Chapter 17

How soon into a friendship can you start calling them a motherfucker?

-Asking for a friend

Cobie

One week later

I’d never, not ever, wanted to do anything more than I wanted to call Dante.

I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to see his little girl hug her arms around his neck. I wanted to freakin’ have a conversation with him that was about stupid shit like what the weatherman was wearing.

What I didn’t want to do was admit that I’d gone and fallen in love with the man. Why? Because the man wasn’t ever going to fall in love with me back. His heart was already promised to another, and that would just be plain dumb for me to go and do.

So, I suppressed the twitch to reach for the phone and went about my day.

It’d been a total of four weeks since I’d had my surgery, and I was starting to feel like myself again—at least myself minus boobs.

It was still weird to put on a T-shirt and not have that added feeling of wearing a bra underneath. Things rubbed weird, and I even contemplated wearing a sports bra just because the feeling was so odd.

Yet, I ignored the new and untried feelings, or at least tried to, anyway.

Hell, even the chest part of my seatbelt fit wrong.

Before, it used to go between my breasts.

Now, it went somewhere to the right, rubbing all sorts of different places.

Then there was the way I used to sleep—which was on my side. Now it felt uncomfortable because I couldn’t find that used-to-be favorite position anymore. With my boobs missing, I tended to lay more toward my belly rather than on my side.

It was week four, day twenty-six, and I had nothing to do.

Tomorrow was my week four appointment with the doctor, and tomorrow they might tell me I could go back to work.

Likely, though, he’d tell me to take the full six weeks that he’d told me was normal, and I’d have to tell him that if I stayed one more extra day at home, I might very well die.

My job was the only thing keeping me sane at this point, the thought of being there, instead of in this house all alone, sounded so appealing it wasn’t even funny.

Dante freakin’ haunted me.

His laughter echoed inside my brain. Though, he didn’t laugh all that much. Once that I knew of for sure, and it’d been because of something Mary had done to me.

But it was enough to remind me of everything that I was missing. That he was missing.

I felt like he was cheating himself, holding himself aloft of all things that might make him happy. Even when he was there, he wasn’t really ‘there.’

I was so engrossed in my thoughts of Dante that I hadn’t been paying attention to what was in front of me. I.e., the steps of my porch before I was nearly falling down them.

And what caught me weren’t my own arms, but the arms of a man that was the star of my every waking and sleeping moments.

“Dante,” I breathed, pain from my sudden movements arcing through my belly and chest. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

Dante scowled. “You left.”

I blinked. “I left a week ago. Did it take you a week to notice?”

He scowled harder. “No. What took me a week to do was find out where you were.”

I blinked again. “I’ve always been here.”

“You weren’t here. I came by every single day, at different times of the day.”

“I went for a walk every single day… and yesterday I walked and went to the grocery store. It’s just sometimes I don’t have the energy to do it until later in the day. While some days I wake up and can go right then because I have the want and desire.”

He sighed.

“You haven’t been avoiding me?”

I shook my head. “Never.”

I would never, not ever, avoid this man.

That was part of my problem, and also why I’d left. I didn’t want to follow him around like a puppy like I had been doing.

He set me up on my feet and then let me go, but his hands lingered at my waist for a few long moments as he waited to see if I had my footing.

“You want to go get something to eat with me?”

I didn’t even think to decline.

“Absolutely!”

***

“I don’t like this.”

I looked up to find Dante staring at the couple across the diner from us. And when I say across, I mean just a table’s length away. It was a small diner. One that was quaint, small, and tucked into the backwoods of Uncertain, Texas. The lake was less than a hundred yards away, and the water looked like glass.

The trees were just on the verge of losing their leaves, and the Spanish moss hanging from the trees was just starting to turn white.

“What don’t you like?” the man asked the girl.

“I don’t like that it told everyone that I was driving. Who does Apple think they are, telling me whether I can or can’t text and drive?”

