The taste of Ben’s kiss—safe, familiar, and utterly hollow—lingered on my lips like a lie. It was the flavor of a life I’d run from, a comfortable cage I refused to re-enter.
His redacted files and gentle deflections were nothing but pretty wrapping on an empty box, and I was done playing his game.
Frustration coiled in my gut, hot and sharp, propelling my truck back down the dirt road toward the one place I knew held ugly truths: The Swamp Devil.
The bar was even grimier in the fading daylight, the neon sign flickering like a dying nerve.
I slammed the truck door and strode inside, the humid air immediately replaced by the scent of stale beer, cheap whiskey, and something damp and earthy that clung to the cypress-paneled walls.
The place was mostly empty, just a few old-timers nursing beers in the shadows. And him.
Nash Durand was exactly where I expected to find him, hunched over the bar as if in prayer to the half-empty bottle of amber liquid in front of him.
He didn’t look up as I approached, but the line of his shoulders tightened, a subtle acknowledgment that he’d felt my presence the moment I walked in.
I slid onto the stool next to him, the worn vinyl sighing under my weight.
“Buy a girl a drink?” I asked, my voice laced with a challenge he couldn’t miss.
He finally turned his head, his eyes—a startling, stormy grey—raking over me with cold assessment. A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“You look like you’ve had enough comfort for one day.” His gaze flickered to my mouth, and I knew he could practically taste Ben’s brand of saccharine regret on me.
“Comfort doesn’t get you answers,” I shot back, waving down the bartender. “Whiskey. Whatever he’s having.”
Nash let out a low, humorless chuckle. “Trying to play with the big boys, Callie? You’ll get hurt.”
“I’m already hurt,” I said, my voice dropping. The bartender set a glass in front of me and I pushed it toward Nash.
“And I’m tired of being handled. Ben gave me the official story. A tragic accident. A slip and a fall. A neat little bow on my sister’s coffin.” I took a breath, the words catching like thorns in my throat.
“You and I both know that’s bullshit.”
He picked up the fresh glass and downed it in one smooth, practiced motion, his throat working. He slammed it back on the bar, the sound cracking through the bar’s low murmur.
“Go home, Callie. Go back to whatever clean, perfect life you built for yourself and leave the ghosts to the rest of us.”
“Hannah is my ghost too!” The words ripped out of me, louder than I intended. A few heads turned our way.
“And I’m not leaving until I know who put her in the ground. You were her friend. You, of all people, should want the same thing.”
His laugh this time was jagged, broken glass grinding in his throat. “Friend? Is that what you think we were?”
He poured another shot, his hand unnervingly steady. “You have no idea who your sister was. Not really. You saw the sunshine and the smiles. You didn’t stick around for the hurricane.”
The insult landed like a physical blow, stealing my breath.
He was right. I’d left. I’d run off to college, to a new city, to a life where bayou secrets couldn’t reach me.
I’d left Hannah here to weather the storms alone. My grief, hot and suffocating, morphed into white-hot rage.
“And what were you?” I snarled, leaning closer, the smell of whiskey and him filling my senses.
“Her guide through the storm? Or the lightning that struck her down? Everyone in this town whispers about you, Nash. The dangerous boy from the swamp. The one who breaks everything he touches. Did you break her?”
His face went rigid, the color draining from beneath his tan. For a second, I thought I’d pushed him too far, that he would just get up and walk away.
Instead, he leaned in, his voice a venomous whisper that was somehow more terrifying than a shout.
“You want to talk about breaking things?” he breathed, his eyes boring into mine.
“Your sister was the most beautifully broken thing I’d ever seen. She sought out the storm, Callie. She danced in the goddamn rain. And people like you, people like your golden-boy cop, you can’t stand that. You want to lock it up, tame it, make it safe.”
He gestured vaguely with his bottle. “She would have suffocated in that life. Ben’s life. Your life.”
