Page 35 of SCRUMptious

“—You mean how you can never leave well enough alone?”

I gritted my teeth and nodded. He and I both knew this was not up for debate. “Yes, that.”

If Fergus spoke without thinking, I was notorious for acting without thinking. Anytime a red flag might have been raised, I’d brush it aside, figuring I’d make things work somehow. Frankly, I’d been that way my whole life and was lucky I’d never been burned by my impulsive behavior. Then again, I’d never cared about anything the way I cared about Lauren, so even if I had suffered some repercussion, I’m not sure it would have changed things. If today’s conversation with Lauren had proved anything, it was that I was still prone acting before thinking things through to their logicalend.

“What did you do?” he asked, finishing off hisbeer.

“I told her I didn’t want to just visit; I said I’d move out there.”

Eoin groaned and dropped his face into his hands and then spread his fingers wide so he could see me through them. “You didn’t.”

I groaned back. “I did. But it gets worse.”

Eoin dropped his palms to the table and his head fell back. Speaking to the ceiling, he said, “Of course itdoes.”

When he brought his face forward, I continued. “I might have said I wanted us to be together. Like forever. Stick a fork in me and allthat.”

Eoin took a deep breath and let it out on a long gust. “Wow.” Then he shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Wow.”

“Yeah, wow.”

“What did shesay?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose as I recalled that moment in vivid, technicolor detail. “Lauren didn’t say anything.”

“That’s good though, right? I mean, it’s not like she told you to feck off or anything.”

“No, you don’t understand,” I answered. “I specifically asked her to tell me she heard me loud and clear, and that she believed me. She bit her lip and refused to speak.”

“Ohfuck.”

“Yup. Fuck indeed.”

“At the risk of sounding like a chick, she has told you she loves you though, right? I mean, this isn’t all just one-sided?”

I took the final drink of my beer, the liquid now warm. “No, it’s not one-sided. She told me she loved me that night at the museum. And then she told me she loved me again, even as she was telling me she couldn’t commit to me the way I wanted herto.”

“Shit, man. I don’t know what tosay.”

“Neither did I, so Ileft.”

“Like, you just walked out of there?”

I nodded. “Prettymuch.”

“Yeah, been there done that. It typically doesn’t endwell.”

That was the understatement of the century! When Eoin had found out Aoife was pregnant and had contemplated getting an abortion without telling him, he’d been devastated. In the heat of the moment, he’d called her a heartless cunt and then stormed off. They hadn’t spoken for weeks afterward, and it was only Aoife’s brother Declan knocking some sense into Eoin—literally—that had put them back on the path to domestic bliss.

“The good news is I didn’t call her a cunt,” I answered with a wry chuckle.

Wincing, he replied, “Yeah, smartmove.”

Months later, the names Eoin had called Aoife remained a sore subject between them, and I knew from past discussions that for the rest of his life, Eoin would regret the way he’d spoken to her thatday.

“But you didn’t say anything you can’t take back, did you? I know how you can get. You go for the jugular first.”

“No,” I said with a protracted sigh. “I knew I was getting there, so I told her I was going to head home before either of us said something we might regret in the morning.”

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