Page 61 of Love's a Glitch
“You still should’ve had the balls to tell me.”
Again with the searching around the area, like he was hoping someone would save him from his crazy ex, and that made mefeelcrazy. “It’s over. I’ve moved on. Let’s not do this here.”
He had a fair point. But I couldn’t let it drop, not with him standing in front of me, the reminder of that night he’d asked why I kept holding back running through my head. I’d poured out my heart about the pain and grief that’d taken over my life after my dad left, and how it occasionally rose up to haunt me. Then I got super real and raw and expressed it was hard for me to believe people would stick around once they got to know the real me.
Dillon had wrapped his arms around me, kissed the tears off my cheeks, and told me that he understood my hesitance. Then he’d told me he was willing to go slow if it was what I wanted.
Naturally, I’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, and slept with him that very night. “In case you don’t remember, I’m a questions type of gal. It’s how I packed all those fun facts into my head that you claimed you found adorable.”
“I remember,” he said, the words tight. “I just hoped you might’ve changed over the past few months.”
Much more of this, and I’d have to scrape my self-esteem off the bottom of his shoe. “I haven’t. But don’t worry, I’m not planning on drawing this out any longer than necessary. I just need to know one thing. Why did you tell me you were falling for me and commit to future plans if you were just going to disappear without a trace?”
“Yousaid you were falling quickly. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, so I nodded along. I never actually said it back. The fact that you were getting serious so quickly is why I decided it was best to simply stop responding. I was trying to avoid an awkward chat like this.”
Inside, my heart crumbled into pieces, but I propped the corners of my mouth into an approximation of a smile and gave one sharp nod. “Okay. That’s all I needed to know.”
He stretched out his arm, as though he were about to give me a pity pat on the shoulder. In further proof he couldn’t commit, his hand just sorta hovered there.
“There you are,” a female voice said, and Dillon withdrew his indecisive arm and went all in on draping it over her shoulders. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Sorry. I ran into an old acquaintance and we were just saying hello. Ellie, this is Heidi…” The woman placed her left hand on his bicep in a predatory way, and thanks to the giant diamond on her ring finger, I already knew what Dillon’s next words would be. “My fiancée.”
* * *
Food was deliveredto the tables shortly before the speeches. People cheered. Celebrated the presented facts and figures.
I’m sure everything was brilliant. Well, save the small talk I forced myself to make in order to keep up appearances. Donna and Laurel clearly thought I was missing Luke, which wasn’t totally inaccurate, and told me the guys were always super busy for the first half, but would wrap up the business portion of the party shortly.
A haze had settled over the evening, to the point I no longer had any perspective on much of anything. Even the chocolate dessert failed to ignite my tastebuds, much less anything else. All I could do was fixate on the fact that I’d assigned feelings to Dillon that he hadn’t had.
While I truly believed Luke enjoyed chatting with me, as well as our other time together, I recalled him mentioning getting so caught up in his work that he often forgot anything else existed.
Would I be included in that “anything else?” Would it be easier and easier to forget me the longer we were apart? Was I supposed to just sit at home while he traveled the world, with nothing more concrete than “a step at a time” and a “we’ll see”?
I’d done a rather good job convincing even myself that, this time, things were different. That Luke was different. But do you know who hadn’t changed? Who wasn’t any different?
Me.
After nearly a decade of dating with the singular goal of finding that special someone I could share my life with, I was about to commit to a man who hadn’t fully committed to me.
Cat was right. I accepted scraps and bent over backward for guys who’d treated me as nothing more than an afterthought—hell, some of them hadn’t had a thought about me since walking away.
I was a chronic settler.
And there was only one way to break the cycle.
31
Luke
Once again, I found myself down-to-the-bone tired. The achy burn in my muscles was different than what I experienced after an intense hike or climb, where I fell into my sleeping bag at the end of the night and couldn’t imagine ever moving my heavy limbs again.
It was the sort of social exhaustion that reminded me why this lifestyle would never be for me. All the talk was of properties and profits and chuckling over havingtwoluxury cars in the garage, plus one for the wifey. In order to keep Dad and Henry happy, I’d stuck by their side for a whole thirty minutes after the big branding reveal and consequent speeches. I’d humbly accepted all the compliments on the new direction and the website, even though Ellie had way more to do with that than I did.
Ellie.
I swept my gaze around the area, my eyes coming to a stop when I spotted her seated at a table about fifteen yards away. With the sun dipping low in the horizon and the overhead canopy of lights casting her in a soft glow, she looked so much like the first time I’d laid eyes on her, when she’d just been some woman in a picture that’d been sent to me by mistake. Her smile had reached through my phone screen, grabbed hold of me, and hadn’t let go since.