Dante stiffened across from me.

“Just turn it off. I heard it’s in settings or something,” the man said distractedly, his eyes scanning the menu.

“I shouldn’t have to. I should be able to text anyone I want to text. It’s my phone, not theirs. If I want to put my life in danger—which I’m not because I know where all the freakin’ letters are—I should be able to do that.”

My brows rose at that statement. Dante’s, though? They lowered. Then he surprised the hell out of me by looking down at his water glass and clenching his jaw. His hands clutched the edge of the table, and the muscles in his arms bunched. Like he was struggling. Like he was trying to keep himself seated the only way he knew how. Brute force.

“Do what you want.”

“Texting isn’t even that bad. I mean, I don’t even have to look at the screen when I do it.”

The man with her snorted.

Dante lost it.

He stood up, pulled his phone out of his pocket, did something on the screen, and then placed it nicely on the table in front of the woman.

“That’s my wife and two kids,” he said softly. “They’re dead now because a teenage girl thought it would be okay to answer a text. It wasn’t okay. My sister didn’t react well. They went over a bridge and drowned. My wife was knocked unconscious after the impact with the river. My daughters both drowned, and I listened to them through the phone that my wife was using to talk to me on. So, you may not think it’s necessary to use that app. And that’s your prerogative. However, maybe stop and think about somebody other than yourself.”

With that, Dante walked back over to our table, gave me a look that said to follow him, and left without another word.

I watched him walk all the way out. I stopped, looked over at the table next to me, and sighed.

Standing up, I looked longingly at the food I was about to order and followed him out the door seconds later.

Dante was sitting on his motorcycle that was parked next to my car.

“You still want to go?”

He nodded once.

“You up for a ride?”

I took stock of my body.

I was still residually sore. The doctor said it could take up to three months for the pain and weakness to go away completely.

“It’s like losing a limb. That doesn’t go away overnight.”

But I felt pretty good. Really, I did.

That’s why I nodded my head and said, “I’d love to.”

But once I got up to his side where he was straddling his bike, I didn’t know what to do from there.

And I covered my nervousness by chattering his ear off.

“I’ve never been on a motorcycle before. In fact, I’ve always wanted to ride one, but I’ve never known anyone that had one to ask them.”

Dante grunted, keeping his eyes forward, and I bit my lip and wondered if this was a good idea—placing my body up against his back.

I didn’t know how he’d react. I didn’t know if he’d be okay with me touching him after what had happened in there.

But the moment I placed my hands on his shoulder and swung my leg over, he seemed to relax.

The moment I placed my hands on his hips, he started to chuckle.

“Gonna need to get closer than that,” he murmured, circling his fingers around my wrists and tugging lightly on them.

I scooted forward until I was pressed to him, crotch to chest, and waited for what he’d do next.

He started the bike.

Shocker.

What was a shocker, though, was the fact that he took my hands and encircled them around his chest.

Once I had a hold of his shirt—because my arms couldn’t fit all the way around his broad chest—he let go.

I didn’t.

Not until we finished our ride, and wound up at some house off Caddo Lake.

Apparently, there was a motorcycle club—MC—that he knew there. They were having a party, and he’d been invited multiple times. He’d turned them down so much that he almost felt compelled to go to one. He didn’t tell me why he’d never gone, but I knew as soon as I arrived why he never went.

There were a lot of happy couples in attendance.

It was hard to see other people happy when you weren’t happy yourself. I knew that from experience.

But, for once, I didn’t feel so alone with Dante standing at my side.

Not when the club president, a man named Peek at our sides and expressed his happiness in seeing us there. Dante more than me.

Something passed between the two men as we grabbed ourselves a plate of food that was cold, but still good.

And I wouldn’t know until much later on in the night as we were saying goodbye to the MC, that Dante, according to quite a few women that introduced themselves, actually looked quite happy.

And that was because of me.

I didn’t believe them.

Not at all.