“At that beach, I walked away from you, and in my head, the same words tumbled over and over, ‘Don’t call my name, don’t call my name, don’t call my name.’ And I got up to that condo and was sick to my stomach. Puked in the sink for what felt like hours. Because you didn’t call my name and I was wrecked. I didn’t know how to be without your love shinin’ its light on me. And I was also so fuckin’ glad you didn’t call my name because if you had, I would have caved in a snap. Then I’d spend the next however long it took wrecking you, truly wrecking you, and I would not have been able to live with myself when I’d done that.”

My head fell forward so my forehead was resting on his line of his nose.

Then he whispered, “She finally gets me.”

“But I…there were…” I swallowed. “You should know…”

“You got a guy,” he stated flatly.

I pulled my head away, but my eyes went anywhere but to him, and I said, “Not exactly.”

“Cher,” he said warningly.

I looked at him. “I lied. Sonia did too so you would…um…”

He started grinning. “So, I’d fuck off.”

“Something like that,” I mumbled.

He kept grinning.

Damn.

All that he’d just said, and he was grinning.

And now I had to say what I had to say.

“I had a thing, with Cat,” I whispered.

The grin disappeared.

But he just said, “Okay.”

“It didn’t—”

“How ’bout, in that, we do what we did before. You knew you weren’t my first. We didn’t talk about that. Now you do the same,” he suggested. “When we were together, it was just you for me, and me for you. And now that we’re back together, we got that back too.”

I totally could do that.

So, I nodded.

Preacher didn’t say anything.

I didn’t either.

Okay.

Now what?

Were we…?

What?

He said “back together” but what did that mean?

Exactly.

“You listen to the CD?” he asked.

“No,” I told him.

“You gotta listen to the CD, baby.”

I now wanted to listen to the CD.

But in that moment, I needed something else.

“Where do we go from here?” I asked.

“Well, in a little bit, I gotta be in Louisiana to start rehearsin’ with the boys. But between then and now, you wanna see my cabin?”

Lyla and McCade:

(Lyla) As much as we could be together in that six weeks, we were together. The cabin was an easy drive from Phoenix, so I went up on the weekends if Preacher was there, and sometimes Preacher stayed at my place in Phoenix as well.