No, I wasn’t some creepy weirdo keeping her underwear like a stalker. I planned to return them.
When I could figure out how the hell to face her.
I pumped the bar back and forth, my shoulders burning. Sweat beaded my forehead.
I needed to talk to her.
Now.
I let go of the ropes and stood up, wiping my face with a towel.
Not allowing time to talk myself out of it, I ran upstairs and grabbed the panties hidden in my drawer, and then headed for my car.
**
The Galloways’ street was empty. Of course, it was. It was only five in the morning.
I parked out front of the tidy brick home Meg had grown up in. It looked exactly the same as it had the last time I was here fifteen years before. Same neat flower beds lining the driveway. Same bright red door. Same faded blue porch swing swaying slightly in the morning breeze.
I turned off the engine and got out of my car, closing the door with a quiet click. The air was cool on my legs; I was still wearing the sweaty gym clothes I had worked out in.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I wasn’t the kind of guy who was big on spontaneous gestures, the theater romp aside. But I knew that I couldn’t let what happened between Meg and me rest. I knew her well enough to know that she was going to freeze me out all over again. And she had barely thawed in the first place. Now that I had touched her—felt her from the inside—I knew with absolute certainty that I couldn’t let that happen. The thought of her disappearing from my life all over again made me want to smash things. It made me want to fucking break the world into a million pieces.
I wouldn’t let her shove me aside. I wouldn’t let her turn her back on whatever this was. What was it? Was it just sex? The cowardly part of me wanted to say yes. That it was just a fuck, nothing else. It was easier to guard my heart that way.
But I knew deep down that whatever happened between Meg and me would always be more.
So screw her pride. Screw her hurt feelings. Screw her shame.
She was mine.
I shoved my keys into my pocket and walked swiftly around the side of the house, the well-trodden path both familiar and strange. I wasn’t used to being outside the Galloway home this time of the morning. If David had been still alive, I would have been shitting a brick worrying he’d catch me. I had always gotten along with Mr. Galloway. We had bonded many a time over sports, particularly basketball. He had been a second father to me.
But when it came to his girls, the man was scary as shit. June was no slouch either, which had me practically tiptoeing across the grass. Slinking along the outer wall like a damn cat burglar. God, I hoped none of the neighbors saw me and called the police. Explaining what I was doing traipsing through Meg’s backyard before dawn was a humiliation I didn’t need.
I curved around the back until I was standing beneath the large oak tree that stood proud just outside what I knew to be Meg’s window. The house was dark.
Of course it is, asshat. Because unlike you, some people like to be asleep at five o’clock on a Sunday morning.
“You can do this. One limb at a time,” I muttered under my breath, hoisting myself up onto the lowest branch. I hung there for a few seconds trying to get my balance before slowly and carefully scaling the hulking tree. I had only tried climbing this particular tree one other time, and it hadn’t ended well.
Meg and Skylar were having a sleepover in the seventh grade, and Kyle and I decided that it would be a great idea to scare them. We had put on Halloween masks and snuck into Meg’s backyard. Kyle had climbed the tree with no problem. I had only gotten halfway up when my shoe became stuck. When I tried to wrench it free, my hands slipped, and I fell to the ground, my left arm bracing my fall. David and June ran outside at the sound of the thud and finding Kyle and me in their backyard, had proceeded to give us the chewing out of our lives until David realized my arm was broken, then he drove me to the emergency room.