Page 31 of Baby Bombshell for the Boss

“I’m probably more trouble than you’re looking for.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Trust me,” he said.

She searched his face for a moment. Elliot wondered what she saw there.

Eventually, she seemed to decide that she would trust him. “We can still have a drink together,” she said. “Thanks for buying.”

“No problem.” He lifted his glass, and Cassidy smiled and clinked hers against it.

“So what’s your story?” she asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re such trouble, tell me why.”

“Ah.”

“I mean, unless it’s too personal. But we are total strangers at a bar, right? If you can’t talk to a stranger at a bar, who can you talk to?”

Elliot found himself grinning a little. She did have a point. “I’m in a bit of a situation with a woman,” he said.

“I should’ve known. Let me guess — ex-girlfriend? Ex-wife?”

“Girlfriend, I guess. We weren’t married.” Even girlfriend was overstating it by a lot, but it also felt like understating it. Ivy wasn’t some girl he had dated and then ended things with. She was a lot more than that.

“You’re still into her?” Cassidy guessed.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yeah you are,” Cassidy said. “It’s all over your face. I can tell. You look like a guy who’s hung up on somebody.”

“What does that look like?”

“Like you’re a million miles away from here,” she said. “Like there’s somewhere you’d rather be, but you can’t go there. It looks like homesickness.”

That was a gut punch. Homesickness was exactly what it felt like, he realized. “You sound like you’ve been through it.”

“Sure. Who hasn’t?”

Elliot hadn’t. Not until now. “What did you do about it?” he asked. “How did you get past this feeling?”

“It fades,” Cassidy said. “Gradually, but it does.”

“When you say it fades, you mean it doesn’t go away.”

“Well, no, not completely. Everything leaves a scar.”

“Great.”

“She broke up with you, huh?”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s just obvious that you’re not over it. You’d take her back in a heartbeat if she asked, I think.”

“I broke up with her,” he said. That wasn’t quite right, but it was the closest he could come to the truth without going into more detail than he wanted to.

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