Kristen Ashley - Fire Inside

Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band: Nine Tonight (Live).

I scrolled to the track, hit play, and walked to the couch, resuming my position, staring at my stereo as the crowd cheered then went silent as the piano started up and Bob started singing “We’ve Got Tonight”.

I listened to the words.

When the song ended, I got up, hit back, and played it again.

I listened to the words.

When it ended, repeat.

And repeat.

Again.

And again.

I did not cry.

I would not cry.

Not ever again.

I didn’t have it in me.

I had nothing left to give.

I not only had nothing left to give, I just had nothing.

And I was going to keep it that way.

If you had nothing, you couldn’t feel more pain because you had nothing left to lose.

Three weeks later…

“Uh… Lanie, honey, where’s the frame?”

I was smiling at Tack, who was standing in my doorway waiting for Tyra to pull the lead out and follow him to his bike, but at my best friend’s words I felt my smile freeze on my face.

Tack didn’t miss it.

Tack, the single-most decent man I’d ever met (regardless of how much he swore, which was maybe more than Hop did), was also the smartest.

He didn’t miss anything.

So when my smile froze, his sapphire blue eyes dropped to my mouth and his dark brows snapped together.

I pulled in breath and looked to Ty-Ty.

“What frame?” I asked. It was a lie and worse, I knew Tack would know it.

Tyra did, too.

This wasn’t a surprise. She knew me well. We’d been friends a long time.

Kane “Tack” Allen was tall, dark, handsome, and rough. He was also very smart, very loyal, very funny, and very in love with my best friend.

Tyra Allen was curvy, redheaded, green-eyed, and not rough in the slightest. She was also far from dumb, very loyal, very funny, very in love with her husband, and very true to me.

She and I had been through a lot even before we’d been kidnapped together years before because of Elliott’s problems with the Russian Mob. Although she’d been tied up and kept in a dark room while I was interrogated by the Mob, and we’d been rescued separately, when you shared something like being kidnapped, bonds formed even if the bonds already there were strong.

Sometime later, the day I’d been shot and Elliot had been killed, Tyra had been kidnapped, tied to a chair, and stabbed repeatedly.

Tack pulled out all the stops and paid a fortune to have a plastic surgeon erase her scars.

Mine still marred my skin. A reminder, a strong one, never to forget.

Tyra also came and got me from Connecticut, rescuing me from the dysfunction I’d moved to Denver to escape in the first place. She thought she was rescuing me from something else and I let her think that. I don’t know how convincing I was. I just knew Ty-Ty was letting it lie. She had me in Denver, under her watchful eye and close enough to feel her comforting hand. When that hand needed to form a velvet-gloved iron fist was anyone’s guess.

I just knew by the look on her face it would not be now.

Even so, Tyra had looked askance at that frame of Elliott and me tons of times. I even once caught her giving Tack eyes about it, jerking her head toward it, whereupon he shook his head. She bugged out her eyes. He rolled his to the ceiling. She crossed her arms on her chest and glared at him. As for me, I pretended I missed all this when I didn’t.

Suffice it to say, Elliott wasn’t her favorite person. He got me kidnapped. He got her kidnapped, twice. He got me shot, repeatedly. He got her stabbed, repeatedly.

So Elliott, even dead, was persona non grata.

As he should be.

For years, Ty-Ty had simply looked askance at the photo but ignored it and didn’t mention Elliott. I knew this was partially because, even though he was dead, she was pissed at him for getting me hurt, not to mention getting her hurt. This was also because her husband was loyal and he adored her and Elliott got her hurt. Even if Elliott was still breathing, it was pretty clear that Tack would make sure he wasn’t doing that for much longer. The breathing part, that was.

As for me, I didn’t mention Elliott. Not ever. My fiancé nearly got my best friend dead. Once we found out about his dealings with the Mob, Tyra advised me strongly to break it off with him. I stuck by his side. She was right. I was wrong. But we both paid for me being wrong and I didn’t go there. I didn’t go there because all I had in me was the ability to rejoice that she didn’t turn her back on me after I nearly got her killed. I held onto that like the lifeline it was. Like I was never going to let it go and no way I was going to bring him up, my decision to stay with him, and rock that boat.

