Page 17 of Never Stay Gone
Shane’s eyes slid closed. He palmed Shelly’s phone and squeezed the case.Don’t look. It’s not your business.He slid the phone into his jeans pocket. “Thanks, Alejandro.”
Alejandro shrugged. “See you around, man.”
He felt eyes on the back of his neck as he limped out of Manuel’s. He nodded a few goodbyes, gave a few tight smiles. He hesitated at the doorway. Those eyes were still crawling all over him, hot and heavy, and he wanted to turn around, wanted to see if Dakota was looking his way, looking at him like he used to instead of giving him that empty, nothing stare from earlier.
But what if he wasn’t? What if, when he turned around, all he proved was that Dakota couldn’t care less about him?
Shane pushed through the saloon doors without glancing back.
He ignored the stares from the crowd on the porch, ignored the mumbles and the mutters.Has-been. Blew it all. What’s a girl like her doing with a guy like him?He moved as fast as his aching knee would take him across the street, then climbed into his truck and put it in gear.
As he roared down Main, going the opposite direction Shelly and her friends had driven, he caught the shape of a man standing on Manuel’s porch. Broad shoulders, slim waist, the cherry tip of a cigarette in the darkness.
Shane floored the gas.
He drove past the town sign and the turnoffs to the ranch roads, out to where the desert took over the two-lane highway. Dust and grit sprayed behind his tires, arching into the waves of moonlight pouring across the desolation. Shadows of ocotillo and agave made claws that seemed to reach for his truck, trying to drag him into the darkness of the desert.
What’s happening to us, Shane?Shelly’s sad, lonely eyes faded, shifting into Dakota’s cold glare. Dakota used to look at him differently. So did Shelly.
Fuck, he’d been happy once, hadn’t he?
He slammed his palm on the steering wheel once, twice, and then yanked the wheel over, heading out into the black. His truck bounced over the creosote. He swerved around prickly pear and a mesquite, skidding on the loose, dry soil. Pushed his boot against the pedal, going faster, as fast as he could with pain rocketing up his leg. He screamed, gripping the steering wheel with both hands as he drove toward the horizon, a smear of purple beneath a million stars he’d spent thirteen years trying not to look at again.
His knee gave out before he could do any serious damage to his truck or the desert. It buckled, and he tore his foot off the gas and hissed as he coasted to a slow roll and then a stop. Shane threw the truck in park and grabbed his knee, trying to rub away the agony.
He traced the shapes of the mesas, the dark smudges that blotted out the starlight at the horizon. Damn it, out of all the places he could have come, he’d drivenhere? He thudded his head against the seat back and blew out a hard breath.
Something vibrated in his jeans pocket. Shelly’s phone. She had the worst habit of leaving it behind. He’d collected the phone from Manuel’s, the Get Go grocery, the library, Jo’s Diner, Betty’s antique store, the truck stop… He’d collected it from so many places he’d forgotten them all. Shelly could be careless with her phone, but she was a brilliant accountant. She worked for her father and had made a name for herself as the county’s go-to CPA. How could someone so smart with taxes and finances and things Shane could never understand, not even if he spent years studying, leave her cell phone on bar tops and restaurant tables and bathroom stalls?
Don’t look. It’s not your business.She can text whoever she wants to text.
Sighing, he dug the phone out of his pocket and tapped the side of the case.Maybe you don’t want to know.
He powered on the screen.
A series of texts appeared, the last few in a conversation between Shelly and someone else.Hey babydoll. I’m going to be in town again if you want to meet up.
His stomach clenched.
Shelly had obviously replied, but the lock screen didn’t show her text back, only the next message from whoever this person was.If you were really that happy, you wouldn’t have texted me again, babydoll.
And the text she’d just received:I wouldn’t leave you in that bar all alone.
Enough. Shane powered off the screen and shoved the phone into his center console.
A torrent of emotions rushed through him. Frustration and failure. Desperation and dread. He wasn’t the man Shelly needed, or even the man she wanted. He’d thought, after five years together, that he’d figured things out for good, smoothed over those rough spots inside him. He still remembered the day he first met Shelly and how bright her smile had been, almost as bright as Dakota’s—
Groaning, Shane pitched forward, resting his forehead on the steering wheel. He needed to not think. He turned on the radio, tuning between stations for static. Faint strains of late-night country wound through the white noise, and he caught the chorus of Jamie O’Neal’s “There Is No Arizona.”
There is no Dakota.
He turned the dial until the music came through stronger. The radio was playing old country hits, music from the 2000s, the songs he and Dakota listened to all summer long. He chewed his lip, then climbed out of the cab and hitched himself up over the tires and into his truck bed. It was dusty, and there were tool chests and police kits crowding the space, but he shoved those to the side and made a space where he could lie down.
He stared at the stars, letting his memories and the way the constellations appeared overhead at that damn spot in the desert fill him up until there was no room for anything else. Faith Hill crooned through his open truck windows, singing “Breathe.”
For a moment, he thought he felt a warm body beside him, the puff of soft breath by his ear, chapped lips moving through his hair and pressing against his scalp. He closed his eyes and rolled to his side, reached out and wanted, desperately, to feel someone reaching back—
He felt nothing but the empty wind.
