part of her that had only ever been with Kevin. Zach was the rare sort of man who would care enough to make the first time easy. She should explore that fact, sometime.
The idea made something inside her leap like a flame.
“Duke likes this?” he asked, his smile disbelieving and delighted.
“He does,” she confirmed, already slowing the roundabout. The alcohol in her stomach sloshed ominously. The roundabout came to a stop, but Duke whined for more. He sounded like Chewbacca. She scratched between his ears and tried not to be sick. Maybe spinning around like a five-year-old hadn’t been her smartest idea of the night, or the week, or even the year. She needed to get off this wobbly platform.
She stood up and her world turned black.
“Woah, woah.” Zach grabbed her, his arm an iron bar around her waist. She heard Duke’s worried bark, felt the warmth and weight of him pressing against her legs. He was trying to prop her up because he was a good boy.
“I’m fine,” she said unconvincingly, except this time it was true. Her vision prickled back to life and the dizziness faded. She tried to push Zach away, but she might as well have pushed a brick wall. He was immoveable.
“Are you that drunk?” he asked, worry threaded through the words. “You only had—”
“I started early today.”
“What? Why?”
“But I’m not that drunk. I have POTS.”
Apparently convinced she was steady, he stepped back. She tried not to miss the feel of him, that reassuring solidness. “What the fuck is POTS?” he demanded.
“It’s a circulation thing. Mine is fairly mild. Sometimes, when I stand up, my heart beats too fast and I get dizzy.” She usually rose slowly, so she wouldn’t drop like a sack of potatoes. Except she was preoccupied and, let’s face it, wasted, so she hadn’t.
Zach shook his head, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Okay. Got it. But you know what? You and me, we’re going to sit right here. Just for a little while.” Clearly, POTS or not, he knew she was drunk as hell. His arm came around her waist again, pulling gently, and a moment later she was sprawled in a heap on the playground, Duke licking her shoulder happily. Zach sat beside her with his face tipped up to the stars and his thigh pressed against hers.
Well, pressed was an overstatement. There was some slight contact, perhaps. But she felt it so intensely, he might as well have slapped her in the face with his dick.
“You seem sad lately,” he said, which certainly distracted her from inappropriate horniness.
She sighed dramatically. “Maybe I’m always sad. Maybe I’m a nihilist. We’re all going to die, the earth is just a doomed chunk of rock, and my mother never loved me.” There. The best lies were always technically true.
Zach turned away from the stars to face her. If this conversation were a duel, the care in his eyes would be a canon. “Hey. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
She feigned reluctance. “I suppose.”
He snorted and bumped their shoulders together. “Talk to me, sunshine. Might help.”
It absolutely would not help. There were so many things she hadn’t told him, or anyone—things that didn’t fit the character she played in this town. The breezy, bitchy divorcée gleefully spending her husband’s money while simultaneously giving not one flying fuck about the man. She liked playing that person. The longer she inhabited the role, the more real it felt. In fact, she’d started to believe it was real.
And then the call had come—the award and the invitation—and she’d been forced to face facts. She might not love Kevin anymore, but he still had the power to affect her life and fuck up her choices, just like he always had.
Her voice was choked when she finally confessed, “I’m angry.”
Zach’s reply was careful. “About?”
She opened her mouth, closed it, and shook her head. “I don’t think I want to have this conversation.” And she couldn’t. She really couldn’t, because she’d promised, she’d sworn, and it was pointless anyway.
He must’ve heard something desperate in her voice, because he stopped pushing. “Alright. Fair enough. What do you want to do?”
Now that was a damned good question.
Rae had decided a while ago to always choose herself: to write whatever her heart desired; to move somewhere slow and pretty and get a big old dog; to make friends who were kind to each other, whose interests weren’t carefully curated to make them look smarter or more cultured than they actually