Page 75 of Just a Heartbeat Away

“Why did you break up?” Grace asked.

Via gulped again.

Because you can’t date one man and have a burning grain of sand in your heart for another.“It was time. We...wanted different things. I guess I realized that I’d been staying with him for the wrong reasons.”

“Sex?” Grace asked candidly, making Shelly sputter into her stew and Via laugh at the unexpectedness of the comment. “What? I’m old, I’m not oblivious.”

“Sex didn’t factor into the breakup,” Via said as diplomatically as possible. She tried to gather her thoughts. Normally, in this situation, she would try to think of a generic answer. But something in her told her that Grace and Shelly might actually understand if she tried to explain the real reasoning. “People who grow up with family, I think they don’t even realize how much of a tether that is. If you have your family to anchor you to Earth, then you can kind of...take some chances flying your kite. But when I lost my parents, that tether went away and I had to find other things to anchor me down. Like work and my reputation and—”

“A nice, steady boyfriend.”

“Exactly,” Via said, pointing her spoon at Grace. She was thrilled that Grace seemed to understand. “And after a while, I realized that it’s not fair to stay with someone for that reason. Or at least in my case, I started to feel like I was using Evan for what he could provide for me instead of staying with him because of what we had together.”

“So, the breakup was easy then?” Shelly asked.

Via laughed in a pained way. “No. No, it was not. It took about three days up at his parents’ house in New Paltz and it was a dramatic cry-fest the entire time. And then when it was over, even though I was relieved, I came home and the cry-fest started all over again.”

Grace frowned at her. “Just so you know, you’ve got a perfectly good kitchen table to cry at right here.” She pointed at her kitchen. “You need to cry, call me and Shell and we’ll throw you a whole cry-party. A cry-parade. We’ll all cry together. It’ll be a bonanza. Your foster sister can bring the popcorn.”

Via laughed and to her surprise, actually felt tears rise in her throat. How sweet was that? How sweet was all of this? She let herself relax even further.

The evening ended up being quite nice, though it wasn’t until Via locked the door to her house behind her that she finally allowed herself a long, soothing breath. She let the gravity of what had happened in the staff meeting wash over her.

Well, it was done. It was over. Sebastian finally knew that she’d broken up with Evan. God, Via had been stressing out over how to tell him for weeks. Or if she even should tell him. No matter how she’d sliced that particular piece of pie, every single way she’d tried to tell him ended up seeming desperate and obvious.The subtext is strong with this one.

Seb, just so you know, Evan and I broke up.Because I have feelings for you.

Hey, Seb, I’m fine, just going through a breakup.That you caused because you’re handsome and sweet and such a m.a.n.

Just so you know, I’m single now.

Yeah. That one was EXCLUSIVELY subtext.

She’d been too scared to tell Seb because then he’d know about the dense little grain of sand between her lungs that she’d been carrying around for him ever since that night on his couch.

And if she was honest, it wasn’t a grain of sand anymore. It was growing, ravenous, devouring the world. She felt like her feelings for Seb were the size of a soccer ball, lodged between her lungs and trying to suck everything right in. She could barely believe she’d been able to hide those feelings from Grace and Shelly tonight.

Her feelings for Seb were made of gravity; nothing was safe. She watched a movie on TV after work, cried, thought of Seb, and just like that,Maid in Manhattanwas sucked into the ball in her chest. She made lasagna that she thought Matty would like:bam!Sucked into her feelings for Seb. She saw a dog on the street that walked the way Crabby did:bang!The hungry ball of feeling was fed, always demanding more.

She’d greedily absorbed every moment with him over the last month. She’d even stopped by the lunchroom every now and then to watch him with all the kids. Laughing with one group over a joke inside a fortune cookie. Helping one kid heat up his leftovers in the microwave. Splitting up a scuffle between fifth graders. He waded through the kids like a papa bear surrounded by cubs. It made the breath catch in her throat and her hand press over her heart.

And of course, it made that dense ball of feeling grow even denser, even hungrier.

Spending her birthday with him had been a dream come true. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d been happier than that night in the pillow fort. And when those gray-green eyes of his had found hers across the room? Well. God. She’d been about two moves away from curling into his lap like a kitten. Friends be damned.

Fin had pushed her to tell him how she felt, but Via was very, very unsure. What would the point of telling Sebastian reallybe? This whole thing with Evan only proved to Via how much of a mess she really was. She tried to be so orderly and prepared for everything but there she went, clinging to her relationship with Evan for an embarrassingly long time. That was not the behavior of the person she wanted to be. It just showed her exactly how little she’d be suitable for someone like Seb, who needed someone reliable in his life. Not a woman who couldn’t even figure out her feelings about her own boyfriend until they nearly smashed down the door.

She’d freaked herself out with this Evan thing. She’d thought she was so grown-up, and then she’d gone and lashed herself to someone like him. It just proved she didn’t know shit about shit.

Except that she did know one thing. That she couldn’t stop thinking about Seb. She was pretty certain he was attracted to her. But she had no clue if he wanted anything more than that. Actually, the only evidence she had was to the contrary. He’d said that Fin was too young for him. And Via was roughly three years younger than Fin.

She’d done the math.?It wasn’t encouraging.

She had to admit that he did seem a lot older than she did. His demeanor, the grays at his temples, his ability to keep a cool head under all circumstances. The way he listened with patience and full attention. He was never distracted by his phone or by the television. Something about him seemed old school.

She only hoped that she didn’t seem correspondingly young to him. Empirically, she knew she wasn’t completely immature. She’d worked to have a stable, steady life. But up until a month ago, she’d had an extremely immature boyfriend, and that was points against her. She should have seen that Evan wasn’t the real McCoy. There’d been sign after sign. And she hadn’t been able to see any of them until Seb had walked into her life and shown her what grown-up really looked like.

Her ultimate fear was that he’d see her as a girl with a crush.

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