Page 46 of Continuum

“About me being here with you.”

A slow smile spread across his face. “Oh really?”

I nodded. “I may have minimized the size of the crush I had on you in college. She always wanted me to tell you how I felt.”

“You should’ve listened to her.”

“Oh please!” I bumped him with my shoulder. “You were happily dating the it-girl on campus. How would that have worked out for me?”

“Better than you think.”

“You say that now,” I teased, ignoring the butterflies he’d just given me. “But you were in love and you know it.”

“I wasn’t in love. I enjoyed my time with Jayla, but I wasn’t in love.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now anyway. All I’m saying is that Angel would be happy that we’re…spending time together.”

He picked up his bottle of water. “To Angel.”

I smushed my plastic bottle against his. “To Angel.”

We took a sip and then I let out a little giggle.

“I thought I saw her last night. There was a woman with the same hair style at the bar and I just…” I let my sentence trail off as I realized how it was going to sound. “I followed her into the bar and then I lost her.”

“What were you going to say when you caught up to her?”

I shrugged. “Honestly, I just wanted to see her face. I wanted to see if she looked like Angel. I wanted to see who else could pull off that hairstyle. I wanted… I don’t know. I just wanted to see her.” I paused for a second. “Have you ever felt drawn to something?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“That’s how I felt about this woman.”

“Did you think it was Angel?” he asked gently.

The tenderness in his tone and in his eyes allowed me to be open and honest about what I had experienced. “Yeah,” I admitted. “And I know Angel has been gone for a long time. Eight years today. But the feeling I had when I saw the woman was too familiar to be a random stranger. I felt pulled in her direction, if that makes any sense. So yeah, on some level I knew it couldn’t be Angel. But a part of me just needed to check to make sure.”

He didn’t laugh or question my sanity. Instead, he moved closer to me and put his arm around my shoulders. He didn’t say anything. He just held me tight for a silent five minutes.

“Okay, now you tell me something,” I demanded softly, breaking our quiet solitude. “Something super personal.”

“After my last relationship ended, I started going to therapy,” he confided.

“To deal with the breakup?”

“No…” He cleared his throat. “To deal with my own bullshit.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He hesitated. “After a year of working with the therapist, it would seem as though I’ve been holding on to this idea of what I want and uh… when women don’t meet that, I stop dating them or I end the relationship.”

“What is the idea of what you want? Were you chasing perfection?”

“Uh…” He let out a dry laugh. “She said I was chasing a ghost.”

I lifted my head from his shoulder to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“When I described what I wanted and I told her the only time I ever felt like I had it, she said I was chasing a ghost and for me to let it go.”

---