So, obviously, it being an unspoken bone of contention, she wouldn’t miss the photo being gone.

And equally obviously, I was not going to share that I’d thrown it against a wall, shattering the glass. I also was not going to share that I then obsessively listened to Bob Seger singing “We’ve Got Tonight” because every word in that song was true even as I wouldn’t allow myself to admit that it was. I was further not going to share that I’d had my “night”. That night was with Hop (as were the thirteen before—and I was not going to share that either) and, at the time, it hadn’t even been a day but I was already jonesing for a drug I had to get off cold turkey.

No rehab to help me deal with losing my high.

I had to get through it on my own.

And I damned well would.

So the frame and glass and the stupid picture of me and my dead fiancé had long since been taken away by the garbage man. As had all the other pictures I had in albums upstairs. As had my wedding gown that I didn’t get to wear that I kept for some ridiculous reason, that cost a mint but I didn’t even give it to Goodwill or anything.

No one needed that bad juju.

So the garbage man took it to where it belonged. The dump.

At my fake-innocent question as to what frame they were referring to, Ty-Ty’s eyes slid to Tack. Mine did too.

He was looking at his boots.

In the years I’d known Tack Allen, I’d learned all the meanings of him looking at his boots. These were threefold.

One, he didn’t want Ty-Ty to see he found her amusing and this was solely when she was ticked at him which she would not find amusing that he found amusing but he mostly always did.

Two, he was ticked at one of his kids—the older two, Rush and Tabby, that he’d had with another woman—not Cutter and Rider, the boys he had with Tyra. As an older dad on his second time around, he had all the patience in the world with Cut and Rider. This was good, seeing as they were still little boys, but they were also total hooligans (and thus why they weren’t with us right then, ruining a relaxing dinner, but with Big Petey, a vintage member of the MC, likely destroying his house). Tack being ticked at Rush and Tab came rarer now, as they were older, and he looked at his boots when he was trying to stop himself from shouting or, maybe, strangling them.

Three, he was with Tyra and me and—for whatever reason we were squabbling, gossiping or giggling—he was not going to get involved.

Luckily, my eyes went back to Tyra before hers came to me.

I tried to come up with an answer to anything she might say.

Surprisingly, she didn’t say anything. Not about the frame or my lie.

Instead, she said, “Nothing, honey,” as she walked to me, wrapped her arms around me, tighter than usual, and gave me a long hug. “Thanks for dinner,” she said in my ear.

“Yeah, babe, good food,” Tack called to me from his place at the door, and my eyes moved over Tyra’s shoulder to him.

I smiled.

Tack did not.

He tipped up his chin but his gaze stayed glued to mine, intense. Somewhat like how Hop looked at me, minus the admiration and, obviously, the sex or foreplay, but adding open contemplation I had a really bad feeling about.

Tyra let me go and I tore my eyes from Tack to smile into hers.

“Thanks for coming,” I said to her and I chanced looking back at her husband.

“Don’t have to thank me for sittin’ down at a table with two beautiful women and good, bona fide, Southern cooking,” Tack replied and, finally, I smiled a genuine smile.

One thing my mom didn’t try to leave behind in Tennessee was her cooking. She did it all the time and she taught me and Elissa how to do it like her momma did with her and Mamaw’s mom did with her and so on.

She did this because she often tried to be a good mom. She also did this because it was tradition. But it stunk because I knew she did this mostly because Dad loved her cooking. Or, more aptly, he loved that whenever they had dinner parties, people would shower him (yes, him) with glowing compliments about how he was smart enough to marry a woman who knew how to make honest-to-goodness, down-home meals.

Needless to say, learning to cook in the Southern tradition, I grew up in Connecticut but I didn’t know you could steam vegetables until I moved to Denver. As far as I knew, they were either fried in an iron skillet with butter or breaded or battered and dropped in hot fat.

Luckily, I had the metabolism of a sixteen-year-old high school point guard.

Also luckily, my cooking was good enough for Tack to mention it (again) and get everyone’s mind off the frame.