Page 59 of Never Say Yes To Your Best Friend (I said Yes)

“I always have time for lunch or dinner with my parents.”

“Any chance you can bring your mystery woman?” Dad asks.

“Not one single chance,” I say with a snort.

Dad laughs and shrugs. “I just thought I would try.”

I want to do this with my parents. It’s important to them. It’s their dream. But years of going back and forth to Europe? Being gone for weeks at a time, at minimum, because that’s what it would take to get anything accomplished and make a significant impact while I was there?

I still have no idea how I’m going to explain that to Evilla, but I’m going to have to find a way.

Chapter eighteen

Evilla

Wild animals were never meant to be caged, and right now, my heart is going full-on wounded beast in my chest. Mont is giving methatlook.

Here it is, THE END in screaming capitals, right when I was still basking in the warm, sunny glow of our beginning.

“You want to break up,” I mutter.

“No!”

Either I’m reading this all wrong, or him saying he wants to go to Scotland on and off for months isn’t code forsorry, I’m not into this anymore, so I’m going to bail on you with Europe as well.

Europe. It seems to be collecting a lot of men who were special to me at one time, men who still are. The land of freaking gone fiancés, dashed boyfriends, and crushed hopes and dreams.

Maybe I should clarify. Would he just bring me to this park bench, in public, if he wasn’t worried about causing a scene? He wouldn’t have picked me up and driven me here just because it’snice, and he wanted to have a long heart-to-heart about how to make this work. That can’t be what’s going on here. Clarification. Yes, that’s exactly what I need.

I have no idea what is going on with my face right now. It probably has a hot mess car wreck spelled out all over it, whereas Mont’s is dead calm and serious. I don’t see any ulterior motives or guilt looming under the surface, and there’s no apparent relief that he can dump me and move on with his life, either. I can’t read anything in his inscrutable features. It’s highly terrifying. Is he doing the honorable thing and sitting me down to have this conversation?

“Is this you flaking off? If you’re not into it anymore, then there’s no use in pretending. If you want to go off and do your bucket list, then it’s all good. It’s important. I urged you to do that. You wanted to do that. You changed your mind because we…we became a thing. And I don’t want that to interfere with your life.”

“That’s not what I want.” No sigh. No long, dragged-out exasperated mutter. Just warm amber flecks in deep brown eyes and endless patience.

“What you’re really saying is that you want to take a break.”

“No!” He reaches for my hand.

I watch his huge palm engulf mine like it’s happening to someone else. How is it possible that I barely even feel his warmth? I’m sitting right here beside him on this bench at the edge of this busy park on a Saturday morning. There is endless foot traffic, joggers, and people on bikes, rollerblades, and skateboards. The world is still moving, and I seem to be locked into one position.

“As someone who has already been left behind yet survived it, I know I’ll be fine. I’ll heal. You don’t have to worry that this will wreck me.”

He nearly falls off the bench. Like, literally. He slips to the edge and has to catch himself and jerk himself back. It looks like someone losing balance at the edge of a cliff, swaying mid-air for a second, then throwing themselves back into safety.

“What does that mean, Evilla?”

I stare at our joined hands, and I can finally feel the warmth. It spreads up to my face, which heats up hot enough to cook a turkey. “I was engaged before. We dated for a year, and the engagement was fast. It was very public—one of those proposals you can’t say no to because there’s so much pressure. But I did want it. I think. Or the me that I was at the time wanted it. Eight months later, he met someone selling flowers at a farmer’s market. They went to Europe the next day and never came back. He texted me after he landed, breaking things off. I…I have no idea what he’s doing, if he’s still there, or if they even worked out. I don’t want to know. I’ve spent a good long time healing and moving past that.” There’s a feral gleam in Mont’s eyes at my words. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. I just didn’t know how without bringing up the conversation about exes, and no one wants to have that. Shit. You do know the night at the restaurant was fake? Yes. Yes, of course, you know.”

Now comes the sigh. It does come, but it’s not an angry sigh or a patronizing one. Just a huge exhale tinged with sadness. That gleam in his eyes? I don’t think it’s because he’s mad at me. It honestly might have more to do with the fact that he would like to throttle my ex. His free hand pinches the back of his neck. Yeah, that’s totally a stress mechanism.

“I’m so sorry that happened to you.” He looks like he’s just been wounded or dropped from an impossible height to crash and crumble on the ground. I can talk about what happened to me without the same level of feeling I once had, but he’s hearing it for the first time, and he lookscrushed.“I now understand why this conversation was triggering for you.”

Triggering? Yes, I suppose it was. I immediately thought the worst even though, after I was left behind, I spent so much time trying not to be that person who gets triggered. I don’t want to think people are there one minute and gone the next. That commitment and feelings don’t exist for everyone because they didn’t exist for one man. I never want to lump other people into the same boat that a single experience was born from.

“Evilla?”

“I panicked. I’ve tried to never do that. To never make assumptions or think I know another person’s mind. I know you wouldn’t do that. I know you wouldn’t just leave. I know you don’t want to break up, and still, I was so irrational.”

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