Page 11 of No First Kisses

“Just think about it,” Nia goes on like Logan’s rage isn’t palpable. “I know you’d have a blast.” Maybe she doesn’t feel the anger radiating off him in waves.

She walks out, and Logan steps into the office, closing the door behind him.

For a tense few moments, neither of us says anything. “You’re not going to go out with a doctor. Or anyone else she tries to hook you up with.”

My neck stiffens at the commanding tone he uses. Like I will just cower at his words.

I stand up, making sure that no one is in the lobby before I take a step toward him. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” His voice drops an octave. “You’re not gonna go out with?—”

“You don’t own me, Logan. You never have, and you never will. If I want to go out, I will. If I want to fall in love, I will. If I want to move out of the damn state, I will. And at the risk of sounding exactly like a child, there’s nothing you can do about it.” My chest is heaving, and I feel like an asshole for snapping like that, but he doesn’t have any right.

For a second, I watch the flash in his eyes. The challenge and the change back into the boy I’d fallen in love with. Daring me to say anything, just so he can kiss the words out of my mouth. Then just as quickly as it appears, all that is gone and I’m met with the same blank stare as the one he had when he broke everything I ever tried to give him.

“We need to talk, Poppy.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about, Logan. You should go.”

“No, you’re right.” He pauses and then opens the office door again, walking away with another piece of my heart that he doesn’t even know he has. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”

I see the look in his eyes, the challenge there, and decide to do the smart thing.

After work, I run away and avoid him like the plague for the next four weeks.

4

LOGAN

Poppy walks out of Birch PD after a twelve-hour shift with her red hair swaying behind her back, hanging just above her ass, and every single ounce of control I have snaps into pieces.

She’s managed to avoid working on the same shift as me for a month. How she did that, I don’t know. But after walking in on her and Nia talking about going out together again, I just about lost it.

“Gonna go on a date, my ass.” Muttering to myself, I follow behind her, needing to collect myself before I do something stupid like flip her over my shoulder and carry her home like the caveman that I really am.

Never mind the fact that Poppy doesn’t actually say that she is going to go on a date with anyone. I just walked in on Nia inviting her out and proceed to obsess over it for the next eight hours while we both work our shifts.

Hearing her voice on the radio drives a nail into my chest. One that I can’t avoid or do anything to prevent because dispatchers literally tell cops where to go and what to do. If I don’t want to lose my job, I need my radio on.

Even if I’d rather throw it out the window than listen to Poppy give me the cold shoulder in front of every single cop who has our frequency.

By the end of the night, just like every other night that I’ve worked with her, I’m ready to throw in the towel and give her anything she wants as long as I can fall asleep with her in my arms.

But when I close my eyes and think about letting my dreams become reality, all I can see are her lifeless eyes staring up at me, and just like every other time, I know it is all my fault.

So I keep my mouth shut when she says goodbye to everyone else in the bullpen at the end of the night and try to figure out the odds of breaking into her house in the middle of the night again just to hold her.

Poppy walks ahead of me by almost fifty feet, and not once does she look over her shoulder, which is one of just twenty reasons that I follow her out every night from her shift. She doesn’t have any sense of the danger that lurks in the darkness all around us. And I can’t stand the thought of losing her. Not again.

Alive, but not mine, I can handle.

Alive, and just out of reach, right where she belongs.

If anything happens to her, I don’t even have to think about it. I will burn the entire world down while I smile and welcome the death that will bring me back to her.

Morbid? Absolutely. But I also know the extent of my feelings for the woman, and that barely scratches the surface. If there is only one thing I’ve ever learned in therapy, it is how to acknowledge and accept the feelings I’ll never be able to change.

I would have followed Poppy all the way to her car on the other side of the parking lot, just like I do every other night, except for the fact that my phone starts to vibrate in my pocket. With a glance down at the watch on my wrist, I see that I’m already running late.

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