Love Unrehearsed

I got as far as “you don’t deserve him you whore” when I threw it in the bag. My hand slightly trembled.

“Do you remember the night of the Reparation premiere, how Ryan was sort of freaking out?” I turned to look at her sitting on the floor.

“Uh huh.”

“He was worried that someone in the crowd might try to hurt us, shoot us, stick him with a needle while he was signing autographs.”

Marie gaped at me. “Seriously?” I nodded.

I opened a manila bubble envelope that had what looked like underwear in it.

“Eeeewwwwee.” Just looking at it made me want to disinfect my house.

Marie’s face scrunched. “Oh my God. Is that some girl’s underwear?” I felt like throwing up. This was like eight boxes of Angelica the psycho-stalker all over again. “People on this planet are seriously screwed up.”

I tossed the fan panty envelope right into the trash bag. Some fangirl’s skanky panties were now going to pollute a landfill somewhere. “You know what’s even scarier?” I kicked the stack of boxes stuffed with fan mail. “When you start to actually add them all up.”

I rifled through the pile, grabbing a few that were addressed to me. The first letter was a weird mix of congratulations and warnings not to mess it up. Unbelievable.

The next one wasn’t so benign. My hands started to shake. Not again. Not freaking again.

Marie noticed me stagger back into the boxes. “What’s that?”

It was hard to speak. “Um, it says someone is going to kill me if I don’t end it with Ryan.”

“Let me see that.” She grabbed it out of my hand. “Where’s the freaking envelope?” I handed it over.

“No return address but it’s postmarked from Ohio. You need to tell Ryan about this.

This shit isn’t funny. I know you don’t want another Kyle incident but chicks out there are crazy.”

She was right.

There was nothing stopping another person like Angelica from coming after me, and if the stacks of mail behind me were anything like the letter I held in my hand, there were a lot more psychos out there wishing for my demise.

Chapter 12

Skeletons

“Taryn, that guy sitting at the bar over there says he’s from . . . Oh Jesus cripes . . .” I instantly looked over at Marie, who was murderously glaring at the front door of the pub. From her reaction I fully expected to see Gary sauntering in. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Instant tightness gripped my chest and throat, causing my heart to thump and sending my natural fight-or-flight response into high gear. I couldn’t form a rational thought while the adrenaline was coursing into my blood. Why in hell would he ever think to show up here?

I felt slightly lightheaded and dizzy as I watched him approach the bar, his head dipped low with humbled hesitance. Running into an ex is one of the most awkward things in life to endure, but this run-in was not accidental.

Unfortunately, sometimes the skeletal remains of past relationships don’t stay buried forever. Sometimes the dead inexplicably rise and manage to crawl their mangy asses out of the dark hole that you put them in. I felt sick to my stomach, seeing my past had come back to haunt me. I thought I had buried Thomas deeper than that.

Part of me wanted to shout at him to stop and get the hell out of my bar, but as I took in his overall appearance and extremely forlorn look, a moment of compassion held my words back.

“Like we don’t have enough crap to deal with around here,” Marie said out loud. It had been a week since she stopped accepting Mike’s calls and she was bitchy. “Either you tell him to leave or I will.” I quickly noticed that Thomas was wearing the black button-down shirt that I had gotten him for Christmas several years ago underneath his well-worn motorcycle jacket, and casually untucked from his blue jeans.

Did he wear it on purpose?

My fingers had opened those buttons before. My hands had sought out the hard chest beneath it.

Damn him.

As if I needed to be tortured some more, my eyes quickly skimmed over the bulge near his zipper. How I once used to crave that . . . him, voraciously. How he scorched his place in my soul, assuring that any man I dated would be measured against him.

I also noticed that the laces of his work boots were pulled apart and exposed; how silly that I used to find that so goddamned attractive, all those years I pined for him. I hated that something so simple as his looks was still able to pull an unwilling emotion of excitement out of me.

Thomas’s shaggy blond hair was tussled into casual disarray, giving him that delicious “I just crawled out of bed where I was naked and sinning” look. But instead of appearing cocky and ready for my icy greeting, his eyes were sorrowful, red. Pained?