Page 5 of Don't Call Me Sweetheart

This was the problem with hookups. I had sat down at the bar with the purest of intentions. A beer, a meal, and then back to my rented room for a thrilling night of financial documents and budget proposals. If that didn’t put me to sleep, a Netflix binge would do the trick. Under no circumstances was I going to pick up a local and take her back to my room. That was something the Old Max would have done. The New and Improved Max had a game plan and wasn’t going to let anyone stand in his way. Not even his own dick.

But that was before I heard her voice.

It was a nice voice. Sweet and kind, even when the owner of said voice was harried and frustrated, which she definitely was. I had found myself eavesdropping on their conversation, a low-stakes drama that somehow sucked me in. I couldn’t resist turning to look. Just to satisfy my curiosity.

She looked exactly like I had expected. Sweet, like her voice. The girl-next-door type, the kind with fathers who issued dire warnings to stay away from guys like me. Her honey-brown hair was pulled back in a casual, bouncy ponytail. It was difficult to make out the color of her eyes in the dimly lit bar, but I guessed they were probably brown too.

She just looked so normal. Like nothing bad had ever touched her. There was an appeal to that. I didn’t examine the feeling too closely; I already knew I was a cliché. Bad boy wanting the good girl was hardly a new plot.

Two weeks and I was already falling into old habits. I had come to Hart’s Ridge for a fresh start. After a childhood of bouncing around foster homes, followed by a decade and a half of bouncing from school to school as I progressed in my career, it was time to settle in one place. To build something real and lasting.

My roots were already here. Now it was time to see if, for the first time in my thirty-five years, I could actually bloom.

But none of that was going to happen with Rose. Because girls like her wanted guys like me for one night only. Not forever.

And apparently maybe not even that, judging from the way she was soaking my chest with her tears.

I gave her shoulder an awkward pat. “There, there.” I winced. There, there? My therapist was going to laugh himself sick with that one.

In an attempt to make myself useful, I reached for the tissues on the nightstand and pressed one to her face. She made an indelicate snorting sound and pulled back to wipe her nose and eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sniffling. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” She sat up, covering her face with her hands. “This is so embarrassing.”

“No,” I lied. Then hesitated. Yeah, I needed to know for sure. “Was it… Was it something I did? Did I…” I turned the moments over in my mind. She had seemed eager enough. Sober enough. I was ninety-nine percent certain I hadn’t crossed that boundary. Her tears were the only thing that made me waver on the final one percent.

She shook her head vehemently. “It wasn’t you.”

Great. If it wasn’t me, then it wasn’t my problem. Other than the very obvious problem that a woman fleeing my bed, sobbing, into the dark night would very likely wreak havoc on my not-entirely-stoic psyche. We couldn’t end it like this. It would haunt me.

“Want to play cards?” I offered.

She blinked watery brown eyes at me and wiped her nose. Christ, she was even cute when she cried. Of course she was.

“Cards?” she repeated, sounding baffled. “What game?”

“Egyptian Rat Screw.”

I stood, tugged on my underwear, and tossed Rose her clothing. I rummaged through my overnight bag, taking longer than strictly necessary as I listened to the sounds of her hastily getting dressed behind me. I hadn’t brought much with me. Starting fresh was my specialty. I hadn’t had time to settle in or even buy a bed for my new place before I had ended up here, in a cabin with a dive bar, where I had been staying for the past three nights while my rental was fumigated. Because would it even be my life if an amazing job opportunity didn’t come with a side of pestilence?

“I don’t know how to play,” she said.

I located the deck and rejoined her on the bed. “It’s like this. Since it’s just us, we each take half the deck. Don’t look at your cards. We take turns putting a card faceup in the middle until one of us puts down a face card or an ace. If I put down a face card, and then on your turn, you don’t, I get the pile and put it on the bottom of my stack. Then we keep going.”

Her brow furrowed. “What’s the point?”“The point is to get all the cards. The point is also not to think for the next thirty minutes or so. It’s why I always keep a deck of cards handy. You never know when you want to shut down your brain for a bit.” I grinned. “And in this game, you get to slap things.”

“I’m in,” she said immediately.

I laughed at her willingness to choose violence. “Okay, here’s the slapping rules. Slap the cards on doubles, also when there’s a sandwich, which is just a card between the doubles. There are other things to slap on too, but we’ll start with those for now.” I shuffled and dealt, dividing the worn cards rapidly between us in turn. “A warning, though. This game gets violent when you start to memorize the order and know when the doubles are coming.”

The first run through the deck went quickly with only one slap—mine—and a lot of missed chances, leaving most of the deck in my hand. But I could tell from the gleam in her eyes that my luck was about to change in her favor. She had memorized the cards.

I was right. She had taken nearly all the cards when I finally managed to score a hit. By the third time through the deck, we were evenly matched again.

“Good grief, how does this game ever end?” she griped.

“To be honest, it doesn’t. Even when you’re out, you can always slap back in.”

She looked at me, and for just a moment, it felt like she was seeing past all the layers of bullshit, right to my soul. “Is that why you like it?”

---