Page 19 of Her Football Star Ex

But Jaxon didn’t seem to really care because he just pulled his pizza out of his milk and took a bite off the end.

My son wouldn’t touch the mac and cheese I made him last week, but he’d purposely eat soggy pizza.

Kids have the weirdest taste buds.

“Do you want to see what she put on her profile?” Cole asked.

I turned my attention back to him and saw that he had already brought up Emerson’s full profile. The photo of her in the navy-blue dress was front and center. She still looked amazing in it, but that wasn’t what caught my attention this time.

Instead, my eye caught on the bottom right corner of the photo where I noticed the bottom of the gray joggers I’d worn to her house on Tuesday night and the top of my foot in my black socks.

So this photo really was from that night?

Did that mean she had only been pretending to have a guy to send those photos to? And that she’d set up this dating profileafterI’d left her house?

Was she, like me, only pretending to have a date for Derek and Kira’s wedding?

It was probably farfetched for something like that to be true, but the thought of her not having actually moved on with someone else yet did ignite a few sparks of hope in my chest.

“What other photos does she have on there?” I asked.

But when Cole swiped to bring up the next photo, my stomach clenched. It was the one I’d taken of her on our vacation to Mexico a couple of years ago.

The photo of her in her pink sundress on the beach where she was smiling into the camera like she had the secret ingredient to my happiness.

The photo that I had framed after that trip and was currently sitting in the drawer of my nightstand for the nights I wanted to torture myself by looking at it and remembering what I was missing out on.

“How did you let her get away?” Cole looked sideways at me, clearly noticing how beautiful Emerson was.

“Because I’m an idiot.” I grunted. “Let’s see the other ones.”

And either he had caught onto my sudden mood, or was just interested in seeing other photos of Emerson, because he immediately brought up an image of Emerson wearing a backpack and white hat as she stood on a bridge that led to a volcano during our hike on our last trip to Hawaii.

Another photo that I’d taken.

Was using photos that I’d personally been there for some part of her plan? Did she think the universe would direct her to Mr. Right as long as a piece of my ripped-out heart was part of the process?

“Are there any more?” I asked.

But when he tried swiping, it just went back to the first one again.

Well, at least she hadn’t used a photo that she’d cropped me out of.

“Do you want to read the rest of her profile? Or are you kind of done with this?” Cole asked.

I sighed. “Let me just read it over real quick.”

It couldn’t make me feel much worse than I was already feeling, right? Plus, I was really curious about what kind of guy she’d say she was looking for.

But as I read over what she’d written, it did indeed make me feel worse. Not because she said anything bad necessarily, but because she sounded like she was planning to take this online dating thing seriously and was actually ready to date again.

How was it possible that I could be so far from ready to not only move on from the past but even go on a single date, while Emerson was actively putting herself out there?

“You gotta hand it to the girl,” Cole said after he’d read through her profile as well. “She knows what to say to get a guy to swipe right. She sounds witty and fun. And with photos like that…” He raised his eyebrows.

“Are you trying to tell me that if I wasn’t sitting here right now, you’d be messaging her?”

“If I was a jerk who hit on his buddies’ ex-wives, then yeah, I’d definitely be messaging her right now.”

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