Page 12 of Lacey's Fight

Between the warm summer evening and the throng of people dancing and making out inside the bar, she shouldn’t be cold. But this cold wasn’t due to nature, it was inside.

Deep inside in a place she pretended didn’t exist.

She’d always hoped that if you painted something in enough bright colors you could eradicate the black beneath it.

But you couldn’t.

No matter how many layers you put on that black it was still there, ready to show through when anyone scraped away some of the color.

Like Ben had done to her earlier.

It wasn’t that he’d turned her down for sex, that was his right, and while it didn’t happen very often, he wasn’t the first man not to be interested in sleeping with her. It was the way he’d gone about it.

He’d wanted to hurt her.

Wanted to lash out.

Lacey wasn’t stupid, it was pretty obvious that the man was dealing with some sort of heavy trauma. She knew it because she carried that same burden. But just because you were hurting didn’t mean it was okay to lash out and hurt others.

You never truly knew what someone else was dealing with.

Even a smile could hide a whole load of pain.

Ben didn’t know it, but he’d scratched away several layers of her colorful paint today by making her feel like a cheap hooker.

So, she liked sex, so what?

If she was a man, nobody would try to make her out to be a whore, but because she was a woman and wasn’t looking for a commitment that somehow made her less.

It sucked, big time. Because she liked sex, liked that it let her control her own body’s release rather than having that control snatched away from her.

Wasn’t like she was asking Ben for a commitment and a marriage proposal. One night of fun, dinner, maybe some dancing, and a few hours burning up the sheets. It would have worked off the stress of the mission, made them both feel good, and then they could have gone their separate ways in the morning.

If that wasn’t what he wanted he could have just let her take him for dinner to say thank you. Or just said no but said it in a nice way. There was no reason to make her feel like a piece of garbage. She’d felt like that enough for a hundred lifetimes.

Instead of going to sleep tonight satisfied and held in the arms of a strong, capable man, she’d go to sleep alone. Again.

Just because she wasn’t looking for what Ivory had found with Roman or Pearl had found with Jesse, it didn’t mean she didn’t get lonely sometimes.

Oh well.

No sense in dwelling on it.

She’d paint that color back on one smile, one laugh at a time until the black was all covered over again.

“Hey, beautiful.”

The words pulled her out of her funk, and Lacey smiled at the man standing beside her table.

After leaving the base completely humiliated, she decided to stop by her favorite club. It was late, the place was packed, the music was playing, and she was starving. Needing some space, she’d kept her gaze on her food so no one approached her, but this guy had come up to her anyway.

“Hey,” she said, attempting to shoot him a flirty smile but pretty sure she failed quite dismally.

“May I?” he asked as he nodded at the chair beside her.

“Sure.” Why not? If she wasn’t good enough for Ben, then this guy was obviously happy to step in.

“Looks like you’ve had a hard day, darlin’.”

---