Page 165 of Bitter’s Sweet

“I already decided one thing.”

“What?”

I wipe my face and sit straighter.

“I'm not sleeping in his bed again.”

Mercy has already arranged a guarded room for me upstairs at the clubhouse. Her own house is still off-limits after Razor photographed it, and for once I'm not going to argue about sleeping somewhere safe.

She watches me carefully.

“Good.”

“Tomorrow I get Mama. I get my suitcase. I get whatever else I left up there.”

“And then?”

I look toward the dark window. Beyond it are festival lights, the garage, the clubhouse, and somewhere on the other side of all that, Bitter.

I can almost feel where he is.

I hate that.

“Then I stop waiting for him to prove I was right about him.”

Mercy doesn't answer.

Maybe because she knows I don't quite believe myself yet.

I don't need to.

Not tonight.

Tonight I can hurt.

Tomorrow I collect what belongs to me.

And Bitter Adams can keep everything else he chose.

Chapter Ten

Sweet

I wake up in the clubhouse guest room Mercy Duvall usually uses with swollen eyes, a headache behind both temples, and the uncomfortable realization that heartbreak does not kill you nearly as efficiently as it feels like it should. It should. That would at least be dramatic.

Instead, I am alive beneath a quilt covered in tiny embroidered roses, staring at a ceiling fan with one bent blade while somebody downstairs bangs a cabinet shut.

My first thought is that I need coffee.

My second is Bitter.

I hate my second thought.

I roll onto my side and immediately regret it because my body remembers him before my heart can defend itself. My thighs ache faintly. There is a mark on my shoulder from his mouth and another low on my throat, proof of a night that felt real.

Proof does not mean much when the man attached to it is fucking someone else inside a coffin less than a day later.

I close my eyes.