Every word was a calculated strike, aimed at the weakest parts of my soul—my guilt, my regret, my fear that he was right. Tears pricked my eyes, hot and furious. I wouldn’t let him see them fall.
“So you know what happened to her,” I stated, my voice shaking with the effort of keeping it steady.
“You were there. Ben’s redacted files, his careful omissions… he’s protecting someone. Is it you, Nash? Is he protecting you?”
The air crackled, charged with everything unsaid between us, between our families, for years. The bar noise faded into a dull roar in my ears.
It was just his stormy eyes, my ragged breathing, and the heavy, humid weight of the secrets suffocating this town.
“You need to stop,” he warned, his voice a low growl.
“No,” I pushed, shoving aside the last of my caution. I was a live wire, sparking and frayed. “I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you tell me you had nothing to do with my sister’s death.”
His control finally, catastrophically, snapped.
“Nothing to do with it?” he roared, the sound exploding from him, raw and full of pain. He shot to his feet, the barstool scraping violently against the floor.
“I was with her! I was with her that night, you stupid, naive girl!”
The confession hung in the air, sucking all the oxygen from the room.
My heart stopped. He was with her.
The last person to see her alive. The one person who knew.
Before I could process it, before I could even form a question, he moved. He wasn’t just fast; he was elemental, a force of nature.
One hand tangled in my hair, yanking my head back, while the other snaked around my waist, hauling me off the stool and against him. In the next instant, my back slammed against the hard, sticky edge of the bar, the impact knocking the air from my lungs.
His mouth crashed down on mine.
It wasn’t a kiss. It was a collision. A brutal, desperate claiming.
There was no tenderness, no romance, just the raw, bruising intensity of his anger and a sorrow so deep it felt like it could drown us both. His lips were hard, demanding, tasting of whiskey and rage.
He wasn’t trying to seduce me; he was trying to silence me, to punish me, to make me feel even a fraction of the agony he was clearly living in.
A choked sob caught in my throat, and his mouth slanted over mine, devouring the sound. His teeth grazed my lip, and the sharp tang of blood mixed with the whiskey.
My hands came up, intending to push him away, to fight him off, but instead, they fisted in the worn fabric of his shirt, clinging to him as the world spun away.
This was everything Ben’s kiss wasn’t.
It was wild, dangerous, and devastatingly honest. It was the truth of this place, of my sister’s secrets, of the grief that was eating us both alive.
I kissed him back with all the fury and confusion and pain that had been simmering inside me for weeks. It was a desperate, shared exorcism, a primal scream without a sound.
His grip on my hair tightened, and he tilted my head, deepening the kiss until I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, could only feel. The hard line of his body pressed against mine, the unyielding wood of the bar at my back, and the violent, all-consuming heat of his mouth.
Just as suddenly as it began, it was over.
He wrenched himself away, shoving back from the bar as if he’d been burned.
He stood there, chest heaving, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides. His eyes were wide, wild with a mixture of fury and horror, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just done.
I sagged against the bar, my legs trembling, my lips swollen and throbbing. My fingers were still tangled in his shirt, and I slowly, shakily, let go.
We stared at each other across the charged space, the silence deafening. The low thrum of the jukebox and the clink of glasses slowly filtered back into my awareness.
He looked utterly shaken, stripped bare. All the anger, all the defensive walls, had crumbled, leaving behind a raw, exposed grief that mirrored my own.
Without another word, he threw a few crumpled bills on the bar, turned, and stalked out into the night, the screen door slamming shut behind him like a gunshot.
I stood there for a long moment, my back pressed against the bar, my body humming with a strange, terrifying energy. I touched my fingers to my lips, feeling the slight sting where his teeth had cut me.
The taste of him—of whiskey and warnings and a devastating, shared sorrow—was branded on my soul.
I had come for answers, and in a way, I had gotten one.
But it was tangled in a volatile, physical truth that left me more lost, and more afraid, than ever before.