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“Go. Now.” Cooper steps closer to him. “Everyone in this town knows what you did. You’re a sorry excuse for a man, spreading lies about how she ran off and left you, when it was you who was the pathetic loser all along.”
Jason looks at Allie, surprise all over his face. Apparently he thought he’d have the upper hand here. He assumed she still hadn’t told anyone about Christopher or what a coward hewas for doing what he did. But it’s quite the opposite. I guess his friends hadn’t gotten the memo. Either that, or they were waiting to get drunk before telling him.
“Come on, man,” one of his friends says, tugging on his arm. “Let’s go next door.”
“If by next door, you mean the bowling alley,” Dallas says, “don’t expect a ticker tape parade there either. You’re a loser, Platt. Best go back under whatever rock you crawled out from. This town doesn’t want you anymore.”
As the three men leave, Allie lets out a sigh so big you’d think she’d been holding it in for days.
Blake walks up and puts his arm around her. “You okay?”
She nods.
“If you hadn’t hit that fucker,” he says to me, “I would have.”
A bunch of “Me toos” echo in the space behind us.
I stare down at my fist, now aching and red. “I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”
“You picked a good one to start with.” Dallas holds out his hand to shake mine. “You’re a good man, Asher.”
“You okay?” I ask Al.
“Yeah.” She looks at the door. “I’m not sure I want to leave though.”
“How about we go back and finish dinner?”
Our waiter is just walking past, our barely touched food sitting under a pile of used napkins and other crap.
Cooper hands me an ice pack and looks at the tray. “I’ll make up some new plates. On me.”
“Thank you,” I say, leading Allie back to the booth we just vacated.
I set my hand on the table and put the ice pack over it.
“I can’t believe you hit him,” Allie says. I think she’s going to cry, but instead, she surprises me with a half-smile. “Thank you.”
I laugh. “You’re welcome.”
She scoots closer so our thighs are touching. “I mean it. You’re good at this.”
“At… punching people?”
“At taking care of me.”
I remove my hand from under the ice and wrap it around her. “I’m always going to take care of you, sweetheart. I promise.”
~ ~ ~
Allie’s been tossing and turning all night, but when she wakes up crying, I pull her to me, my front to her back, and whisper, “What can I do?”
She turns around in my arms and faces me. I can just make out her features in the moonlight coming through the window overhead. “He never got over the fact that I didn’t abort the baby. And then he actually had the gall to ask if I wanted to get back together after I came home.”
“Jesus, really?”
“I told him to fuck off and never talk to me again. He moved out of Calloway Creek a few weeks later.”
I kiss her forehead. “Good girl.”