Page 124 of Sharing Shane

Veronica nudged her empty salad bowl aside. Her session with Jarred had run long, so she was taking her lunch later than usual, and the normally full courtyard was empty. She leaned back on the metal bench and tilted her face up to the sun. “As long as you promise the dessert won’t have any THC in it. I’m barely recovered from Saturday.”

“Lightweight. Have you told Shane yet?”

“Not yet. I talked to him just before I got the offer, and he was going to bed. It sounded like he had a hard weekend. I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

“Why not later tonight? I thought you had a standing Monday date.”

“We do, but Wyatt’s work schedule got changed again, so we switched my Monday for his Wednesday.”

“You can still call him, right?”

“Yeah, but I’d rather tell him in person. Anyway, he was so beat when I talked to him, I’m surprised he had the energy to answer the phone. He was practically talking in his sleep.”

“I love it when Julian talks in his sleep,” Delia said with a giggle. “It’s always nonsense like ‘the elephants need a pedicure before they can do ballet!’ or something like that.”

“Shane didn’t say anything about elephants,” Veronica said. “He just said he loved me.”

“He what?” Delia’s shriek had Veronica yanking the phone away from her ear.

“He said he loved me,” Veronica repeated, a laugh bubbling up in her throat. “He said it as he was saying goodbye, and he was half asleep. But he said it.”

“Holy crap! Did you say it back?”

“He hung up right after, so I didn’t have time.”

“Would you have said it back?”

“Probably?” Veronica chewed her bottom lip, wincing as Delia’s disappointed moan reverberated in her ear. “I know, that’s pitiful. But it caught me by surprise. And also, I don’t even know if he knows he said it.”

“How can you not know you said something?” Delia scoffed.

“Because he was half asleep. Maybe it was just a reflex.”

“What do you mean, a reflex?”

“You know, like “okay, bye, love you’. Like that.”

“How is that a reflex?”

Veronica huffed out a breath. “I don’t know, it just is. You say it so often it becomes habit, so you say it even when you don’t mean to. I accidentally said ‘I love you’ to the guy who called to set up an appointment to fix my cable last week.”

“Slut.”

Veronica snorted out a laugh. “My point is, maybe he didn’t mean it.”

“Oh, he meant it. Maybe he didn’t mean to say it, but he meant it. Are you going to tell him?”

“What, that he said he loves me, or that I love him?”

“Both.”

“Probably not. Even if he did mean it, he might not have meant to say it, which means he didn’t mean for me to hear it. Right?”

“Fuck, you’re stressing me out,” Delia muttered. “Can we go back to the part where we’re celebrating you getting a job? That was way easier than this angsty emo mess you’ve dragged me into.”

Veronica opened her mouth to reply, but a beep in her ear stopped her. She checked the screen. “Hey Dee, that’s Wyatt calling me. I’ll talk to you later.”

“If he’s calling to talk about another threesome, ask if you can film it this time.”

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