Page 7 of Secret Twins for My Ex's SEAL Best Friend

“Um, it was good. I saw your ex.” I looked at him to gauge his reaction.

“Which one?” he asked, a small smirk across his pale face.

I look at him with a mockingly sad face. “Oh, don’t do that. You know you only have one ex.”

“That isn’t true,” he said defensively. “I’ve got plenty of women wanting a piece of this.”

I took a long sip of my beer, giving him a moment to sit with his lie. “Fine, if you need this charade to keep going, it was Delia. She looked good.”

“I know she looks good,” Jeremy said, a little too quickly, a small blush creeping up into his cheeks. “I see her all the time, you know.”

“Right, sorry. Well, she looks good,” I said offhandedly.

“Okay, I get it.” He sounded annoyed at me, as though by pointing out she looked good, I was basically fucking her in front of him.

We sat in silence for a moment, and Jeremy bit off a piece of a mozzarella stick, clearly thinking about Delia.

For just a second, I felt a pang of guilt for breaking them up. It was clear when I spoke to her today that it still hurt her to think about it. She missed him, and why shouldn’t she? Jeremy was a nice guy, attractive enough, and reasonable.

But it had been inappropriate, their relationship. I couldn’t hang out with a guy who would sleep with his students, even if she was an adult. It just wasn’t right.

After a moment, Jeremy continued, “I wonder why she was at your class. Do you think everything’s okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean, what if she feels unsafe? What if she’s worried about someone?” He looked intensely at me, prying without asking if I knew anything, hoping that I would tell him what I knew.

I shrugged his questions off. “Women take that course all the time because they just want to be prepared. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“Maybe I should take one, prepare myself. I’m a small guy. Are small guys allowed?” His tone was joking, but in a way that told me he did want to take the class. I could guess why.

There was something appealing to him, I’m sure, about seeing Delia sweaty in workout clothes. I’d seen it myself, and it wasn’t a bad view.

Chuckling, I responded, “How about I do you one better? Why don’t you come to the next one and I’ll let you be my co-instructor for the day? We can get you trained, and you can teach a couple lessons. It’s rewarding work.”

Jeremy stuck out his bottom lip, considering, and looked out the window of the dimly lit bar. The light was nearly blinding in comparison.

He looked back at me, squinting, and his pupils were tiny against the sunlight. “Yeah, that sounds fun. Thanks.”

“It starts pretty early, though. 6 a.m. Think you can hack it?”

“I’ll manage.”

“As long as it’s not just a scheme to get close to Delia again. It took you so long to get over her, man.”

“Like I said, I see her all the time. I haven’t gone back yet. I’m not going to go back now.”

“Okay, good, because I worry about you.” I watched him over the glass with stern eyes as he ate, his mind somewhere else.

Despite being a successful therapist for veterans and managing a successful partnership with the local colleges in which they sent over master’s students to study underneath him and get their hours, he managed to have the worst self-esteem of any man I knew.

He always seemed to be striking out with women, and he took it hard.

“I know Delia was a lapse in judgment, dating a student like that, but you’ve got a career to think about. You can’t blow it all on some twenty-something.”

“She’s more mature than half the women in their thirties I’ve dated in Seattle,” Jeremy griped, annoyed with me for dragging the conversation on.

“Maybe that’s more about your taste in women,” I pointed out, waving a half-eaten mozzarella stick at him.

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