I started slapping hangers, declaring, “I can’t talk about this.”

“Why?” Aunt Bette asked.

I stopped slapping hangers and looked at her. “Because I don’t know what to think about it. He’s a complicated man. There’s too much going on, with him and just with me, and all of it is happening fast. One day, I knew where my life was heading. The minute I woke up, I knew what I would be facing. Two and a half months ago, I changed that and now I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m heading. All I know is, wherever it is, I have to get there. And as for Tack, he can be…” I stopped then started again, “a lot of things. Some of them are good, really good. Some of them are bad, really bad.”

“What’s bad?” Aunt Bette asked.

I shrugged and started moving hangers. “He’s unlike any man I’ve ever met. He takes bossy to an extreme. I’ve never experienced anything like it,” I answered. “And he has multiple personalities. He can be extremely gentle, thoughtful, warm. Then he can get angry and it’s scary. Then he can, I don’t know, disappear. He’s there, we work together for the most part, but he’s not.”

“Has he ever handled you the way he handled his ex?” Aunt Bette asked quietly and I took in a soft breath.

Then I admitted, “If he wants your attention, he finds a way to get it.” Aunt Bette’s eyes flashed and I hurriedly went on, “But it isn’t exactly the same. She’s a crazy woman and she makes his life a living hell and their kids. You heard it but what you saw is constant for him and they’ve been divorced for four years. And he said he’d never hurt me and he never has, not that way. He promised that. He said he’d rather cut off his own arm than ever hurt me.”

“He said that to you?” Lanie asked.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Wow,” she whispered then she looked at Aunt Bette. “He strikes me as a man of his word.”

Aunt Bette looked at Lanie then murmured, “Well, that’s two in the plus category, not exactly batting a thousand.”

Oh boy.

I heard chiming coming from Aunt Bette’s purse, she opened it, pulled out her phone and hit some buttons.

Then she hit some more while saying, “That’s Marsh. He’s done communing with the golfing brotherhood and he’s hungry. I need to feed my husband. He says he’s at a place called Club and he already has a martini. If we don’t get there soon, he’s ordering.” She hit one last button and I sighed a relieved sigh that this particular conversation was over (for now). She dropped the phone in her purse and looked up at me. “Is this Club place close?”

“Yes, just outside the mall,” I answered.

“But we have to drive there seeing as I’m wearing heels and they have really cool cocktail glasses so it’s likely a taxi night anyway since you have one cocktail in a really cool glass, you have to have seven,” Lanie explained.

This was totally true and this also obviously worked perfectly fine for Aunt Bette for she nodded once then said, “Let’s roll,” as a reply.

With no other choice, since when Uncle Marsh was hungry, everyone ate, even I knew that, we left our rack and headed to the parking garage.

We motored through it toward my car since Uncle Marsh had their rental. I headed to the driver’s side. Lanie to the passenger side back because Aunt Bette’s legs were shorter than mine. And Aunt Bette to the passenger front.

I’d bleeped the locks, doors were opening all around when suddenly and with no warning I saw nothing but black. My body went solid in shocked surprise and I heard a scuffle right before I opened my mouth to scream.

But not that first sound came out because I stopped seeing black when everything went black.

Chapter Fourteen

McGyvering

As I lay on my side on a floor in the dark with my hands bound behind my back, my ankles also bound together, instead of freaking out and visualizing all the possibilities that would bring about what might be my imminent torture, violation and death, I took this time to reflect on why I had never married and why I fell in love with Tack over tequila and sex.

I did this because I wanted to think about Tack who was big and he was strong and he made me feel safe (when he wasn’t making me feel unsafe) but mostly he made me feel alive. If there was nothing else to be said about Kane “Tack” Allen, he made me feel alive. Every minute I spent with him from his initial, “Hey,” to when he kissed me hard and wet and long before he left me that morning, I felt tingling. I felt excitement. I felt fear. I felt pleasure. I felt warmth. And I felt anger. I laughed. I wanted to yell so badly it made me want to explode. I wanted to cry so badly it hurt not to do it.

And I’d been one hundred percent alive through all of it.

What I did not want to think about was where Lanie and Aunt Bette were because they were not with me. And also I did not want to think about where I was. And further I did not think of why I might be there. And lastly I did not think about what might become of me because I was worried that what might become of me was that I wouldn’t be alive anymore.

Instead, I forced my mind to Tack, a man who was not perfect.

But he’d seemed that way when I met him. He was everything my mind had made up in my daydreams of the man I wanted to be mine since I was fourteen and started having them.

He was handsome. He was strong. He had a beautiful voice and an even more beautiful laugh. And he laughed a lot. He had a light touch and he had a sweet touch and he had a sexy touch. He drank tequila like it was water and ate roasted hog sandwiches like they tasted as good as the finest fillet mignon. And when I had his attention, I had all of it. That night at the Chaos party, he made me feel like I was the only one there. He made me feel funny and interesting and beautiful. And when he took me to his bed, he made me feel a lot of other things that were even better.

It felt like, all my life, I’d been living in black and white and didn’t realize it and suddenly, across a rowdy biker party, I saw this man and the world filled with vibrant color. It didn’t leach in slowly. It slammed in with a kapow!

I didn’t know that was what I was looking for. I just knew I wasn’t going to settle for anything less, not anything less than perfect. I was going to find the man of my daydreams and nothing else would do. So I never got married because I never found him, no one ever brought that color into my life.

Until Tack.

And lying on my side in the dark, bound, I realized that color shot back through my life every time he was filling it. It muted and trickled away when he didn’t, but it would burst out bright and beautiful the minute he came into my space.