Page 49 of Unmatched

Her eyes widen. “What?”

Okay, maybe we’re not on the same page. I glance past her toward the pink and red horizon. “It seems pretty clear we’re incompatible.”

“What makes you say that?”

My eyes dart back to hers.

She shakes her head. “Our favorite hiking trail is to Maxwell Falls. Last summer, we went for bike rides almost every night at sunset, and we had fun. I know you make lasagna when you’ve been thinking of your mom. You know exactly how to shut down my mom before she gets to me. We both enjoy listening to the sounds of crickets more than music...we both love dogs,” she says, gesturing to Heartthrob. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we enjoy each other.”

I sigh. “All of those things are nice, but?—”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever been with,” she whispers, her cheeks turning pink.

I step back, wondering if that was a dig about Unmatched, but her expression suggests she is just listing facts. Still, I have to call it like I see it. “What if you don’t actually want to be with anyone?”

Her face darkens from pink to red.

“Look, I’m not trying to make this all about sex...” I run my hand over my face. “It’s just...if you take that out, what you described sounds like friendship. Not marriage.”

She sits on that for a minute, taking the ball from the dog again. After securing it back in the launcher, she tosses it and turns to me. “I want to be with you. But, I don’t know, for some reason...this is difficult for me.”

Something in her voice makes me pause. “What’s difficult?”

She doesn’t speak. But with an unsteady hand, she reaches out to touch my cheek.

And my skin comes alive under her fingers. The ache, the desire, floods through my cells as soon as she makes contact. I want to lean in, grab her other hand, and pull her to me. This isn’t fair—the intensity of my reaction stirred by the simple touch of her flesh.

Her face is solemn, but when I look into her eyes—the same ones I’ve stared into the last ten years—there’s a glimmer of optimism. It’s something about Lydia that has always confounded me, but that I also admire. Her ability to keep pushing when things seem impossibly hard.

“I’d just like to give us another try.”

I open my mouth to say yes, I am here for all the trying she wants to do. Until I notice how awkwardly she’s holding her arm out to touch me. How hard she seems to have to work to maintain this touch. My thoughts drag back to her striptease this morning. The one she clearly forced and neither of us enjoyed.

If it takes this much effort for her to try, will it be worth it? For either of us?

“Okay,” I say, and before I can think too hard about it, “But let’s set a limit—thirty days.”

The tennis ball lands at her feet again, but she doesn’t move to pick it up.

I wince at the look on her face, but I need to protect us both. “Lydia, if we try, and nothing’s better in a month...I don’t think it ever will be.”

She bites her lip like she disagrees, then withdraws her hand from my cheek and nods. “You’re right.”

It’s funny how you can almost feel the absence of someone’s touch more than their presence.

I chuck the ball one last time for Heartthrob, and as he runs for it, I close my eyes. It’s tempting to resign myself to just wait another month. There’s a good chance she’ll get busy at work and our relationship will fall by the wayside. Again. I could stick it out, take this time to get our accounts and stuff in order so the end is as smooth as possible.

But the fact that she hasn’t already moved out, filed papers, even taken off her rings after what I did to her —to us—makes it harder to just give up. Maybe I owe her that much. At least if I do this, I can move on feeling like I tried everything.

I clip the leash back on Heartthrob’s collar and we turn together back toward home, but Lydia stops suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk. “If we agree to thirty days, Anton, will you—” She stops, looking up at me with a flushed face. “Do you promise not to go back on that app?”

My throat tightens at the expression in her eyes. At the realization that, after everything that’s happened this weekend, she actually thinks I would. “Of course,” I murmur. “I promise. Never again.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Lydia.” Charlotte greets me, giving my hand a firm squeeze as I enter her office. She’s a motherly middle-aged Asian American woman, graying hair cut into a short, no-nonsense bob, her lipstick always a bright shade of pink. Today, she wears one of her power suits in blue, but I notice slippers on her feet and her heels set to one side. Which is one of the things I love about her. “Thanks for coming in on short notice.”

I sit in the chair across from her desk and silence my phone, stealing one more look at the screen before tucking it into my purse. I was supposed to meet up with Mark to go over the completed plumbing work in the new space, but we rescheduled for this afternoon. No one has called in sick at Ooh La Pooch or The Pooch Park, and Anton is busy at his own office. I almost have the headspace for this meeting.

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