeup sex. Trust me, you want the makeup sex.”

“I’m not going to get into fights just for makeup sex.” The regular sex was plenty good enough for me.

“Not just makeup sex,” Tasha replied. “There’s also angry sex. Angry sex is fucking awesome. Look, why don’t you just go and see him.”

“Because I don’t know where he is.”

“I’m sure he’s just at home sulking and missing you.” Tasha paused, her attention distracted by something behind me.

“What is it?” I asked, without looking round. Barton? Was he here? Had he come to see me?

“Nothing. He might be at home. Or he might be in a bar with women draped all over him.”

“What?” I yelled. I turned around expecting to see my nightmare come true, but he wasn’t there. The bar was quiet, so I would have noticed.

“Look at the screen above the bar,” Tasha said, pointing to one of the monitors.

I looked up and saw Barton’s picture on the screen. He was in a bar with women flocking all over him. The scene didn’t look that different to our first meeting back in his apartment. That felt like a lifetime ago now.

The photo of Barton showed him looking down at what appeared to be a man lying on the floor in front of him, although the image wasn’t that clear. Eventually, the closed captioning caught up and a bad night got a hell of a lot worse.

“Milton Patton is a teammate, isn’t he?” Tasha asked, after we’d worked out that Barton had been in a fight.

I nodded. “This is not good. In fact, this is bad. Very, very bad.”

All that work improving Barton’s image had been thrown down the toilet with one swing of his fist. Leona had finally got what she wanted; a client who generated the wrong kind of headlines.

Was this why he’d run out on me? Just to go and get in a fight with a teammate? Not just any teammate; the quarterback who stood to take his place once he was back from injury. There was no way to do damage control on this. That wasn’t my responsibility now anyway.

Barton was on his own, just when he needed me most.