It couldn’t have been further from the truth, though.

I resisted touching alcohol. I shoved away any blunt thrown my way. And I got violent when somebody offered me coke. There was no way I was going to numb my reality again.

In the here and now, I wanted to feel every second of it.            

Thirteen

Ryker

“I’m sending some pussy your way,” Boss said to me on the phone. “I’m tired of you dodging the girls. If I can’t have you chasin’ one, then I’m going to send one your way.”

When he laughed drunkenly, I hung up on him before he carried on. It wasn’t that I wasn’t itching to be with a woman. Fuck, I was so hungry for sex, I probably wouldn’t care who I got to take home. But I was trying to fight that urge. The girls weren’t anything special. Just a bunch of chicks willing to put out in their tight little jeans and low cut tops.

And that would have fucking riled me up before, wouldn’t it?

It didn’t do anything for me anymore. Even in prison, when the guys reminisced about fucking, they never cared about who it was. They didn’t have a face in their minds they wanted to see when they were slipping their dicks into the warmth of a woman. It was all about ass and titties for them.

I’d had a taste of chicks of every size and look. After a while, the shine wore off and you were getting the same tasting meal that just looked different. Sex felt the same with anybody. There wasn’t anything special about any particular person. You got to pump and come and that was all there was to it.

It was the year I was arrested that I realized how wrong I was. When you had a connection with somebody – a person you loved that filled the void inside of you – then sex really was different. It wasn’t pleasuring you on just a physical level, it was also satisfying you on an emotional one too.

I doubted I’d ever feel that way again. And if I didn’t, plain sex just to get a physical need fulfilled was essentially meaningless to me. Choosing to listen to Reaper’s constant advice, I was tired of living a meaningless life, and I needed to do something about it. So cutting that out was the answer for now.

On my fifth day of freedom, I spent the day watching a little bit of television. Then I did four rounds of two hundred push ups and one hundred chin ups before I got bored and hit the shower. It was when I finished and drying myself off that I heard a knock on the door.

I checked the time. It was mid-afternoon. Had Boss sent the girl my way so early? I wrapped the towel around my hips and walked to the door. I ran a hand through my hair and then whipped the door open. Saying the words “fuck off” were at the tip of my tongue until I saw who it was.

Immediately, those words died in my throat and I stared at the face in front of me in shock.

Allie.

Standing right in front of me, looking the same and yet completely different at the same time.

It’d been raining out and her blue summer dress was damp. Her dark hair was tangled and shorter than I remembered, just barely reaching her shoulders. Those blue eyes – unchanging and beautifully pronounced like it had always been – looked directly into my own.

Fuckin’ hell, she was beautiful. Nothing like the awkward girl I’d fallen in love with. And this is what I threw away, I thought to myself right then and there.

“H-Hi,” she stuttered out, swallowing hard.

I didn’t respond. She shivered from the cold – or maybe it was me – and tucked her hair behind her ear nervously. She was holding her purse in her other hand, and she was gripping that fucker hard.

My heart raced as all kinds of emotions took over. I didn’t think about our past. I didn’t think about why I hated her. I didn’t think of how she’d broken my heart and stomped the fuck out of it. Instead, I just felt. And what I felt was nerves and love and fucking terror all at once.

You’re fucking letting her get drenched, dickhead. Open the fucking door.

I opened the door the entire way and stepped back. She stared into the room, hesitating for a brief moment before she walked in. I watched her stop in the centre of the room and look around. There was nothing for her to really see. The room was neat and tidy and completely fucking bare.

When the door slammed shut, she jumped and looked back at me.

And now it was just this. Her and me in a room after three years of zero contact. Her, nervous and scared, breathing harder and harder as the seconds passed. Me, controlling my urge to kiss the shit out of her while I breathed harder and harder as more seconds passed.

“What are you doing here, Allie?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she answered quietly, looking down at the carpet. “I’m… I want to know how you are.”

“How’d you even find me?”

“Everyone talks, Ryker.”

Ryker. I shut my eyes for a second, feeling pleasure run through me at her saying my name. That’s all she fucking had to do to make me feel like this.

“Well, I’m fine,” I then said in a harder tone.

“Good. That’s good.” She ran a hand through her wet hair, and my eyes glanced down her body. I used to know what every inch of it looked like, but it was completely different now. Allie was a stranger to me.

“You’ve grown,” I simply managed out before clearing my throat and awkwardly rubbing the back of my neck. This was not how I ever envisioned our first encounter to be like after everything.

“You too. You… You’ve definitely changed,” she remarked, glancing down my body for a split second before she looked back at my face. “The beard… that’s really different.”

Why was she telling me this?

Why the fuck was she even here?

This was the woman that I’d spent three years getting over.

“I got tired of shaving my face,” I told her on a shrug. This was the most pointless conversation of my life, but as long as she was talking more pointless shit, then the more I’d hear her voice.

We didn’t say anything for another few moments. She was still shaking – so it was me then – and trying to smile. I didn’t care about pretending shit. I just stared at her unabashedly. I had nothing to lose by doing it, and it made her even more uncomfortable.

Quietly, I said, “I know about Heath –”

“I don’t want to talk about him,” she cut in, blinking hard and looking away. She swallowed hard again, fighting to keep her emotions at bay. “I’m not here to talk about him.”